G’day,
How you going? I’m pretty chuffed here. I’m happy to be sending another letter, of course, but this one is special. This marks the one year (and a bit) anniversary of the start of Letters From the Road.
I honestly did not know how my little letter writing project was going to turn out, whether I would stick with it, whether anyone would read.
As to whether I’ve stuck with it, this is letter number 45, if that’s any indication. And most have been more than just brief interludes to say hello. Those 45 letters have included more than 105,000 words. Decent!
As for people reading the letters, the magic of analytics tells me that the letters have been viewed approximately 6,000 times. I’m sure about half of those views are my mom, but hey, I’ll take them.
I’d like to think that I would be writing these stories regardless of whether anyone was reading, but it certainly makes things easier knowing that there’s someone out there, joining me.
So whether you’ve read every one of the 100,000 words, or if this is your first letter, thank you. It means a lot.
We’re over two months into the road trip at this point and there’s only one month to go, so we’re into the home stretch. There’s still plenty more to come, though, before we make it back to Melbourne, and I hope you’ll continue to stick around to find out what happens.
And if you’re enjoying, why not share with some friends?
Or if you’re not a subscriber, give it a crack.
Without further mucking around, let’s get to your letter, this one coming to you from Rottnest Island, the place where you will find the Happiest Animal in the World.
Hooroo!
Luke
6 December 2019 - Freo and Rottnest Island
The rottenest.The rats nest.
The rattan knit.
That’s where we went today.
In 1696, a Dutch sea captain named Willem de Vlamingh stopped on an island while exploring the west coast of Australia. He liked the island, calling it a paradise on earth’. And yet, he called the island ‘Rottenest’, which means “rat’s nest” in Dutch, because the place appeared to be infested with large rats.
Someone shortened the name, something Australians tend to do whenever they can, by getting rid of an ‘e’ and just calling it Rottnest.
The large rats in reality were quokkas. They’re not rats, they’re possibly the cutest little animals you’ve ever seen.
Not exactly like that, actually. More like this:
Quokkas are like miniature kangaroos, little smiling balls of fur, only more adorable. You could imagine finding something like them in a Studio Ghibli movie, playing the part of the sidekick who talks too much and is a bit stupid, but everyone loves anyway.
They’re everywhere on Rottnest, lazily wandering around, grazing for food and stopping to pose for photos on every possible occasion.
Ok, that’s certainly enough cuteness for one letter. Too much of a good thing can make you ill, like that time my brother ate an entire tub of fake whipped cream called Cool Whip, and it made him sick. I don’t think he’s touched the stuff since.
Let’s get to some cold hard facts instead, as a bit of a digestive.
There are an estimated 10,000 quokkas on Rottnest Island. Most people think they live exclusively on the island, but that’s not true. There are 4,000 across the rest of Australia, numbers that were much larger before they had to deal with dingoes, foxes, feral cats and the like.
Quokkas are related to Australia’s other, more well known pouched marsupials - kangaroos, koalas and wallabies. Which raises the question, can you just imagine a small smiling ball of fur with an even tinier smiling ball of fur sticking its head out of its pouch?
Sorry.
While quokkas are less well known than Australia’s other animals, they did have a moment, becoming an internet sensation in 2017 when Roger Federer visited Rottnest Island and took a selfie of himself with some quokkas.
So aside from beautiful beaches, the likes of which there are many on the mainland, add in the quokkas and you can see what makes Rottnest Island special.
It certainly hooked us. Our plan was to make a day of it. Jump on an early ferry, gawk at the quokkas, and then take some rental bikes on a circumnavigation of the island. We’d then lightly harass the quokkas some more, have a sausage roll, and catch the ferry back to Fremantle. It had all the makings for a memorable time.
Doing some cycling just seemed like the best pick of the options to see the island. There are hop-on hop-off buses. There are guided tours. There are bloody segways. Or you can rent bikes and pedal your way around, stopping wherever and whenever you want.
We’re bicycle people, we thought. Let’s cycle from one end of the island to the other, then back again in a giant loop. We’ll see the whole island, stop off for some snorkelling, some lunch - what an excellent way to spend the day!
Turns out, it was one of those times when, as parents, we push our kids just a little too far. You know those days. Like when it’s midnight and you’re coming home from having dinner at a friend’s house, and the kids are feral and about to start throwing rocks at you, and/or they’re passed out on the ground like quokkas, who also have a habit of plonking down wherever they are at the moment to have a snooze. And you think, ‘maybe we shouldn’t have kept the kids out so late.’
