Ceduna and surrounds

We were 35 km from Ceduna and intended to drive in the next day for showers, laundry, and groceries.  At that point, it had already been a week since our last showers, and we’d begun to be able to smell ourselves.  However, we found ourselves delayed by another few days by more isolated beaches, which seem to make up most of the Eyre Peninsula coast. 

One night, I stepped out of the van for a wee to a bright flash of light.  Eric thought I’d bumped the power switch as I slid out of the van, as I often do, but I threw my hands up in innocence.  The first in a 36-hour series of massive storms was just rolling in.  We stayed up until daylight watching the lightening all around us and out to sea and then spent the next day in the van reading and watching too much television.  There’s nothing cozier than listening to rain on the top of the van when you’re warm and dry inside.

Lest you become jealous, though, there are limitations of living in a van, particularly when it’s raining.  Sadly for me, my stomach started sending me distress signals during a heavy downpour.  I put on my rain jacket, stripped naked from the waist, and set off with the shovel.  Eric wanted to take photos of me digging and squatting half-nude in the rain, but I assured him no judge would hold me culpable for divorce…or murder…if he did.

I took the edge off my stench the next day by taking a naked dip and then walking back along the beach starkers to achieve that all-over tan.  The things you can do when you haven’t seen another human in a few days..  Still, by the last night, we were down to cereal for dinner, so it was time to head in.

After washing everything we owned, Eric and I explored town and saw a sign advertising “Greek dinner tonite.”  We inquired at the supermarket and we told to see Anna at the pizza place.  Sure enough, Anna and her crew of Greek grandmothers were running mad with trays of delicious looking things, most of which involved phyllo and cheese.  At $30 each, the tickets weren’t each cheap for a country town, so we figured we’d get to rub elbows with all the rural elite.

When we arrived that night, there was some confusion about which table to stick us at.  We were escorted into the town hall and turned over to the hostess with, “These are the tourists.”  Clearly in the four hours since we had bought the tickets we had been much discussed. 

We were seated at a table of eight lovely people, mostly in their 50s and 60s, who were intrigued by what had brought us to their town much less to their dinner.  We had offers of water for our tank on the way out of town, a room on the WA border in a cousin’s motel, and tea the next afternoon.  In return, I took their money by winning the lucky squares competition, where everyone at the table “buys” squares on a grid for a couple of dollars, and then a number is chosen at random corresponding to one of the squares: winner takes all.   

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to spend my prize money on any of the delicacies being auctioned to raise additional funds for the local oyster festival.  There were vats of olives, raised, picked, and cured by Anna herself, piles of smoked fish, and giant trays of Greek pastries.  It was like a Costco of homemade food.  Most entertaining, though, was the fight over a 30 year old bottle of Ouzo that eventually went for $500 after half an hour of duelling bids from a fisherman and young lady up front.  I suspect there was more at stake there than a musty old bottle of foul tasting booze.  One of our dinner companions assured us that at least the girl had no way of affording the bids she was making, so I imagine she was mostly relieved to lose.

With nothing better to do, we decided to take up the Coopers on their offer for tea and had a lovely afternoon on their deck overlooking their mangroves, pelicans, and egrets.  To our relief, it wasn’t even discovered that we had no idea of Mrs. Cooper’s first name, despite having spent three hours talking to her the night before.

We killed a couple of additional nights on beaches near the Cooper’s house out past Ceduna and then had to pass back through the quarantine check to get back into town.  Mrs. Cooper had assured us that we could just use her name if they gave us any hassle about our fruit and veg.

Our 16-week checkup was with the midwife, who only sees patients on Tuesdays.  She was very chatty and helpful, and I think she went out of her way to be particularly thorough since she had two trainee midwifes assisting her.  Everything looked good with the Sea Monkey, and she encouraged us to consider returning to Ceduna for the birth.  She was really trying to sell the benefits of their new medical centre, which made us wonder if they need to fill beds to maintain their funding.   Hopefully the Busselton hospital will be as welcoming.

16 weeks near Ceduna

Ceduna was the first town we’ve come across with a large Indigenous population, located as it is near land owned by a couple of different tribal groups, called mobs.  They just seemed to be loitering in front of buildings and on street corners in groups of six to eight.   We were a bit intimidated, but we felt really guilty since the most they did was say hello to us, and it’s not like there was much else they could do to entertain themselves than hang around town.  We were trying to figure out if our gut reaction was because we had experienced such different behaviour from groups of, say, African Americans in Minneapolis, who were more likely to be armed and to harass us at the bus stop.  Poverty was evident, particularly in the number of children running around shoeless and with dripping noses in the cold weather, and there were a few bottles being passed around in paper bags, but it was nothing like what my sister and I saw in Darwin and Katherine a few years back. 

After leaving Ceduna, we made it a whole 90 km to Cactus Beach, a famous surf camp well down a rutted dirt road.  There’s a whole maze of campsites, and I imagine they’re full when the sun is out and the surf is big, but at the moment there are no more than ten of us spread out across a few acres.  The surf was acceptable on the first day, but Eric was a bit wary of the reef bottom and advertised shark colony.  However, in a place that doesn’t allow photographs in an attempt to stay out of the surf mags, the shark colony could be just another way to keep the place pure for the locals.  For all the talk of localism, though, who the hell are the locals here, where the nearest “town” is a petrol station with a general store 20 km away, and the only other place of any size within about 1,000 km is Ceduna?

Countryside near Cactus Beach

Cactus Beach Rule Board

Cactus Beach surf on a bad day