Quokka! No, that’s not a swear word, it’s a very cute marsupial – but I’ll tell you more about that in a minute.
(and a warning – this is the longest blog ever, get your coffee or wine lined up!)
First, a couple administrative updates:
- No, still haven’t heard anything re permanent residence application 🙁 Patience isn’t one of my virtues, so I’m really having to work at not thinking about this all the time. The application was lodged (Aussie for filed) 3.5 months ago. The government estimates that they will process 50% of applications within 3 months and 90% within 10 months. So we weren’t one of the 50%, which is either good (in that they quickly dismiss all applicants they know aren’t eligible) or bad (in that they quickly accept all applicants they know are a shoe-in). Keeping fingers crossed.
- Saw my oncology surgeon 2 weeks ago for my semi-annual follow-up. The original requirement was to have a follow-up appointment every 6 months for 3 years. But things have been looking so good that I get to skip the April 2026 one and don’t have to go back for a year. Yay!!
I told you last blog that we had an adventure planned. That adventure was taking the Indian Pacific train from Adelaide to Perth and then spending a day on Rottnest Island in order to see quokkas. You see, my sister sent me a photo of a quokka about a year ago and asked if we had any in Yeppoon. I’d never heard of quokkas so did some investigating and discovered the only place you can find them is on Rottnest Island. So we decided to plan a trip around seeing quokkas!
We flew to Brisbane first (that is the start of every trip when you live in regional Queensland!). We had a couple hours to kill between flight arriving and my doctor’s appointment, so we wandered around a mall area in the CBD (that’s Aussie for downtown – central business district). Lovely Christmas lights everywhere:
Fun fact about Brisbane, from our full-of-fun-facts-friend Rod, the street names in the CBD are female running one direction and male running perpendicular! Look up the Queen Street Mall and check out the street names.
We visited the Anzac Memorial in Brisbane. I’ve already told you that Australia does an incredible job with its war memorials and this one was just amazing. Click here to learn more.
When we were in New Zealand in January, we met Lynette and Peter and they live in Brisbane. They kindly invited us to stay with them before we flew to Adelaide the next morning and we had an awesome night, which may or may not have included lots of wine:
Peter and Lynette live on the outskirts of Brissy in a very hilly, treed area. I am now calling them Dr and Mrs Doolittle because they have befriended all the local wildlife. Here’s one of the dozens of cockatoos that visit them each dusk:
And one of the King Parrots (the ones we saw were female; the more brightly coloured males didn’t appear for us):
And this possum living in the rafters under their house (there’s a little baby possum with her that is camera-shy):
After making us a lovely dinner, Lynette had us try a classic Queenslander treat, which we hadn’t heard of before:
Here is some history of the Weis fruit bars. Despite being purchased by Unilever and moved out of Queensland, it was still a very tasty treat!
Oh, when we were heading to Lynette and Peter’s, our Uber took us along this road:
So we rode on Rode Road 🙂
The Indian Pacific train travels between Sydney and Perth. We decided to pick it up in Adelaide as we thought we’d prefer to explore the area between Sydney and Adelaide by car. The area between Adelaide and Perth is mostly unforgiving desert, so we wanted to see it, but we liked the idea of being on a train to do so. The train wasn’t leaving until late in the evening but we flew to Adelaide early because we really like it there and wanted to wander around the downtown again. Our parrot luck continued and we saw this Eastern Rosella:
The main place in Adelaide we wanted to visit again was the Central Market:
Boy we wish we had something like this in Yeppoon/Rocky! Heaps of fresh produce, seafood, breads, cheeses, spices, meats, and delicious made-to-order foods. And you won’t believe what we discovered there – a place selling fresh cut fries! But we discovered them too late, they had closed the kitchen already 🙁 Now we need to make a special trip to Adelaide again to get some fresh cut fries! So strange the things you miss – really miss fresh cut fries, so tired of the frozen ones. Anway, en route to the market, we discovered China Town, which we somehow missed when we were here in June:
So when we head back to Adelaide to get fresh cut fries, we’ll explore more of China Town too.
Liz, about a year ago you asked if we had Jacaranda trees here. I haven’t seen any in Yeppoon but there are some in Rockhampton and I was finally able to get a photo for you (they bloom in spring):
We then discovered they’re pretty much everywhere! Here’s a gorgeous one we saw in Adelaide, with a lavender blanket of petals underneath:
Funny enough, they’re considered invasive weeds in Queensland!
