Brookton Highway, Western Australia.
Scale is an interesting thing, I look at a map of Australia in the same way I view one of the UK. Coming from a small island has the effect of bringing everything closer together, perception of distance varies country to country, someone once told me an anecdote about a British tourist from Salisbury in America having a chat with a man who knew a family from Birmingham and then inquired to whether he knew them at all, perhaps not realizing that these two places are in fact quite far apart from a British perspective. To the American however a 30-minute trip to the post box and a 3-hour trip to the shops was the norm so it is quite conceivable that Birmingham to Salisbury is ‘down the road’
It’s only when you get out and start driving in Australia that it all becomes very clear that the apparent short distance between locations actually take all day to reach and you have not covered much of that map you were patiently studying. Sat in a pub in New South Wales a British backpacker working behind the bar was talking to a local about an unexpected two-day road trip she had just driven. Asking “How many K’s ya do?”, “400” she replied genuinely pleased with her recent journey into the unknown, “ha! That’s not a road trip”. On a recent trip from Perth to Hyden with my girlfriend, home of the ‘Wave Rock’ a place that pretty much does what it says on the tin; a rock in the shape of a wave, created from 60 million years of weathering so that coach loads of tourists can pretend to surf for the cameras. The map made it seem as though it would be a Bath to Bristol, or perhaps a London to Reading type trip, but in fact took 5 hours to get reach although with London traffic painfully filtering onto the M4 off the Chiswick roundabout and crawling past Heathrow it is quite possible for that trip to take as long. This is a relatively short distance too, Adelaide the next biggest city can just be driven to in a day, Darwin roughly three, I am beginning to feel the need to think big.
Along the way, driving the Brookton Highway I spotted a small chair with a name written on it in bold marker pen but kept on driving thinking nothing more about it. Then not too much further there was another, 100 yards down the road from that there was another one, then another all in front of trees, all with different names on different kinds of chairs. I decided I had to stop and photograph them. At first I thought that this was a local memorial to the victim of a road accident, there were just too many chairs and surely such a black spot should of been dealt with long ago. With some of the chairs photographed I continued the journey to Wave Rock and finished the trip I had underestimated, vowing to find out more about the mysterious chairs when I got back.
Stopping for a short break and a re-fuel in the small town of Corrigin that had two main tourism draws; holding the world record for the most ‘Dogs in Ute’s’ previously held by the state of Victoria, and a dog cemetery on the edge of town. I’m thinking the latter probably exists due to the amount of exasperated dogs kicking the bucket inside scorching hot pick-ups. The petrol station was however selling all sorts of doggy cemetery memorabilia including fridge magnets, key rings and the obligatory bumper sticker. All a bit lost on me that a canine graveyard is a sole source of tourism, possibly because I am English and we would give a pet Hamster a state funeral on the back of a gun carriage whilst reading ‘Stop all the clocks’ given half the chance, such places are common place alongside conventional human ones. Not to detract too much from the small hamlet’s clever tourism pulls we pushed on to Wave Rock and spent the night in the first campsite we could find. Arriving later than expected but with enough daylight left to set up and even get a quick look at the wave, just 100 yards from the campsite, it was time to eat, and more importantly, drink.
I have noticed many things in Australia that seem ten years behind, look at any number of ‘.com.au’ websites to see what I mean, internet shopping has a lot of catching up to do and is almost non-existent, remarkably Amazon remains known only as a large South American river, you could of course argue that this is a good thing. They are not behind however when it comes to beer bottle technology or should I say ‘stubby’ as they are known in Australia where no bottle shall remain unopened. At an AFL (Aussie Rules football) grand final party I saw a man using a cap that also doubled as a bottle opener neatly incorporated into the hats peak, in itself an interesting idea though redundant as it was only useful in opening those annoyingly stubborn European imported brews. Australian bottled beer all have what looks like a standard top but in fact are screw caps, brilliant and simple why don’t they all do that. Second of course, and what no self-respecting Aussie bloke should be without is the ubiquitous ‘Stubby Holder’ resembling a miniature bottle-shaped wet suit and made from the same neoprene material. All to keep your warm hands from heating up your drink before it turns into that old favorite of British jibes ‘a warm beer’. Incidentally, having sat in the back of the car all day, our beers were definitely over room temperature. That didn’t stop me having a couple whilst cooking sausages with a cake tin, bought because we forgot to bring a frying pan.
In Perth the following evening I turned to Google and queried the chairs on the off-chance there would be a little more info on them. It would seem that they are a mystery to the entirety of Western Australia, the only coverage was a couple of blog posts dated a few years ago by people who regularly traverse the highway. The only headway made was in discerning that the people behind it are aptly name ‘The Brookton Chair Shufflers’ due to the chairs moving position, disappearing and reappearing along this stretch of outback road. Claiming that it could be some sort of Art installation, maybe Brookton has their very own ‘Banksy’. The chairs remain a bit of a mystery.
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