That morning we had needed somewhere to shop and someone to give us an injection. By late afternoon I had wanted the doors of a museum to remain open longer. The pies could take as long as they liked, apparently, but at the place I had scarcely intended to enter, I had run out of time.
The Places We Found and the Things We Never Went Looking For
The day in Albany began at midnight, with an awning that would not stop flapping. Robyn had been listening to it for long enough and asked me to put it away for safety, a request which required the person who was less concerned about the awning to get out of bed and attend to it.
My assessment was that much of the noise came from the sea on the other side of the dune. This was an opinion I could have developed at considerable length from beneath the bedclothes, but it was unlikely to make any difference to the outcome. Outside I went, where there was no sign of anyone else moving about the park, and started retracting the awning.
Somewhere in the operation I caught a finger in one of the joints. For a short time the question of whether the awning needed putting away became secondary to the question of whether it would give my finger back. It eventually did, without any lasting damage, but in freeing myself I let go of the mechanism and the recovery tab rolled up out of sight.
That would be a problem for daylight. I returned to bed, where Robyn offered not to snore as a reward for my gallantry, an arrangement which proved rather less enduring than I might have hoped. We had not yet begun our day out and already there was unfinished business.
By morning the sky was grey, the air cold and the wind still about. Forbsy was wandering around the park, so I enlisted him in recovering the awning. Our first attempt achieved very little, but another application of brute force brought the mechanism back into an operational state, and we ended up with the whole thing deployed again.
For the moment the wind did not seem too bad, so we left it there. There is a particular satisfaction in solving a mechanical problem, although in this case our achievement was largely to restore the circumstances which had required me to get out of bed in the first place. Nevertheless, we could now get on with the day.
What the day was to contain remained open to negotiation. Robyn and I needed whooping cough vaccinations before visiting a newborn in Echuca in a couple of weeks, Rosalie wanted her hair done, and Forbsy had plans of his own which did not involve remaining in his van. Rosalie had secured a cancellation at a salon, with an appointment at half past eleven and an expected finish somewhere well beyond one.
Our own first destination was the shopping centre. There was a Terry White pharmacy where we could have the injections and enough shopping to occupy us beforehand, particularly with the Nullarbor ahead. A long trip with a caravan still requires someone to think about what will be eaten when there is nothing convenient down the road.
We bought spinach for pies, chicken pieces to roast for lunches, cheeses, dips, water and drinks. These were supplies with work attached, especially the spinach, but that work would repay us over the following days. Travelling around Australia had given us magnificent views and memorable encounters, while leaving the basic requirement to organise lunch remarkably intact.
Joe, the pharmacist, was a young Englishman whose reassuring manner made the process straightforward. There was paperwork, a check that the vaccine was available and an explanation of what to expect, followed by the injections themselves. Neither jab caused any particular difficulty, and we went back into the shopping centre for the waiting period afterwards.
During that interval Robyn walked into a dress shop and liked the first thing she saw. I reported to friends that she appeared to have had a reaction to the injection, because this was sufficiently unusual to warrant investigation. My own attention went towards refreshments, where the iced chocolate arrived as chocolate milk with ice cream and ice cubes, a combination which did little to improve my opinion of the treatment of non-coffee drinkers in coffee shops.
The establishment advertised its allegiance clearly enough through a sign about finding traces of blood in someone’s coffee. I could hardly claim to have been misled about its priorities. Still, it seemed a modest ambition to want an iced chocolate made with something approaching the enthusiasm devoted to the coffee machine.
Back at the park, the awning had been put away. I initially credited one of our travelling companions, but while we unpacked the groceries our neighbour came over and explained that he had retracted it when the wind picked up. We thanked him, and the awning’s brief second career as an outdoor shelter came to an end without further injury.
With the appointments and provisions dealt with, Robyn and I could wander. We drove out of the park, turned left and found ourselves on a tourist drive, which seemed a reasonable beginning for people without a more specific intention. At the first opportunity we stopped to photograph the harbour, with the wind busy across it, and farther along another sign offered another view worth getting out for.
The elevated outlooks gave us room to look across the water and take photographs. We passed the Anzac precinct, which Silver Leader wanted to visit in the hope of finding information about an ancestor who had gone to war. We would get there later, but for now the road was offering enough to keep us occupied.
Down at the port, Albany was getting on with its working life. Sand piles, silos, grain facilities and woodchip conveyors shared our attention with the art on the storage structures. I enjoy places where the scenery includes evidence of what keeps a town going, where a harbour contains more than a convenient foreground for a photograph.
One tank at the fuel facilities carried the words “Fire Water”. Its capacity was given as 400,000 gallons, which encouraged an entirely different interpretation of the contents and the scale of the party that might follow. It was a useful example of how a perfectly sensible industrial label could entertain someone who had no responsibility for the equipment.
A stop at the distillery offered a giant still outside and more photographs. We were there to look rather than sample, although a sign playing on the word “dram” appealed to me. Between the port and the distillery, we were finding plenty to investigate without having to give the afternoon much direction.
The turn towards the wind farm took us farther in than a passing glance at the sign might have suggested. Once there, though, we had paths to follow, viewing platforms to reach and wildflowers growing along the way. The turbines were the obvious attraction from a distance, but they were far from the only reason to get out of the Cruiser.
Among the flowers were blue ones I had tried to photograph as we passed along the road the previous day. This time they stayed within reach while I took the picture. There is a considerable difference between noticing something through the window of a moving vehicle and being able to stand beside it, especially when the camera is expected to make sense of your enthusiasm.
The paths carried us through flowers towards the platforms, with explanatory signs along the way. Eighteen turbines stood across the hills, all working enthusiastically in the wind which had been giving the awning such trouble. Out here, the same conditions had found a considerably more productive occupation.
I had noted from the information boards that the installation could supply a substantial share of Albany’s electricity. Looking across those hills, it was easy to understand why the place had been chosen, even without being qualified to assess the machinery. The flowers occupied one scale of attention and the turbines another, with our walk allowing time for both.
We continued along the tourist road to its end, at the far point of the bay we had been looking across. We had visited before, and went for another wander, trying unsuccessfully to find a position from which to photograph a departing freighter. The wind was stronger there, and the ship declined to arrange itself for our convenience.
Silver Leader called to find out where we were. The hairdressing was finished and they were heading to the Anzac memorial, while we still had places to investigate and had not yet had lunch. He also asked whether we had heard from Forbsy, then discovered Forbsy’s Cruiser parked immediately in front of them, which brought that particular search to a satisfactory conclusion.
Robyn remembered a caravan at the port selling squid, fish and chips. We kept it as our fallback while following the water and looking for something suitable, including an excursion towards a sailing club suggested by the GPS. The driveway looked rather more exclusive than the simple lunch we had in mind, so a lap of the car park became the full extent of our visit.
The farther we went without finding an alternative, the better Robyn’s remembered caravan sounded. Eventually we returned to the port, ordered our lunch and drinks, and sat at tables beside the water. A seagull was already working the area, collecting fragments of chips left by previous customers and taking an interest in our arrival.
Our fish was lovely, although I learned afterwards that it was shark. The squid was less successful, but we were sitting by the harbour with lunch in front of us and no pressing cause for complaint. The gull, meanwhile, had acquired what seemed to me an exceptionally favourable position.
There were about fifty other gulls some distance away, occupied with a commotion of their own. This one had us to itself. All it needed to do was remain reasonably discreet and see what became available, a strategy requiring very little effort and offering every prospect of reward.
I threw it a small piece of chip. Instead of quietly collecting the dividend, it began squawking and carrying on as though a major announcement was required. Other gulls noticed, took an interest and came over, at which point our original bird devoted itself to trying to drive away the competition it had just summoned.
It was difficult to see the commercial sense in the operation. A private opportunity had become a public dispute through the efforts of its original beneficiary, which now seemed affronted that anyone else had discovered the food. We ate our lunch with entertainment provided, while the gull worked considerably harder than the circumstances had originally required.
By the time we headed towards the Anzac precinct, the day had already been quite full. We had sorted out the awning, bought food, had our vaccinations, looked around the harbour, walked among wildflowers and watched a seagull mismanage its affairs. There had been no shortage of things to photograph or talk about, and I had no particular expectation that the remaining visit would take possession of the afternoon.
The grounds themselves gave us plenty to explore before we entered the main centre. High above the bay, the precinct looked across the water from which the wartime convoys had departed. Ship memorials recorded the vessels and, on the Australian ones I examined, numbers of soldiers, officers and horses carried aboard.
Those details brought a different sort of activity into the harbour we had been enjoying. There were ships to imagine in the water, carrying people whose journeys would end very differently from one another, and horses included in the accounting of what went aboard. A departure of that kind becomes harder to hold at a comfortable distance when the place in front of you is where it happened.
