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Published: August 15th 2006
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I did my longest haul of this road trip today, from Albany on the south coast all the way up to New Norcia, about 130km north-east of Perth. I noticed that many of the land divisions here are called shires and I even passed a sign welcoming me to the shire of York, which made me feel strangely at home.
I was an unwilling, and unhappy, accomplice in the death of at least one bird today. The one confirmed killing happened in less than a second - a green object shot in from the right and bounced off the windscreen. I backtracked and found a parrot that was well beyond the stage of being as sick as. Ten minutes later, another bird thudded into the windscreen, but I couldn't find a body so hopefully that one only had a bad headache. I also increased my echidna tally (seeing, not killing) by one.
For accommodation, I'd been advised to stay at the monastery at New Norcia. New Norcia was originally founded in the middle of the 19th century by Benedictine monks from Spain, with the usual missionary aim of converting the locals to Christianity - it's named after Norcia in
Italy, which was St Benedict's birthplace. Its appeal lies in the fact that it is a small slice of the Mediterranean incongruously located in the Australian Outback, with Spanish architecture and olive trees mixing with red dust and flocks of galahs. Separate boys' and girls' schools were inaugurated, but now the schools have long closed, the monk population is at about 15, and the main business of the town is tourism.
I arrived in the middle of the evening so decided to go for the first accommodation I could find, which was the New Norcia Hotel (there was no budget accommodation in the town). This used to be the monastery guest-house. From the outside it looked excellent in the moonlight, with a first-floor terrace (accessible from each of the bedrooms) running the full length of the building. However it wasn't quite as good when I got into the details - for 3 times the cost of staying in an average hostel, I got a single room with a shared bathroom, and beer available in the bar at $8 a pint. The showers contained a remarkable number of cobwebs and the buffet dinner went against all my previous Australian buffet
Bird on a wire
Galah on the slide experiences by only allowing you one visit to the food. Note to self - a collapsing stack of roast beef can spray gravy a prodigious distance. Inevitably, in this far-flung town that's miles away from the backpacker trail, one of the barmaids was from Nottingham.
Though it may not have been the swankiest accommodation ever, the feeling of fading grandeur, of former glories now just a memory, made it worth the money. With no particular wish to see the museum, I walked around the town first thing in the morning, taking photos of all the various buildings, then was back in the car and heading to Cervantes.
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