Two other fun facts we learned while in Adelaide:
Ugg boots are Australian! And so are Blundstones! I had no idea.
We saw this garbage truck while on a tram in Adelaide:
Aussie humour is everywhere – the truck that empties wheelie bins (garbage cans) has the Ibis, aka Bin Chicken, as its logo 🙂
Speaking of Aussie humour, I think I’ve told you about the curlews that come out at night and sometimes sound like a woman screaming and sometimes sound very mournful, but always sound very loud. Saw this t-shirt the other day:
Before boarding the train in Adelaide, the tour company, Journey Beyond, put on an incredible dinner in their train terminal for those of us joining the trip in Adelaide. The food and wine were fabulous (they were also fabulous on the train). This dinner included kangaroo meat as an entree (Aussie for appetizer). Everyone who’s eaten kangaroo tells me it’s delicious (also high in protein, low in fat), and Hugh definitely enjoyed it, but I couldn’t bring myself to try it. Will have to save that experience for another time.
The train is called the Indian Pacific because it travels from the Indian Ocean on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east (and back again).
Our particular train was extra long:
The train journey went through the Nullarbor (null arbor = no trees) Plain. Most of the trip looked like this or with less foliage:
It would have been great if the train followed the coast line, but alas it did not. Click here for some photos of what we missed by being further inland. Saw a couple kangaroos but no dingoes and no wild camels.
The world’s longest golf course goes through the Nullarbor! No, Hugh didn’t play it 🙂 Click here to learn about the 1,365 km long course.
You can see a row of piles of rocks in this photo (on the far side of the “road”):
That’s from when they trenched fibre to connect Perth to reliable internet in 1989-1991 (before then, the west coast relied on microwave radio and satellite links). There are also cameras across the plain that are used to triangulate meteors. There’s all sorts of space exploration history related to this part of Australia and I wish they had shared more while we were on the train. Will have to do a lot more googling about this.
The lounge car on the train had wifi (as long as the train was going through somewhere that had a cell signal) so we were able to watch some of the Canadian curling trials while going through the Australian desert:
The train made 2 stops. The first was in a “town” called Cook. Here are some photos:
Cook is very much in the middle of nowhere – 1,100 km from Adelaide and 1,500 km from Perth. The nearest doctor is a 12 hour drive away. Apparently there are some residents in the area still and the Indian Pacific train brings them supplies and in return, the residents supply the train with water and fuel. At its height, the town had 200 residents, a school, a pool, and a general store. Really not much need for the Railway Crossing sign!
The other stop was what I had anticipated would be a highlight of the trip – an under the stars dinner at Rawlinna, Australia’s largest sheep station (2.5 million acres of land, 30,000 sheep). Unfortunately, it was disappointing. There were lights everywhere, so seeing stars in a light-pollution-free desert was not possible. It was freezing cold (probably 13-15C but with a wind – and we are well and truly acclimatised to the sub-tropics now, so we were frozen). The food was mediocre (extra disappointing given how good it was on the train). And they didn’t teach us anything about the sheep station. In my googling, I learned that it had just changed ownership the month before, so maybe we didn’t see it at its best.
As we got to the western edge of the desert, there were salt lakes everywhere. After watching curling from the train, I did a double take because some of them looked like frozen lakes:
Our train pulled into Perth on the Saturday afternoon and we took an Uber to our hotel in Fremantle (called Freo by the locals). Let me contrast the difference in accommodation for you. Here is our room on the train:
Here is our bathroom (using a wide angle lens) and Hugh walking partially sideways down the corridor where the rooms are:
Then click here to see what our room at the Esplanade Hotel in Freo looked like. It felt so luxurious after being squished in the train cabin! And I’m quite sure our entire bathroom on the train would fit twice into the shower stall in the hotel room. Boy did we enjoy our stay there!
They really did a great job decorating the hotel for Christmas:
And we enjoyed more curling, this time by the pool:
While we were sitting at the pool, a person walked around with an Esky (cooler) handing out “zooper doopers” (what I called Mr Freezies as a kid):
They also handed these out on the ferry we took to Rottnest – not sure if this is a marketing campaign by the Zooper Dooper company or what, but there was no shortage of frozen sugar water in Fremantle!
