Nov 14 - Dec 3 (Day 288-307) - Border Village to Perth (including quarantine)

Saturday 14 November

What a whirlwind of a first few days! What started off a bit exciting but calm turned into quite an ordeal!

So continuing on from last entry... we were lined up waiting along with another couple who had been waiting a bit before us, and we agreed they'd cross the border first even though that was our hope. No matter. There was quite a line of cars but we were next to the other people at the front. The cars were all sitting there with their engines idling waiting for the signal from the police and not wanting to be the one who moved a second too late and got overtaken!

 

Quarantine check at WA border

At about 11:55pm last night the police waved a light to wave us over, so we let the other guys go first and took our place behind them.

 We'd already spoken to the police and the quarantine officers to work out what they'd need to look at and what they'd care about, in particular a bag of red sand we got from Big Red in Birdsville. Despite being told it would be fine, they decided at the time to take it :(. Not to worry.

 

 

 

About 12:08am we were all finished and ready to cross. The local ABC news was there waiting to talk to the first few cars who crossed over so we chatted to them for a minute or so before we FINALLY got into WA. YAY!

Once we were across we only drove for about five minutes before finding a free camp cut into the side of a hill pretty close to Eucla and stopped for the night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our camp spot for the night just out of Eucla

 

We woke next morning to a flurry of messages from people who'd seen what the ABC had done with our interview!  Our contribution appeared on ABC's website the following day, and some of the footage went into the TV news bulletin:

Ruins of the Eucla Telegraph Station

Since we were close to the beach and quite low down off the cliffs, we decided to drive down to the beach for a quick swim. It wasn't quite as simple as we thought to get to the beach though! We dropped the caravan off in a carpark where we saw from the satellite map some vehicle tracks. We followed these for about a kilometre through some pretty tight spots (bushes close to the track), but it only ever ran parallel to the water a few hundred metres away the whole time. We passed the old Eucla Telegraph Station ruins along the way but didn't get to the water, so we eventually turned back and found a different track...

... which led us to the old Eucla Jetty! We were pretty sure given there was a jetty that a track would have to lead there. What a pretty sight hey?! Almost mythical!

Ruins of the Eucla Jetty

We had a nice swim here for about half an hour, although later discovered this stretch of coast between Eucla and Esperance is a shark breeding ground! Thankfully we still have our limbs intact!

The beautiful beach near Eucla

This all finished, we hitched the van back on and headed into Eucla for some fuel and to pump up the tyres.

The 'Learn Health and Safety' playground in Eucla!

They have a lovely old 'unsafe' playground at Eucla! Yes, the type we all used to play on years ago, injure ourselves mildly, and through those little accidents we learned all about risk management. It's a shame modern playgrounds, in their desire to be super safe, have all but taken away the need for kids to even think about safety, and that there can be unpleasant consequences if you don't check first - 'is the metal slide too hot?'; 'how do I avoid getting splinters on this rough wooden see-saw?'; 'the angle on that slide is pretty steep - I'd better be careful when I reach the bottom so I jump off a bit and don't slam into the ground'.

 

The Eucla motel has this lovely Chinese garden out the back - what an oasis!

Coming through Eucla Pass

Their morning's education on Workplace Health and Safety complete, we jumped back in the car and headed west. We had this lovely view just coming through the pass. If you've not been this way, there is a mountain range which, east of the border, runs very close to the water, which is what creates those iconic cliff shots over the Great Australian Bight. Eucla is at the point where the range heads inland a bit and sits on the south-western edge of the range, so there's a pass through the mountains through which you get a great view across the plain down to the water.

Stopped for the night just east of Cocklebiddy

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. We stopped off at roadhouses at Mundrabilla and Madura to refuel and check in with how trade was doing. In both cases the proprieters said they had expected a bigger rush of tourists than there'd been, which was disappointing given how heavily they rely on tourist trade and that there has been basically zero tourists while the border had been closed! So we did what we could and bought a few things. We stopped for the night just before Cocklebiddy.

 

 Sunday November 15

So far, so good. We had a reasonable sleep and headed into Cocklebiddy for a top up of fuel.