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
All transportation on the island is either biking or walking or by one of the shuttle buses, so we opted for the expensive choice of riding bikes. And of course we decided to take the longest route possible on the Island.
The promotional materials tell you the route is 22 kilometres (13.67 miles), which isn’t too bad. Possibly a bit long for us, not having ridden bikes since February.
The promotional materials make no mention of flies. Our old friends, the flies, who’ve largely left us alone since maybe Ningaloo, were back with a vengeance. We had no fly nets, no bug spray.
The promotional materials probably do mention that it’ll be hot, to take plenty of water, all that shifting liability bullshit. After about 10am, when you weren’t right on the coast and the wind was light, and there was zero shade other than under your bike helmet, it was kinda brutal.
Speaking of liability, just the other day I read that some guy hurt himself diving into the water, and sued the island because they failed to post a sign saying to not dive, so he assumed it was ok. I wish the world worked that way, where if anything goes wrong there is always someone else to blame.
So the flies sucked, it was wicked hot at times, and after we had an excellent snorkel at Little Salmon Bay, Henry quit, and Oscar quit. Henry just stopped in the middle of a long hill and said ‘I’m done’, with a flustered look in his eyes… his whole body really.
He didn’t even have it in him to get angry, which he is wont to do.
Stopping with Henry, I realised that I hadn’t seen Katie and Oscar in a long time, so I turned my bike around and went to look for them.
Oscar I found sitting under a really large bush with Katie.
At that point we had not even reached the far end of the island in order to turn around and head back to the port.
We’d biked just shy of 10 kilometres, so we were faced with an awkwardly long bike ride to get home, whether we turned back or continued on. When you’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere, with a couple of kids who have given up the goat to the windless heat of an island trip gone awry, is when you think to yourself, ‘maybe we should have gone on the segway tour…’.
Ok, probably not that extreme, but we were at least questioning our parental choices.
Even when surrounded by tiny furry creatures that are always smiling at you, this is not the spot you want to be in.
We’ll segue now, from quokkas to quods. If you’re keeping score at home, the quokka is not only a cute and friendly little creature, but also, at 23 points, a cracker of a Scrabble word. Quod is not as fruitful, but will still net you 14 points.
It’s likely there was a limestone quarry (18 points) on the island as well, but we’ll stick with quod for now. Quod is the old timey British word for prison.
I did lots of research for this letter, wanting to give some background on Rottnest Island, or Wadjemup as it is known to the Indigenous peoples who lived on the island for thousands of years until around 7,000 years ago, when sea levels rose and turned it into the island it is today.
There’s part of me that wishes that there is nothing to tell, because that’d be easier. Focus on the story of our bike ride gone wrong, or on the sentiment of Tourism Australia: “When it’s time to relax and recharge, swap the rush of the city for an idyllic escape on Rottnest Island.”
Rottnest: Place of gorgeous beaches and restaurants, fur seals and quokkas, and a segway tour that they say is a ripper (if you don’t mind looking like a jerk rolling around on a flagpole with wheels).
All that is very nice, but what I find most interesting about Rottnest is that it is a conflicted place, more so than any I have visited in Australia. That conflict lies between the history and the present.
Once you take your sunnies off, you can see that it is a poster child for Australia’s colonial missteps, abuses, the attempts to forget and attempts to remember, all on a tiny island that you could - hypothetically - ride your bike around in an afternoon.
Some horrible things happened on Rottnest. How horrible?
"You can't imagine running a tourist business over somewhere like Auschwitz,” is how the island’s Aboriginal heritage officer put it.
That takes the gloss off of the tourist brochures, doesn’t it?
In 1838, a boat arrived on Rottnest Island and amongst those on board were six Indigenous men who would become the first prisoners on the island. These new prisoners, and those who arrived after them, essentially put in the hard labout to built the prison from scratch. Because until they arrived, there was nothing on the island aside from an early homestead.
They eventually built a series of buildings called the Quod that were used as the main accommodation for prisoners.
The first prisoners were all Indigenous men up until the early 1900’s, when European settlers began to be sent there as well. Indigenous men were sent to the island for all manner of crimes, from petty to serious, whether they knew or understood the laws of the colonists or not.
Conditions in the Quod were harsh. There was no heating, rooms were crowded, and the men mostly slept on the dirt floors. Many men died from sickness, measles or an influenza epidemic.
