Anyone who has seen the movie (or read the book) "Red Dog" will know the story of The Pilbara Wanderer, a dog who hitchhiked all over Western Australia (and is rumoured to have made it to Japan and back). This amazing red kelpie is immortalised by a statue, erected by his many friends, at you drive into the coastal port town of Dampier.
Dampier is an iron ore and salt port town. There is also a huge off-shore development of North West Shelf natural gas which is also exported on huge gas tankers. A number of petroleum companies including Woodside, BP, Shell and Chevron jointly extract and export the various petrochemicals which are mined 135km offshore and piped to the processing plant near Dampier. We called in to the Visitor Centre for the North West Shelf Gas Program. We saw an interesting DVD which showed how the various components and gases are extracted. The extraction plant is built on over 200ha of land.
Nearby Deep Gorge has many thousands of indigenous pectoglyphs, some dating back 30,000 years. These are artworks "picked" out of the outer layers of the rock. We went for a walk to see some but we must have taken a wrong path and missed them. However the Visitor Centre of the gas plant has some replicas of pectoglyphs found during the site development. Something to put on the list for next time.
The landscape is littered with iron ore - huge mounds of broken rocks. Our route south from Port Hedland took us though mostly flat country with the occasional jump up or rocky outcrop. The main iron ore mining sites are further inland in the Hammersley Range.
We've had to stay in Karratha, about 15kms from Dampier. This is a mining town which is really going ahead with development everywhere. Just outside of Dampier we drive past the Dampier Salt development. The sea water is concentrated in a number of ponds in the bay and is finally pumped into evaporation ponds where the salt crystals are mined fro. We stopped off at the Dampier Salt Lookout to get an overview of this project.
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