days 9 & 10 Norseman and Lake Johnston

Norseman is the first WA town to the west of the Nullarbor, around 200 km west of Balladonia. It has a population of 560, one IGA and two service stations, and is the start/end of the Eyre Highway. Driving here from the east, you drive through the beginning of the Great Western Woodland, an incredibly rich ecosystem with 20% of Australia’s known plant species, covering 16 million hectares (40 million acres). 

It also marked the end of the Nullarbor for us.

After more than 1200 km since the last supermarket (Ceduna), we could finally buy an apple and a lettuce! It felt like a wonderland. We had skipped along the edge of the continent, having eaten all our fruit and vegies, camping in new landscapes in the heat and wind, journeying across the country. To arrive in Norseman was exciting!

Of course, we visited the two service stations in town on our hunt for a gas refill. Swap and go was the only option here, too. 

We were aiming for a campsite around 100 km west of Norseman but it was another really hot day. We restocked some necessary vegetable and water supplies before hitting the public pool. It is free for everyone to enjoy and, on this 36 degree day, it was a reprieve from the heat, the perfect place to while away some time. We sat in the shade, ate some lunch, enjoyed a few swims and did some work. A few local kids came by after school for a dip, joining the travellers, with a line of land cruisers, RVs and caravans parked outside. 

Around Norseman, there are enormous granite outcrops emerging from the woods and salt lakes, and we planned on doing some small sections of two famous 4WD tracks on our way up to Kalgoorlie via Coolgardie, the Hyden and Holland Tracks.

We left the pool for our next camp spot: Lake Johnston, a salt lake in a large system of salt lakes. The trees here, eucalyptus salubris, have incredibly smooth, rust coloured bark, striking against the backdrop of pink sand, the white lake and small ochre coloured stones on the ground. The shrubs are gorgeous, with subtle variations of silver, grey and green. 

The local Aboriginal people, the Ngadju have lived in this land for eons before the first white person, explorer Edward John Eyre, interrupted their life and culture in 1841. When you think of it, white people have been here for only a moment. 

While we were here, we visited McDermid Rock, a huge granite monolith affording a wonderful view of the surrounding woodland. There are micro ecosystems on the rock, little oases of moss, lichen and shrubs, with a lone sandalwood tree in one such environment. The view from the top reveals views to Disappointment Rock and Mount Day, and the size of the lake itself. Well worth a visit.

We spent two nights by the lake, battling the increasingly gusty wind each night. It whipped up after 9pm, such that on the first night we re-hitched the trailer at 3am and rearranged our setup to minimise any potential damage. This allowed the wind to slip over the clam shell tent. 

Learning from night one, on our second night we carefully packed everything away before bed and we slept well, even in the gale. 

Lake Johnston set the bar very high for landscapes in WA.