On The Road At Last.

We're  off and racing. Well  not really racing. In fact we'll be travelling quite sedately.

When Edward set off on his journey, a number of servants and what he called dark children of the forest, gathered to see him off. He was taking some horses to sell in Sydney so he had two stockmen with him, one European and one Australian (I think I will adopt the policy used in Dancing with Strangers , the excellent history of first contact at Sydney and refer to whitefellas as European and blackfellas as Australians) but he also had a couple of other European stockmen ride along with him for the first little bit.

I don't have servants, let alone dark  children of the forest, but we did have Paul, Carol and John, canoeing friends, with us for the first night. We all camped at Miller's Point, a bush  campsite on the Pallinup Estuary, about 130kms east of Albany. A beautiful spot and probably not much changed since Edwards time; if you discount the road in, pit toilets, assorted moored tinnies and ramshackle shacks.

Our first campsite!

When Edward sailed past here in 1854, the Pallinup Estuary would've still been pretty well untouched by Europeans. It fell into the Goreng branch of the Noongar peoples land,  just outside the territory of Albany's Menang people. George Cheyne had taken up land at Cape Riche about 30kms to the West in 1836, that land being taken over by the Moir's, who had started work on the homestead that still exists there, by the 1850's. John Septimus Roe, who managed to cover most of the Southwest, named Boat Harbour, just over the Estuary in 1848 and of course those intrepid trans-continental explorers, Wylie and Eyre, crossed the Pallinup in July 1842. Eyre's journal records that they came to a wide rivèr that they couldn't get across. They went upstream for 8 miles till they came to a rock bar that allowed them to cross. A day or so later, Wylie, a Menang man, started to recognise territory that they were passing through.

Paul and I paddled 14kms upstream  and sure enough came to that  same rock bar!