Cocklebiddy has the unique attraction of two wedge-tailed eagles in captivity there! This wasn't there when we came past in 2007. You can read all about it on the right, but in short they're two birds which were hit by vehicles and would have died, and are permanently disabled such that they wouldn't survive in the wild. This large aviary serves not only as a home for Samantha and Bruce, but as an education opportunity for drivers to learn how not to create more Samanthas and Bruces! Whistling Kites and Crows can get airborne quickly, but Wedgies being so large and heavy take a while to get off the ground, and in our experience they also tend to be the last birds to leave a carcase on the road. This is partly responsible for why 60 or so of these magnificent birds are killed by vehicles each year, plus the fact they tend to fly back over the road once airborne and sometimes straight into the path of the vehicle which thought the bird had flown away. Moral of the story - slow down when approaching wedge-tailed eagles, and make sure they're away from you when you pass.

Samantha and Bruce in their aviary

From here we carried along, hitting the legendary 90 Mile Straight and stopped for a late lunch in Balladona.

Straight it certainly is!

Balladonia for a late lunch

We got to Norseman about 4:30pm where we refuelled and had a shower at one of the service stations. We'd pretty well run our fresh food out as you need to at the WA border (no fruit, vegetables, nuts etc), so we intended to buy tea and do some shopping in the morning.

Now. Norseman is where things all started to unravel, or at least get very interesting! The first hint we had that something was wrong was a WhatsApp message Mim got about 5pm from a family in Perth saying there'd just been a community transmission case of COVID-19 reported in Adelaide. We weren't too worried about this because we were already across the border and knew we didn't need to quarantine. We thought the worst that would happen is that we might have to get a covid test and stay put for a day or two while the results came back.

So we carried on our merry way and had tea at the BP Roadhouse in Norseman.

Found this very interesting poster about how to
safely share the road with road trains. We knew
some, but some was new and worth reading!

However we were keeping a pretty close eye on the situation, and information started to come out fairly quickly. The initial reports were that the border wall was going to go back up soon but those travellers who'd already entered WA would simply have to get a COVID test and be free to go once it was returned negative, which is what we thought. However about 30 minutes later another report came out contradicting that, saying that we'd need to go into a full 14 days' quarantine, and that WA Police would be getting in touch with people directly. We still weren't too concerned, given:

1. We hadn't been within 300km of Adelaide (Pt Augusta was the closest we got), and that a week before the outbreak, on Nov 8, and
2. The earliest people were spreading it in Adelaide was on November 12, when we were safely camped 10km from the WA Border
   

Also, experience has shown that information is often contradictory in a rapidly developing situation, so we were just going to wait for the call and work things out then. So we drove to a free RV camp in Norseman. Mim got a call from WA Police about 10:30pm who advised we would need to go into 14 days' quarantine, and that tomorrow we should travel to Esperance (the address we'd almost randomly selected as a point of quarantine if it was needed). They said that this was still necessary for anyone who'd been in SA, regardless of where in SA they'd been. Illogical as this sounded, we could appreciate that an initial response may have needed to be quite broad before (hopefully) sensibly narrowing the scope once the breadth of the cluster was known. This confirmed, we headed to bed.

Monday November 16

We headed out of Norseman before remembering one of the reasons we stopped at Norseman was because an eBay parcel (a new caravan door handle) was waiting for us at the post office. So we returned to Norseman, collected our parcel, and decided to phone the caravan park in Esperance to see if we could stay there as our quarantine location. They said no, but that the Esperance Police were meeting with community groups and shops to organise a common quarantine location for people stuck in our situation and that we'd get an update on where to go and when later in the morning. Until then, we were told, we couldn't go into any shops or do anything, we just had to stay put. The Constable I spoke to was extremely understanding and sympathetic of our situation, and while she couldn't do anything about it it was really good to have someone on the other end with that attitude.

However that little bit of news put paid to our plans of shopping and finally getting some food in the van! At least we'd managed to empty the toilet and fill up the water tanks the night before! But we were a bit frustrated at this point not being able to go to the shops to buy food supplies, nor go to a roadhouse to buy pre-made food either, and having to just stay where we were, so we returned to the RV camp and waited for a few hours.

I posted in a Full-Time Travellers Facebook group we're in about our situation and asking for any advice given we had no food, the local IGA wouldn't deliver and we couldn't go into the shops. And wow we got so much help! Honestly people were so nice! One person said they knew the IGA owners and would ask them to deliver some food out to us if we needed. Another person lived about 50km away in Salmon Gums and said they could drive some food up to us if we needed. Many others offered their consolation and well wishes. In the end we had close to 200 comments over the course of about 24 hours, well after we left Norseman and as people sought updates on how things were affecting us.

