Day 37/39. 9 - 12th June 2024. Point Samson \ Pilbara. Mine your business.

Headed to Port Hedland, and now we are really starting to see what this mining business is about. Cobar and Mt.Isa are mining towns, but have somehow yet to really have the industry they are in fund the upkeep of the town beyond some tokenistic gestures. Port Hedland oozes the money that the industries have pumped into it to make it livable for the sizable workforce they have brought into the town. Being Sunday morning, it was unusually quiet and we had coffee at the waterfront (no beach) in the shadows of massive Iron Ore ships. The main town, as such as it is, looks new and up to date in most areas, but devoid of soul. If you are coming here to work, everything you need is here on the surface, but to me it looked to be the façade of a movie set.

One place that has not been done up is the Pier Hotel. The pub is famous to Linda and I as being the subject of another Weddings Parties Anything song. We were keen to search it out and get a couple of snaps. The song is about a stripper from Perth that does 5 shows a day, talks about the boys from BHP drinking some beers and watching for free, and her being lonely 5 times a day. The image of the pub isn’t great in the song, and we mentioned to a couple we were chatting to while we waited for the coffee about the song and asked if the Pier Hotel close by. It was, and they suggested our expectations of an ordinary pub would be met. It was run down, it was old, and it was up for sale. And we were too early for the first show of the day.

Point Samson is a very small coastal town that comprises of a pub, a general store, two caravan parks and probably 1000 residents. The marketers have made it sound quite idyllic and we were hoping for some beach holiday time. However, we just found that things just missed a little bit. The beach at low tide is non-existent, but that is OK. The vista to the left and right of the horizon has mining ships and machinery framing the view. We are fast learning that in WA, the mining influence is much larger than we ever thought.

Karratha is a town built solely for the mining companies to house a community of workers. Like Port Hedland, it has everything you need. Two supermarkets, shopping centre, great medical facilities and an awesome entertainment complex. It is all obviously funded by the mining companies and while at first glance things look picture perfect, the realisation of what is being done to enable to pay for what is there taints the view a bit.

Dampier is another level again. Lots of little towns of Dongas (one room bedsits) for the workers, and another town manufactured for living. Coffee at a café was pleasant, and overlooked the man made bay where you can see the salt mounds being built in the distance. Dampier and the Pilbara is also “Red Dog” country, so Dampier have a life size (small) statue of him at the entrance and the tourist shops have all the merch – camping shirts, road signs, stickers, bar mats, stubby holders,etc.. Funny feeling that his trademark wasn’t captured early on.

We checked out the “beautiful” shelly beach, and checked the ancient rock art in the national park which was fascinating on top of an intriguing rock formations. What dominated our thoughts though was the North West Shelf LNG plant. After coming over the crest at the end of the peninsula, your complete view is dominated by the massive storage tanks, processing trains and jetties for the ships along the coast. With numerous chimneys, and one flaring substantially, it is a sight that juxtaposes the natural beauty that sits around it.

We all use gas, and they export a hell of a lot of it. There is a lot of signs around about caring for the environment and the indigenous population, which looked like lip service and it just left a bad feeling in the stomach. A short documentary on the process explained how they extract it from the sea bed, pipe it to the processing plant, and at various stages they treat the gas to get rid of impurities. Lots of different chemical compounds are extracted, including Carbon Dioxide and Mercury. The lady at the desk of the visitor centre offered to answer questions so I asked the obvious one to me – what happens to the extracted CO2 and mercury? Apparently, I was the first to ask this question and her cheat sheets didn’t have the answer – and even an email answer from her hubby that runs one of the trains (extraction plants) was convoluted and unclear in the answer.

Then Hi-Vis guy comes in and he is the assistant manager on one of the trains. “The CO2, we just release into the atmosphere, and the mercury gets picked up about once a year, not sure what happens there”. I think he missed the day they did his media training and we have a new found commitment to get off gas. I knew burning it wasn’t good but didn’t think of the processing piece before we get to burn it being so bad as well.

Wickham was purely a mining town with a Woolworths and a BWS. The town hid an access road to what was another mind melting large mining operation. Here they were taking iron ore and putting it onto trains that were 263 carriage long to transport it to somewhere that seemingly needs it more than the people of the Pilbara. Outside the high fences are some signs saying how they are looking after the environment and the local people. They are covered in an orange dust from the operations and seem to be forgotten about, like the promises written upon them.

Nearby Roeburn and Cossack were weird towns with either small or non-existent populations. There were many buildings that have been expensively restored and lay in wait for a purpose. One that hadn’t though was an indigenous art gallery where we talked to the curator and their main artist for a while about the art and what they are seeing. The Aboriginal lady was an elder that had seen a lot happen to her towns and when discussing the mining and the money, she lamented about how a lot of it just further divided her people and broke down their communities rather than being a help. She said she cannot worry about it any more, and just focused on the painting. Another artist had works where he was painting scenes of the Pilbara from memory, from before the mining started. I am really hoping this holiday starts soon, as I am getting too much education.

Facilities: We were blessed with the last planned en-suite for the trip, and that gets an automatic 5/10 to start. Old and with a shower curtain, it didn’t do much to lift it past there. The ensuite block had 4 shower/toilet units, each with their own key. Each room had a shower and toilet, a sink but no ceiling. It was just covered by a tin roof with a gap between the top of the wall and the roof. This gave an acoustic effect that any noise being made within one of the ensuites would be amplified and then projected across all directions of the park like a public address system. This was especially evident with one guest who needed to hawk up their lungs at 5 am every morning and left us thanking Apple and their wonderful noise cancelling capabilities in the headphones. It had a nice long bench for us to store our stuff though. 6/10.