A visit to Mundaring Weir and Piney Lake When I was a boy, one of the occasional picnic destinations my parents treated me to was Mundaring Weir. This is located on the Helena River in the Darling Escarpment east of Perth. Mundaring is a small town on the Great Eastern Highway which leads to Kalgoorlie and the eastern states.
We went there with the younger members of our family yesterday. Mundaring has changed significantly since I was last there. It used to be ramshackle and untidy. Now it is the opposite. It has become fashionable, and lovingly restored by the trendies. I would venture to say it is one of the most attractive rural towns in the state. To the credit of the innumerable redevelopers there seems to have been a unified approach to creating an architectural style which is actually appealing and with a distinctive character suitable for our climate. It looked the sort of place I wouldn't mind living in. Too late now though because the prices of real estate have gone through the roof.
Mundaring Weir is the principal tourist attraction in the area and is a short drive south from the townsite - maybe two or three km distant. For the stranger, finding it is to a degree trial and error. Some of the road signs seem to have been designed by a person with dyslexia.
The weir is maintained by the State Government's water utility. Click for their improvable website
here.The weir was built in the late 19th century to provide water to the Kalgoorlie goldfields 600km inland. Most Western Australian school children have had drummed into them at some stage in their education process that the engineer-in-charge was
C.Y. O'Connor. Water had begun to be pumped eastward, but had not quite reached Kalgoorlie when he totally stressed out. He rode his horse into the ocean near South Fremantle and put a revolver to his head.
The weir structure seems smaller than I remember as a child. Everything seemed bigger then. There is a public walkway across it which is still a thrill to traverse. The almost perpendicular drop at the centre of the spillway is still as breathtaking as ever. Given that last year was the driest on record there was a surprising level of water behind the weir - it was actually pretty full.
When the weir used to overflow, great crowds of people used to flock from Perth and Fremantle to marvel at the spectacle of a snow-white sheet of water descending to the new head of the parched Helena River. With climate change, I'm not sure that we will ever see that particular waterway flow again.
One of the reasons for our visit yesterday was to see if we could find some boulders we had seen in a new book titled
Old Fremantle Childhood. (Editor John Dowson.) It's a collection of photographic images taken by a Fremantle photographer Arnold Beste between 1905 and 1916. On page 28 there is a picture of his wife and children posing by a boulder with the weir in the background. We were going to recreate the pose. Alas we were unsuccessful. We think we identified the spot, but the boulder was missing because it had mostly been blasted to smithereens by some unimaginative garden landscaper in the past.
These days the picnic areas are a bit barren, and embarrassingly crude by international tourist standards. There was a man yesterday driving around spraying herbicide on anything which looked like it was a weed. I hate that sort of environmentally unconscious management practice.
There are a lot of kangaroos in the area. They crap everywhere. We saw about a dozen animals yesterday. They will of course nibble on the poisoned weeds. There were indications they nibble on other things too. There is a large rose garden in the picnic area and every bush has been unattractively enclosed with bird-cage wire. There are also quite a few other exotic plants from a bygone era when it was fashionable to plant them. Some very nice oaks took my eye, and there is a magnificent
Cedrus atlantica glauca near the foot of the weir.
I took a photo of the Atlantic cedar with the very tall chimney of the Number One Pumping Station in the background. The rare cedar is in fine condition, but the chimney has a definite southward lean on it.
There is a very nice olde style and well patronised pub adjacent to the weir. Also a youth hostel. We have been recently thinking about signing up with the Youth Hostel Movement again. The one at Mundaring reminded me of the bad old days of youth hostels - spartan and with signs indicating that a stern, uncompromising warden will have no hesitation in enforcing strict rules.
We cooked some sausages on a free gas barbecue in the weir picnic ground. Then we decided to move on. We visited a new (for me) lookout on the southern side of the Helena Valley. A large steel and timber structure which must have cost a fortune to construct. There are signs extolling the hypothetical indigenous significance of the area and some wooden American Indian style totem poles. The platform provides a view northwest to the weir below. I took a photo of that vista too.
Hitting the road, we came home a different way through another small and pleasant trendyised escarpment village called Armadale. Then it was back down onto the coastal plan in the direction of Fremantle and home.
En route we called in at the Piney Lakes Reserve in Melville. There was yet another man spraying herbicides, then he stopped got down on his knees and appeared to be praying towards Mecca.
Elsewhere in the reserve some teenagers with trailbikes were ripping through the bush as hard as they could go. We also saw a few people in the nature reserve with dogs. They're supposed to keep them on a leash, but of course they never do.
We wanted to check out the frog and tadpole situation. There was almost no water in the lakes. The place seemed almost sterile. No frog sounds, which there should have been, and noticeably no flying insects of any type. My guess is that someone has been spraying insecticide for mosquitoes and midges.
Adjacent to this lake is a very expensive dreamland structure called an "environmental centre." It features various white elephant "environmentally friendly" things like solar panels on street lights which few people can afford because they cost a fortune and are environmentally unfriendly to manufacture. We took up the invitation on a sign and had a look inside the large building. No one was on duty, but there were a number of glossy, rather useless pamphlets we helped ourselves to.
Four leaflets on Melville "wetlands" published by the City of Melville, our local civil authority, claim there is "evidence" of Aboriginal usage of them for the past 38,000 years. This is a subject I know something of from my past academic work. Unfortunately the claim can't be substantiated. Someone's been dreaming.
© MMVII Paul R. Weaver.
About the writerCheck out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words.
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