Speaking of advertising, what does this logo immediately look like to those of you in North America:
Hopefully it’s not just us who saw Waste Management! We didn’t have time to visit this museum but will next time. We did see that they have a large submarine in the back:
Here is some history about the secret Fremantle submarine base in WWII. Here’s some information about the upcoming massive nuclear sub base near Perth.
Freo is an awesome spot – we will absolutely stay there again. Hippie vibe, beautiful old buildings, great restaurants, really quite eclectic.
Here is a close up of the jail walls – they’re made with coral!
Obviously would never happen today and so far no youth have demanded that they be torn down because it’s now known to be bad to rip coral from the sea to build walls 🙂
We of course found a spot with great live music! And for the first time in our lives, we saw the Indian Ocean:
Another sign for my Fun Signs of the World coffee table book:
We also found another fabulous market:
This one had two sections, one for food and one for other stuff. If you wanted Bohemian-style clothing, this was the place to go! But also all sorts of other products from local artists. It’s only open Fri-Sun, so we were glad we’d planned to spend our Sunday in Freo.
On the Monday, we went to Rottnest Island in search of quokkas! They get you all geared up for them at the ferry terminal:
Rotto (as the locals call the island) is gorgeous! It has 63 bays/beaches with pristine turquoise water:
Lots of neat rock formations, like this one that looks like a dog sitting:
Hugh and I went for a swim and were shocked at how cold the water was – only 20C! It apparently gets to about 19C in the winter and only 21C in the summer. The air temp was 35C so it was like immersing ourselves into ice water. Brrr.
On arrival at the island was this Aboriginal artwork:
It’s depicting a “cray” (a rock lobster – bet you can’t say that without the song popping into your head!). We really wanted to try some cray but the timing of our travels just didn’t work out, so we’ll prioritise that next time we visit.
At the visitor centre, a volunteer told us the critical information about finding quokkas. There are about 15,000 of them on the island. You can find about 1,000 of them scattered around, most easily seen at dusk. And the other 14,000 are at the bakery 🙂 Well, that was good advice – we saw heaps of them at the bakery where we had breakfast and didn’t see a single one the rest of the day across the island! They are indeed VERY cute:
They are a marsupial, so carry their joeys in a pouch like kangaroos do. Fun fact – they go by the “heir and a spare” philosophy. They have a joey and immediately get pregnant again in case the first joey doesn’t survive. If the first joey seems to be doing well, they abort the fertilised embryo! And the momma quokkas also sacrifice their babies to save themselves – if they perceive a threat, they relax the muscles of their pouch so the baby falls out. The baby rolls around and makes all sorts of noise, which attracts the predator’s attention, allowing the momma quokka to make her escape. So they’re cute but perhaps not as socially evolved as humans 🙂 Although apparently, they have good hieroglyphic interpretation skills as this sign was posted at quokka level at the bakery:
When they can’t get their fill of bakery crumbs, they devour vegetation on the island, so they have to quokka-proof trees they plant:
The island is called Rottnest because when a Dutch expedition arrived in 1696, they thought these strange creatures were rats – rott is Dutch for rat, so the island is a rats’ nest 🙂 It only became an island 7,000 years ago when sea levels rose. Before that it was part of the mainland and Aboriginal people lived there. They’ve found artefacts dating back 30,000 years on the island. But once sea levels rose and cut it off from the mainland, humans didn’t spend much time there anymore. Click here for a history of Rottnest/Wadjemup. Like so many other settlements, it was used as a prison for Aboriginal people from the mid 1800’s to the mid 1900’s.
Rottnest was also used as a quarantine site for overseas visitors during COVID – now that would have been a cool spot to quarantine!
There is one wind turbine on the island that provides 1/3 of its electricity. It was supposed to last for 20 years, but 25 years later is still going strong. There is so much tourism on the island now, they have to do a lot of work to ensure electricity and water is available.
We visited Oliver Hill Battery on the island – one of two gun batteries constructed on the island. Fascinating! After the Great Depression, when governments were trying to find ways to keep people employed, they decided to build these gun batteries. And in a case of lucky timing, they were ready literally months before WWII broke out.
Incredible technology and the tunnel and engine structure were just brilliant. If you ever get to Rottnest, definitely do the Oliver Hill Gun and Tunnel tour!
