Life at Wooleen Pt 1

So, along with being a working cattle station, wooleen is also a tourism business, offering station homestays with Frances and Dave, self contained guesthouses (made of rammed earth - get a mold, cram lots of soil and water in there, let it harden and you've got bricks) and camping facilities. It was my job to help frances with the tourism side, cleaning things, changing beds, helping prepare meals and baking scrummy cakes and slices :)

I started off fairly motivated with my morning running and sometimes the dogs would come with me - it was so beautiful running through the outback with the dogs watching the sunrise :) one day I thought I was going to run into a kangaroo, he was a pretty sizeable chappy and was just sat in the middle of the road watching me. Fortunately he hopped off before I got there.

The first weekend I was there, we all went to the murchison settlement as it was the polocrosse weekend - polocrosse is a mix between polo and lacrosse - basically lacrosse played on horseback. There is a polocrosse field at the settlement and once a year it hosts the matches between the teams in WA. We got there in the evening which was too late to see any of the games, but we were there in time for the bar to open and for dinner to be served and for the games to commence afterwards :)

'Team Wooleen' was an eager comprtitor in the games, the first one being the sack race... With 4 people per sack :) we were doing pretty well until one of the judges tripped us over and then we couldn't get our balance back for the joint jumping :(

Another cool game was the 'crocodile game'. This is in teams of 3, the idea being that you stretch out on top of each other to as long a distance as possible by balancing on the other persons shoulders and walking your hands forward - hands are the only body part that can touch the floor - and place a beer can on the ground. Then you have to reverse to get back behind the start line. It was pretty funny to watch :)

The next day was a bit of a write off as everyone was nursing hangovers.

So most days were cleaning and baking. in the evenings we would sometimes go out to a nice place on the station to watch the sunset with the dogs. We'd take some beer, wine and nibbles (usually cheese, salami, crackers - yum! - and unfortunately olives - urgh!) and enjoy the view :) the first time I went for sunset, we went to the Sharpe family gravesite, on a hill by a water tank, looking out onto the lake. It was beautiful!

We had a group of schoolchildren on the station in the end of July. It was a private school from Perth and as part of their outdoor education programme, the 14-15 year old girls came out on a 6 day camp on our land. They never saw the homestead but were just out camping and hiking around the lakes and granites on the station. The roads were still pretty wet and it rained more when the girls were here. During that time the Shire of Murchison decided to close the roads again which meant that the coaches couldn't get in to pick the 140 girls up! The girls had to be taken to near the closest town (200km away) to be collected by the busses which was a pretty big operation!

We went out for another sunset at a place called yewlands. This is a really gorgeous spot, especially when it's covered in water - lots of gum trees in the water. The colours and reflections were beautiful at sunset! The water wasn't deep, only up to knee hightower so I waded out to a gum tree in the middle of the water and climbed it to get some pictures :)

Soon after that, Daves dad, Brett came up to stay and he bought with him a few people from his rotary club. They were a nice bunch of people and I got to go out on a day tour of the station with them..

We started out going along the lake inthe opposite direction to yewlands. There's an equally pretty pool at the other end of the lake called irrida. Several photo stops were made, especially as lots of wildflowers were coming out.

From there we went to Meeberi rock which is one of the oldest granite rocks in the world (the oldest one is on a station close by). The granites are called plutons which were bubbles of magma that slowly rose and cooled out of the earth over 3.6 billion years ago. The rocks take over 1million years to cool down to form the earths crust. These rocks would have been covered by other earth but over the passing of time, that's all been eroded away and these granites are visible sticking out all over the station. The rock has a sort of spotty appearance which is called exfoliation, caused by the weathering of the rock over all the years.

Under the rock was a special place for the aboriginal people of the area. We went to the underhang of the rock and saw some very old aboriginal drawings, including a time line of a mans life, and the good and bad periods of time in it. It was very interesting. We also saw a big lizard called a bungara sat quite close by us.

From there we went onto another rock called winderjini rock. This was a lovely place with the rock in a U shape making a natural sort of amphitheater. These rocks were also spotty from the exfoliation. The aboriginal drawings that are all made up of dots are representing the exfoliation of the rocks which I found fascinating.

We had a massive sandwich for lunch (the sandwiches at wooleen are pretty legendary, some of the best sandwiches I have ever eaten - freshly made bread and loads of cheese, ham, salad and jalepenos!!) and then made billy tea on the camp fire. With billy tea, you boil a pot of water on the fire, throw the tea leaves in, take it off the fire immediately and then wait for the leaves to settle. It was good tea. Then, with the ashes, we made damper bread in a camp oven (a big pot you put in the coals of the fire). Damper bread is like a massive scone that you put whole in the camp oven, cover it with ashes and leave it for an hour.

We filled the hour by climbing winderjini rocks and looking out over the station. Every direction you look, as far as you can see belongs to wooleen. It's a good way to really grasp the size of the area that one station owns.

We went back to the camp oven for the damper. When we took it out, it looked like a big lump oh charcoal - totally black and crusty on the outside, but when we cut through the crust, it was perfect inside. We ate it with butter and jam - delicious!!

After that we headed into a sacred aboriginal cave. The spirit elders would climb up through the cave on a full moon to communicate with the ancestors and spirits. There was also a cool part of the cave that was used for food storage and a larger area where families could live. You'd never believe that it's all there when you look at the rock from the outside.

From there we went to budara briefly. These are 2 large granite rocks. The smaller one of the two rocks has permenant water in it which is obviously a very important thing in the middle of the outback! The 2 granites are visible from the homestead on the other side of the lake and are a beautiful place to go for sunset, but it was pretty windy so we went to yewlands instead.