While we were there I got a Facebook Messenger message from the ABC journalist who interviewed us at the border, asking for an update on how it was affecting us and whether we'd be willing to talk to one of her colleagues from ABC Perth. She was aghast at the situation and gave us the mobile phone number of the Shire President in case we needed some support from her! We could not have been better provided for!

We said we'd be happy to do the interview, so a little while later we did a Zoom call explaining where we were up to and what our plans were - which at that stage was really just sitting and waiting until we got a call from Esperance Police to say we could come on down.

Chatting to Eliza from the ABC about the latest situation

A small snippet of this interview went out in an afternoon bulletin:

Not long after this we got another call from a different ABC journalist asking for a similar thing but for a national bulletin. And this really was the story for the next couple of days to be honest, as our phone number must have been buzzed around between a couple of different journalists who each got in touch with us a few times to schedule an interview, reschedule something, realise they might be stepping on their colleagues' toes and then changing something again and so on.

 

Arriving in Esperance

Anyway Esperance Police eventually called us and told us there was a facility organised at a local oval where we could stay for the quarantine period. They'd met with supermarkets who were going to be able to deliver food to us, there'd be toilets and showers and so on. All sounded pretty reasonable, and a pretty good outcome considering the situation has only dropped into their laps the night before. We got on our way and headed down towards Esperance where we had to get a covid test at Esperance Hospital. It wasn't a particularly comfortable experience as anyone who's had one would know, and the staff weren't the friendliest either which didn't help things. Quite a contrast to the friendly approach the police had had. But maybe they were a bit stressed out and worried about these SA residents who simply MUST be brimming with all kinds of contagions!

After our first ever covid test! :(

Test done, we headed out towards Newtown Oval, sadly passing many of the shops we really needed to stop at and get our supplies! We even phoned the police asking if we could at least drop in and get a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk, but "No" we had to go straight to the oval. So we did.

We were greeted by another couple of friendly Esperance cops who told us what was going on, basically repeated what the earlier ones had told us on the phone. He said they were looking at getting power and some showers set up, and the council may be providing tea for everyone if people couldn't get food delivered in time. Mim had spoken to a fellow traveller who gave her the number of the local IGA which was delivering some food to the oval shortly, so we got our most essential supplies ordered and they turned up within half an hour.

The 'covid colony' at Esperance!

There were about a dozen vehicles there in total so we got a nice shady spot that still had enough sun for the solar blanket for some of the day, and set up for a long stay.

Honestly, I have to say the Esperance Police, and the supermarkets, really seemed to rise to this occasion and do all they could to make it as unproblematic as possible. While we naturally weren't keen about having to quarantine, especially given there's no way we had the virus, they were clearly trying to do the best they could by providing a facility we could stay in rather than having to be out of pocket for a situation that wasn't our fault.

Somewhere in this time we had another call from the ABC about organising a time to have a live cross with ABC Melbourne's breakfast program the following morning. Also out of the blue came a Facebook message from a journalist from Kalgoorlie who'd spotted my Facebook group post and wanted to do a phone interview tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately soon after this, things took yet another twist and turn. About 5:30pm, the police summoned everyone to a meeting advising that the Health Department had advised that the facility we were in, after all, wasn't going to be suitable, because we'd all be using communal toilets and showers. They had been given three options to pass onto us all:

1. Return to South Australia
2. Quarantine for 14 days in a place of our own choosing and at our own expense
3. If neither option was possible, apply to the WA Government for a financial hardship assistance program where we might be able to get free hotel quarantine

Also we needed to decide pretty soon and let them know what each of us would be doing as the facility would be closed by about lunchtime the next day.

Wow! Needless to say everyone was pretty shocked, to have gone from feeling safe and starting to settle in, to suddenly having the rug pulled out from under us and now basically being on our own! 

Mim got onto her parents who suggested a couple of holiday homes they knew the owners of, one in Albany (about 500km west), and another in Busselton (about 700km west). While they sounded promising, in the end things didn't work out so Mim's parents decided to move out of their house in Perth, stay in their camper van at Mim's brother's house in Perth, and we could stay in the house. This was a great option and gratefully welcomed, as it would mean a full house, a yard and room to get things done. Also there'd be people nearby who could drop food off if needed, as well as supermarkets who could do home delivery if needed. So Mim told the police our plans while the boys and I played a bit of cricket on the oval while we could.