We took the train to get from the main settlement up to Oliver Hill:
About 2/3 of the way up the hill, the train’s engine died. We were fortunate that there was a breeze because, as I mentioned earlier, it was 35C+. The driver said we’d wait and let the engines cool down and if they didn’t, we’d have to walk the rest of the way. There were a number of elderly people on the train (no, I don’t mean Hugh 🙂 ) so I’m not sure how walking up a hill in 35C heat with no shade and next to no water would go. After 15 minutes, he tried the engines, no joy. He waited another few minutes and tried again and thank goodness, they started this time. We got to the top and everyone was happy to disembark. All the passengers and the driver were getting organised for the tour of Oliver Hill and the driver was letting the people who were supposed to return from their tour by train know that they would send a coach up for them instead. All of a sudden, we see the driver running full speed back to the train. It was starting to roll backwards down the hill! Fortunately he was able to jump on in time and stopped it. So while I recommend visiting Oliver Hill, I don’t recommend taking the train 🙂
Did I mention it was HOT while we were on the island? I was reading a novel a few months ago that took place in the Outback and they talked about it being so hot, the bitumen (pavement/asphalt) melted. I thought, really, does that actually happen? Well, yes it does:
The edges of the pavement were turning into oozing, sticky black guck. Which I accidentally stepped on and now have a nice souvenir of Rottnest on the bottom of my shoe. That’s at 35C and the Outback gets much hotter than that, so I can only imagine what happens to the bitumen in the summer there!
Just like on the western edge of the Nullarbor, there are lots of salt lakes on Rottnest Island. They are 7x saltier than the ocean! But still full of wild birds.
I think that’s it for our west coast adventure. I know this blog is already ridiculously long but I’ll quickly catch you up on some other local stuff before letting you go.
First, check out this video of butcherbirds in our bird bath. They are my favourite song birds but they didn’t used to visit our bird bath much. Seeing them more frequently getting all spruced up this year.
Our personal trainer torturer Michelle got a great photo of a Willie Wagtail for me – they’re rarely so still:
And I’ve seen a few pheasant coucals this year – they’re tricky to photograph so here is info from my Merlin app:
A few weeks ago we got a pizza to eat near one of the beaches between Yeppoon and Emu Park and we saw a few birds there that we haven’t seen before. It was dusk so we couldn’t get good enough photos to identify them, but it was neat knowing that there are way more birds still to discover in the area! A few were flitting about in this tree:
Can you guess which way the wind blows!
Our cherry tomato plants finally seem to be done for the season. It was INSANE how many tomatoes they produced – we could pretty much have set up our own veg stand. We thought this was the last batch but 2 days later, we had that amount again:
Spring is the time for storms in eastern Australia and some wild ones went through in November. Fortunately no hail in our area, but Brisbane was hammered. Check out how enormous hail gets here:
The friends we stayed with in Brisbane said that size of hail came down for 20 minutes. I can’t even imagine.
One night we saw this in a parking lot:
Now in Canada, this would be a normal sight in winter. But in sub-tropical Australia??? Aussie friends, can you explain why someone would put their wipers up like this?
Another curious phenomenon. We have a few pieces of raku pottery we brought with us from Canada. Its primary colour was sort of purple. We’d been noticing that we were seeing more green in it this past year but thought it was just the way the light was catching it. Nope, all 3 pieces have indeed turned mostly green:
We’ve owned these for several years and they stayed mostly purple for several years, but all of a sudden they’ve gone green. I did some googling and learned:
You learn something new every day!
Just before we left for our trip, the annual end of year party and awards night was held at the Capricornia Cruising Yacht Club. You had to go dressed as your boat’s name. Kevin and Jo’s boat is Vivacious, so this is how we went:
I think I mentioned last blog that our new neighbours are doing a great job with their Christmas decorations so job #1 when we got back this weekend was to get ours up. We added two new additions this year, a shooting star display on our front porch and snowflakes falling on our garage door: New addition to exterior illumination
The International Space Station was flying over Yeppoon last night so we went out to watch it in the south west sky. While we were watching it, a shooting star went by! I guess that was a celestial two thumbs up for our new Christmas decor 🙂
I also put our Christmas tree up yesterday:
This is always an emotional task for me because every ornament has some significance relating to friends, family, or places we’ve visited. This is my 3rd time putting a tree up since moving to Australia and I’ve gotten teary every time because the ornaments make me think of our wonderful friends and family who are far away in the northern hemisphere. Sending you all our love for a wonderful Christmas and holiday season!