In addition to poor conditions, the prisoners were subject to cruel treatment by the man in charge, Henry Vincent. He was well known for hanging prisoners to make examples of them, for the gallows that he set up, and for his judicious use of the cat o’ nine tails.
The prison on Rottnest closed for the first time in 1849, mainly because of complaints against Henry Vincent. When it reopened a few years later, Vincent was again put in charge.
More complaints in 1883 led to the Western Australian Parliament to announce plans to close the prison on Rottnest, again. It took 19 years for it to be “officially” closed, a meaningless designation because it was 29 years before the last prisoner finally left. Over 4,000 prisoners made their way through the island prison.
Sadly, change happens slowly on Rottnest.
In 1907, the government developed a scheme to transform the island from an Aboriginal penal settlement to a recreation and holiday destination. This started the island down the path to what it has become today. The Quod became tourist accommodation. There was a wide grassy area set aside for camping called Tentland.
The history of Rottnest faded over time, and the island became known primarily as a lovely place to go for a getaway. A whole generation spent their summer holidays in a room at the Quod and tenting up at the campground, without knowing that they were sleeping in a former jail cell or on top of a burial ground.
Turns out, Tentland sat on top of the unmarked graves of over 370 Aboriginal prisoners. The first indication of this came in 1970, when human remains were found when a contractor was digging a sewer line for the island’s golf course. This discovery was inconvenient, so the remains were reburied and construction continued.
In 1992, 22 years after that discovery near the golf course and years of subsequent discoveries, a small area of Tentland was identified as a cemetery and fenced off from use. A year later, more remains were found. Investigations started and ended with the government recognising that the island saw more deaths of Aboriginals in custody than any place in Australia.
It took another 15 years before Tentland was closed completely to campers in 2007.
The Quod, a place with darkness and death built into the foundations, finally closed in 2018, a year before we came to the island. As it was, we didn’t even know it was there when we visited.
Like I said before, change happens slowly on Rottnest Island.
There is hope that the island’s history will be fully acknowledged and the people who passed through the prison and died there are properly memorialised. The Aboriginal community and the Goverment of Western Australia are leading an effort to determine how best to do this.
Meanwhile, tourism development continues unabated while this is happening in the background. A new luxury resort is under construction. And people continue to come, over half a million per year, coming to see the quokkas, to sit on the beaches, and for the car-free roads that are perfect for cycling.
Perfect, just not for us.
Faced with two boys down and several kilometres of bitumen between us and our boat back to Fremantle, we needed a plan.
Walking was out of the question, as it would take us several hours of trudging through the heat to get back to civilisation. For some, it might make sense to carry your kids when they’ve decided they can no longer go on. Ours were too big for this sort of thing, and even if we could carry them, we had four bikes to deal with. The bikes also meant that the shuttle bus would turn us away.
I imagined commandeering segways from a couple of hapless passers by - and it’s likely they’d thank me for it, saving them from the further humiliation of riding the things - but I couldn’t bring myself to it.
I rode while I thought, heading to a turn off that would shortcut us to the other side of the island, and back to town. I wanted to see how far it was, and whether it was feasible to ride it back home. And while I waited, something amazing happened.
Here’s the great thing: I waited for Henry at the shortcut turnoff that cuts to the other side of the island then circles back toward home, and he eventually showed up and rode on.
After some time in the shade, half sausage roll and a banana (both of which contributed to waking up a friendly little quokka who was sleeping under the bush) Oscar rode on as well.
Both boys then finished without further issue. I hope their grit and determination is for real.
Here’s the thing about kids. They’re capable of so much that we often give them credit for, especially in today’s world of helicopter and snow plow parenting. They might not do things in the same way you’d imagined, or as fast as you wanted, and they might not show the staunch determination of an endurance athlete, but they’ll also likely surprise you.
We did not plan for our island outing to be a test of will for the boys, but you never know what’ll happen when you head out on a mini adventure. I look at times like that as good ones, as I am a firm believer that kids need a little adversity in their lives.
They are learning experiences as valuable as anything you pick up in a classroom or learn watching YouTube.
It’s been 185 years since the first prisoners arrived on Rottnest, and for a large part of that time the people involved with the island have been ignoring the reality of the place, like a quokka asleep under a bush. But with the positive signs that things are changing, maybe Rottnest can ride on as well, and find a way to strike a balance between the past and present that’ll make it truly someplace special.
We’ll certainly remember it.
In your next letter, more Freo and the first ever recipe from the road!