Tuesday November 17

First up was our Skype interview with ABC Melbourne. We got up about 4:30am for a 5am interview given it was being run out of Melbourne who are a few hours ahead. This is a screen recording so there's a bit of delay here and there.

An early morning sunrise in Esperance

That done, I phoned the Kalgoorlie journalist and gave him the run-down on what had happened. By this stage we'd told the story so many times we were getting more comfortable with the key dates / times, as well as being more settled with our own feelings on the matter. When the paper came out (see later down this post), it was a pretty balanced coverage of our thoughts.

 

We then thanked the cops for their efforts under pretty challenging circumstances and headed out of town. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The instructions the cops had given us for our return journey was that we had to drive straight through, only stopping for fuel, necessary food and rest if needed, and if so to wear 'full PPE'. I wasn't too sure exactly what this meant so erred on the side of safety when fuelling up before moving on.

Full PPE (other than the shoes!)

 

The Kalgoorlie journalist had asked for a photo of us with our
caravan setup, so we stopped and did this one

The drive was long and not particularly interesting. We cut through the bottom corner of the Wheatbelt region, and we could certainly see why it was so named! A bit like Eyre Peninsula, there was wheat as far as the eye could see!

 

Along the way we got a request for another update on our travels from a different ABC journalist, so pulled over here to do a quick Skype call.

The kids decided to decorate their masks!

We got to Narrogin for tea which was just service station pies, but they were nice enough. I felt pretty self-conscious walking through a country town with a face mask, and through the day when we stopped I asked people about how they were feeling about it all. People were fine, and were pretty understanding of us wearing masks when they understood our situation. The only odd thing we had in Narrogin as we were leaving town was a ute with a couple of old blokes was opposite us at a T-junction. They turned out and to their right (our left) in front of us, and the guy in the passenger seat just stared at our number plate as his mate slowly drove around the corner and off down the road. It was almost comical watching the intense stare and the head smoothly pivoting to stay locked onto our plate while his car moved round the corner!

Tea in Narrogin

We ended up getting to Perth about 8:45pm after a pretty long day's drive - about 700km and 12 hours in the car, including stops.

Wednesday November 18 - Friday November 27

Well this was a pretty quiet time naturally! We couldn't leave the house so it was a chance to catch our breath, catch up on sleep, catch up on school work and business work, do some washing, and enjoy living in a house again for the first time since Townsville (in June).

We had some coffee beans dropped around to us on our first morning which was lovely (thanks Lynette!), Mim's mum had done a bit of shopping for us (thanks Mum!), and on a couple of occasions friends and family visited us out the front and we had a socially-distanced catch up through the front door or front window! The police visited us three times throughout our quarantine to confirm we were all still there and hadn't 'flown the coop'.

Among other things we did: 

 

The kids had new books to read!

Mim did some baking. Oh the luxury of having an oven again!

I washed the caravan. Before...

... and after

Matt had a ball mowing the back lawn on the ride-on mower

We did a 'wasgij' - if you've never done one they're so much fun! It's like a jigsaw puzzle, except the picture on the box is only a CLUE as to what you have to construct. In this case we had to construct a 180 degree opposite view of the one shown on the box. Very tricky!

Boys made some lemonade

Aunty Esther brought around some quarantine presents! Thanks!

We tuned in to Brighton's meeting

Bek did some rock art

Pretty snazzy eh?!

Matt played with cars - as usual!

... and I even got some time to read a few books myself!

 

Tuesday 24th was a day to remember - our day 11 covid test! This meant we were allowed to drive out on the road and go to hospital! It was actually quite a novelty to see the neighbourhood for the first time and lift our eyes beyond our quarantine facility. We can have some empathy with our poor Victorian friends who've been stuck in self-quarantine for months with only brief outings allowed!

 

 

 

Saturday November 28 - Thursday December 3

Yay, out of quarantine! Mim and I did a dance up the street at exactly midnight in our pyjamas when our quarantine period expired! Thankfully I hope no-one was watching!

Mim's parents moved back in during Saturday, and in the evening we went to Gosnells' Ecclesial prizegiving. This too was a novelty, being in a hall for the first time since March and seeing people. We'd moved on from the whole drama of the quarantine mess before we got to Perth and were pleased to be out and about, but it seemed lots of people had either seen us on the news or heard us on the radio, and each had their own anecdote of their surprise to see / hear our faces. So we had to recount the story a few times and how things had changed since the version they saw. Of course we didn't know which version they'd seen, we did several interviews but didn't know what happened with some of them, or whether the footage we'd seen used was the only footage used from those interviews or whether other parts may have appeared in different broadcasts etc. 

