Historical Carnarvon

Church today at a small AOG church .  We doubled the congregation when we walked in.  It was nice to be able to walk there from the caravan park, and all the children did a great job sitting still and keeping quiet during the service.

The couple who led the service are from Tasmania and have sold everything and are travelling around Australia helping in churches where God leads them.  They've been to a few aboriginal communities in south Australia and Grant had a great talk to David, who has some exciting stories to tell.

Afterwards we went for a walk through town and back to the van for lunch.  It's still pretty windy, and the tall palm trees lining the road were bending crazily

Lunch and a lazy afternoon, then we walked down to the waterfront and made up our own historical tour of Carnarvon.    There are a few older buildings here and we found a plaque about Sir Charles Kingsford Smith.  He started a transport company, called Gascoyne Transport, near here in 1926, working to raise money to buy his first plane. This was before he became famous for flying across the Pacific Ocean (I think).  He and his partner offered a reliable trucking service to transport wool and other goods as an alternative to the camel trains that were then the only option for stations in central Australia.  They later sold the transport business and used the proceeds along with their savings to buy their first plane.

St George’s church

We passed the 100 year old St George church, the old union bank that is now the ANZ, and the old post office which is now a cafe.  We also saw the war memorial with wilted wreaths from Remembrance Day, and a remembrance wall for the HMAS Sydney.  This was a light cruiser that was sunk 150 miles south west of Carnarvon on 19 November 1941 by a German auxiliary cruiser named Kormoran, masquerading as a Dutch vessel.  The Sydney asked for their secret call signal and the German ship knew they were discovered and torpedoed the 645 man ship.   The Sydney  subsequently sunk taking all lives.  Before they went down, however, the Sydney fired into the other's engine room and blocked it's escape, and the German ship also sunk, killing about 80 of the 400 man ship.  The others were picked up out of the water over the next few days.  I think one Sydney body was washed up on Christmas Island and has since been moved from there to be identified by the Navy or someone.  Both wrecks were not recovered until 2008 when an American shipwreck hunter went after it.  He listened to the German account of the incident and found the wreck where they said it would be.  Some people allege there was a Japanese submarine involved, and that there was a wide ranging cover up...  The sinking of the Sydney is the most terrible loss ever suffered by Royal Australian Navy.  Isn't war a terrible thing.

War memorial with the HMAS Sydney wall just behind it

We had a fun, if windy, time, walking along the shore front and across an old tram/train bridge out to Babbage Island where a fancy old train station was sitting, now in the middle of nowhere.  There are a lot of palm trees along the shore front which look very nice.

View to Babbage Island

On the way back we discovered a self cleaning toilet playing music, which the boys found fascinating...

Pancakes and tinned apple for dinner, with rice custard, all a la Grant.  He's excelling himself with the cooking.

Grant has taken off one of the canvas ends of the van to have the flyscreen repaired in the morning, so we set up the little tent and moved the big mattress from the end out for Joseph and Grant to sleep in.  They look very cosy in there.  Dominic was very sceptical that the mattress would fit, but once it went in he wanted to sleep in there too…sorry Dom, no room.

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Vicki