At the top of the hill we found a gun emplacement and a viewing platform. A plaque showed where the ships had assembled, giving the open water positions and a purpose which had been invisible during our earlier sightseeing. We could look across the bay and begin to place the vessels within it.
On the way down we visited the HMAS Perth Museum and Interpretive Centre. There was material about the ships which had carried that name, with enough information and memorabilia to occupy us as we looked and took photographs. Even then, we had only encountered part of what the precinct contained.
The decision to enter the main centre was a surprisingly casual one, considering how much of the day it would come to mean. Robyn was looking for a toilet and found one just inside, while I paid for our admission. Had Silver Leader and Rosalie not already been there, I suspect we might not have paid to go through at all.
That admission deserves to remain in the story. I could give myself a more flattering entrance, arriving with a deep determination to understand the place, but that would improve my intentions at the expense of what happened. We had come along after lunch to meet our friends and have a look, and it would have been quite possible to leave after seeing the grounds.
When Robyn returned, we were shown how to use the interactive displays. A card connected us with an individual Anzac whose account and service record could be followed at different points, and a listening device provided audio material around the centre. What had seemed likely to be a visit of unspecified length began to acquire its own demands on our attention.
There is something different about following one person’s experience through a history whose larger outlines you already know. A campaign name can sit in the mind as something learned years ago, familiar enough to pass over without much further thought. An individual account asks you to stay with what happened to someone, and familiarity with the name of a battle offers little protection against that.
The centre carried the story beyond Gallipoli and through the wider war. Fromelles and Villers-Bretonneux belonged to the account too, places whose names I knew but which gathered more weight as we moved through the displays. The photographs, film and recorded accounts gave us reasons to stop repeatedly rather than make a single circuit and consider the visit complete.
I cannot now supply the details of the person on my card accurately enough to retell that service history. What I recorded was how absorbing the process became, how listening and looking led to more listening and looking. The device was simple enough, but it prevented the people in the displays from remaining merely a crowd in an old photograph.
Some of the audio was chilling. The pictures and film made the waste and madness of war difficult to set aside, while the individual accounts kept returning that enormous subject to a human scale. I had been happy to spend the afternoon seeing whatever the road happened to offer, and now I was in a building where moving on required leaving something unfinished.
Several hours passed there. Closing time was approaching and the light outside was fading, yet there was still more to see. The visit I might easily have declined had become the part of the day for which we had allowed too little time.
Outside were further displays, including guns and torpedoes, and walks we had not done. We would have to leave those for another visit, and I wrote that when we returned I expected to give the precinct a full day. By then that was an intention formed from having been there, with a rather better understanding of what the time could contain.
Silver Leader had not resolved the question about his ancestor. The information available to him suggested a departure from Sydney, with Albany a possibility along the route rather than the answer he had hoped to confirm. His particular search remained open, although it had helped bring us to a place we might otherwise have passed through much more briefly.
I came away with the early morning’s irritations occupying less room. My finger had hurt, the awning had been a nuisance and I still thought the iced chocolate could have been improved, but none of those things required much further consideration. An afternoon among the accounts of people who had left that harbour had changed the proportions of the day.
There were still practical things to do. We needed fuel for the morning, so we headed towards a service station on the highway where I had noticed a favourable price, passing caravans gathered in town for a convention. I photographed a particularly small van for my sister, who had been considering something of that sort, and we continued with the business of preparing to travel.
Even then we fitted in a turn towards Emu Point before returning to the park. It was somewhere we knew from our previous visit, when I had fished in the small inlet between the point and an island. This time the roadside signs caught my attention, including warnings about turtles crossing between October and December, with other notices for the local wildlife.
Back at the van, the spinach bought that morning was still waiting to become pies. Soon I was occupied with cheese and eggs while the spinach boiled, then with filling five tins and finding room for them in the oven. The caravan oven took its time, and when the pies were finally done the chicken pieces went in to provide lunches for the days ahead.
It was an ordinary enough way to finish, cooking and getting ready for an early departure. The following day would take us east towards Esperance, so there was good reason to get everything done and go to bed. Albany had given us more than we could fit into the time available, a conclusion reached while the evening’s cooking continued at the speed permitted by the equipment.
That morning we had needed somewhere to shop and someone to give us an injection. By late afternoon I had wanted the doors of a museum to remain open longer. The pies could take as long as they liked, apparently, but at the place I had scarcely intended to enter, I had run out of time.
Author