Sunday we had a family lunch out which was lovely with Mim's parents and Ben and Esther, who came back for the afternoon. We also had a visit from Hevel (Mim's cousin) and his kids.

Ben, Hevel and Esther catching up Sunday afternoon Nov 29

Our kids with Hevel's kids (second cousins) and Johannes (Ben and Esther's son - so first cousin)

Monday 30th I got the car serviced so I was out all day. Tuesday I was working on some electrical problems in Mim's parents' campervan. Mim went out for lunch with Karen.

Mim went out for lunch with Karen Tuesday 1 December

while in the evening we caught up with Ben and Esther and Johannes again

Wednesday Dec 2 we visited Josh and Lynette for the evening
and had a heap of fun riding on their 'Segway's!
Here they are with their kids Luc and Laila.

I'd been to the doctor and sonographer over the past few days to get my right shoulder looked at. It was first a bit sore after cracking our new whip on our first visit to Mataranka back in September. That's not unusual as it was a new motion, but the slight uncomfortableness continued through Darwin, Kakadu, Alice Springs and across to Perth, so I got an ultrasound which showed some 'subacromial bursitis', which sounds like some inflammation of the bursa, which apparently is like a cushion in the shoulder joint. It will apparently go down over time so I just have to take it easy or get a cortisol injection if it gets too bad.

Somewhere during the first part of this week, we finally received a copy of the Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper which contained the article they'd put together from the phone interview we'd done while in Esperance. We were very happy with how they'd covered what we'd said, which leads onto this little musing.

It's interesting to look back on that flurry of media activity and how what we said was represented, and it's given me a bit of a different appreciation of how the media works. As best as I can remember, we did the face-to-face interview at the border, a Zoom call from Norseman, a Skype live from Esperance with ABC Breakfast, I think two other Skype / Zoom / phone calls with ABC journalists, and a phone call with the Kalgoorlie Miner. There were also a number of other logistical calls, some of which also included minor updates on our progress.

The live cross we did with ABC Breakfast Melbourne was played in full, and the Kalgoorlie Miner report appeared to be printed almost verbatim from what I said on the phone (almost to the extent of 'umm's and 'err's!). However the other interviews we did were used as part of news bulletins where only a very small portion of what we said was used. And of course that's probably no surprise if you take a moment to consider it - a TV or radio news story might only be a few minutes long, so in this limited window they clearly have to do some vigourous culling of material. This means there's a real risk the context may suffer.

For example we might say "We understand how difficult it must be to try to plan what to do with all these travellers, but it's very frustrating not knowing what we're supposed to do". If only the second half of the sentence is used, it might present us as a bunk of cranky pants who are annoyed at these irritating WA people. While I don't think we were ever misrepresented that badly, when I look at the snippets which were used in the news bulletins it seems that most of the time they used the 'pithy' comments or 'provocative' thoughts on a subject, even if those comments were part of a broader, more moderate context.

For me, this has been a really valuable exercise, because this is the first time there's been such a concentration of attention on us from the media, where we've done multiple interviews through multiple channels, the output of which has appeared in multiple different mediums. And in all likelihood this will never happen again. So there's a really important learning for me, looking at what's been reported and what I know we said.

What that tells me is that, no matter how much we may trust a particular news outlet (and in this case it was the ABC who I have no problem with), understand that what you hear, see or read is almost certainly not the full story, particularly from TV and radio news bulletins. These are so time-constrained that what they report simply cannot be the whole of the story on the subject - it's going to be a quick overview of what's happened before they move onto something else before their time is up. It's possible a newspaper may have more room to provide a fuller picture than a snippet in a TV or radio bulletin. In our case, the Kalgoorlie Miner is a small paper and this was probably a scoop for them so they gave it plenty of coverage. A larger paper may not be a heap better but would almost certainly have more capacity than TV or radio.

But don't just assume that because you read or hear something in the media, even from an outlet you trust, that it's a perfect representation of what the people in the story actually believe. If you really want to find out for sure, do your own research, ask your own questions and form your own conclusions. Which of course is exactly true with religion. Don't just take someone else's word for it, or assume that a snippet you heard once upon a time is the best yardstick for forming a full opinion on the subject and must be everything there is to know.

-- Greg