Hello again ! 🙂
Exams are over, all assignments have been completed – time to explore Australia a bit. Today I went to the “mid-west”, to have a look at Western Australia’s mini version of Ayers Rock, called Wave Rock.
On the way over there, spotted a nice example of how recruitment is done in small townships. In fact, this one wasn’t even that small. It had a grand total of 650 inhabitants.
This seems to be fairly common. When I went to Albany a couple of weeks ago, a town on the way over there was in dire straits. Their only restaurant was closing and up for sale. If the restaurant would go, it would be very likely that nobody would stop for gas anymore either. As such, everyone was helping out to try and find a new owner.
Anyway, in the case of Brookton above, it started to get urgent as well. The local barber, the “Brookton Shearing Shed” had just closed. Is it in any way apparent that most people in this town work on sheep farms ?
The following nice piece of rock is called “Hippo’s Yawn”. Do you see the hippo (hint: it’s yawning on the right end of the photograph) ? This rock structure is located about 350 km east of the city of Perth.
It’s quite impressive how all the trees are growing away from the rock. The only light they receive is coming from that direction, and most wind and rain flows down over the rock, which explains this peculiar behaviour. The wind whistling through the tree tops also generates the coolest sound effects.
When you climb the rock, you have views like the following. As the surface isn’t completely smooth, rain forms in small pools on the granite, creating virtual biospheres (for example, there are little animals and plants living in the pools).
And this finally, is what is called the “Wave Rock”. The lower edge of the rock consists of softer material than the upper edge. 2700 million years of erosion generated this unique vista point.
The rock is also being put to good use. In general, the area surrounding it only has average rainfall of 325 mm per year (compared to 800+ for Perth). In order to have drinking water for the town, a collection reservoir was built just next to the rock, and all rain falling on it is diverted into this reservoir:
