New Norcia, Pt 173, April 3 (pictures)

We got up early at our roadside rest stop after the visit to the Barrecas Winery and drove down to Harvey, a small town on the South Western Highway, the main highway to Perth. We bought breakfast at a local café and stopped by the park to freshen up. The Batmobile Wicked Camper turned a few heads in Harvey, which was much like a small Eastern Washington cattle town, very neat and clean with a park by the railroad. A call to Encom in Perth confirmed that Rob Healy, a MapInfo contact and one of the founders, was still recovering from knee surgery and couldn’t talk with me. So we made a beeline – or as much of one as is possible through Perth’s tortuous highway system – to New Norcia.

New Norcia is essentially a Spanish Benedictine Monastery, founded in 1846 and the only thing like it in Australia. It was established to convert the Aborigines, but European diseases converted most of them into corpses before the effort got very far. So they set up an orphanage to take care of the surviving children. The orphanage evolved into a school and it is now a small religious college. All of this reminded me, of course, of Old Mission San Luis Rey, where I went to college, or “Uni” as they call it here. The monastery is still active and cloistered. A museum, shop and a hotel serve tourists and sells olive oil, preserves, curios and wood fired baked goods, most of which are made at the monastery. The grounds are very bare but birds are abundant there. Bore (well) water, originally used in a vineyard salted up the soil and left it barren but they still have olive trees. We bought a few hot cross buns in anticipation of the coming Easter Holiday, discovered a very nice porter beer, James Squire, while eating lunch at the hotel’s restaurant and left in time to find a camping spot in a proposed National Park east of Perth.

On the way out we stopped to photograph a huge satellite antenna used in America’s space shuttle program just south of the town. The hills there looked very much like Southern California but with gum trees instead of oaks. Our camp site was wonderfully secluded and had some rare birds including a black cockatoo, which I did not get a picture of, some ring-necked lorikeets (called 28’s because of their vocalization) which I had also seen at New Norcia, and a tiny robin that checked out our camp in the morning.