Western Australia is big.
I mean, it's massive.
It encompasses six deserts
and seven climate zones.
It's one third of the entire landmass of Australia.
It's the size of Western Europe.
The Little Sandy Desert - not even the Great Sandy Desert -
is bigger than Bulgaria...
..but the population density is very low.
In London, where I live,
it's 5,592 people per square kilometre.
Here, in Western Australia, it's one...
..and in this particular square kilometre,
that person is me.
Welcome to Bill Bailey's Wild West.
If you think you know Australia, think again...
..because there's an even wilder...
Here we go.
Whoa!
..weirder...
Even the kookaburras are embarrassed.
..and more wonderful version of
the land down under.
I don't think there's anywhere
like this on Earth.
And it's in the west.
There's so much space here.
You could put 13 Britains into West Australia.
Let me take you there.
Imagine a land of giants...
You look like Bill.
Yeah, you look like Luc.
..of alien landscapes...
I mean, where else in the world can you see
a waterfall in the ocean?
Whoa-ho!
..and a bunch of characters you won't find anywhere else on Earth.
Well, if you're Space Gandalf, I'll be... What'll I be? Space Gimli?
HE PLAYS FAST SYNTH GUITAR LICKS
You play so fine!
I know, sounds too good to be true, but it's not.
This is the real Western Australia... Oh, yeah.
..right here. Yeah.
I come in peace.
Because here it is - the most remarkable part of this
Great Southern Land is the western bit.
Who knew?
In our DNA, we want this.
We want to be amongst this.
Western Australia cracks open your soul.
I'm a few hours north of the WA state capital, Perth,
but it feels like I'm on another planet.
The verdant south seems light-years away from this alien land -
the Pinnacles.
It's quite an eerie
and beautiful sight when you first arrive.
There's all kinds of images spring to mind.
The first is of an ancient, fossilised forest,
and the next thing is they look like tombstones.
And they almost look like
they've been placed here in a circle.
There's some kind of intent behind them.
But, of course, the truth is
nobody really knows for sure how they got here.
I mean, there's plenty of theories
that these are actually old tree roots.
The fossilised remains of ancient trees.
And the other theory is that they're plants...
..and that water flowed into the roots of the plants
and, then, carried with it nutrients.
They dried out, the climate changed,
and they formed these strange stone deposits,
these strange pinnacles.
But there's actually another theory, and that's the one I kind of like,
and that is that...
..this area was sacred,
particularly for women.
Men were not allowed in this area.
And men who strayed in
to spy on these women were punished by the gods...
..and turned to stone.
So, what we are, in fact, standing in is a...is a desert filled with
the fossilised ghosts of perverts.
You can still hear them saying,
"Cor! Look at that! She's gorgeous!"
Dirty sods!
BLEEP!
No-no-no!
"The fossilised ghosts of perverts."
You can't say that. Can you say that? I don't know.
Not a bad name for a band, though.
The Pinnacles are the gatekeepers
for one of the most extraordinary drives on the planet.
I'm heading north,
along a coastline that defies imagination.
This part of Western Australia, all the way to Exmouth,
is ancient and exotic,
rich in natural wonders,
with barely a tourist in sight.
It's what the locals call "the big country".
And they live in a big country, so it must be really big.
About ten hours north of the Pinnacles -
so, basically, up the road in WA terms -
is the Ningaloo Coast,
a World Heritage area famed
for its all-star cast of marine life.
We're pulling into Exmouth.
On first impressions, a rather tidy, well-kept place.
Wide boulevards.
Tree-lined avenues.
Palm trees, which attest to the more tropical latitudes we're entering.
This is the place where we can see the reef, the Ningaloo Reef,
and, hopefully, get in the water.
Maybe do a bit of snorkelling.
Maybe even see the thing I've been dreaming about for years.
The whale shark.
And here, on the Ningaloo Reef, is
one of the few places that you can do that in the world.
Whale sharks have always fascinated me.
They're the biggest fish in the world.
Their origins date back 240 million years,
and they're unique -
the sole member of the genus Rhincodon.
But, to me, there's a romantic grandeur about them,
as they glide gracefully through the world's oceans.
Gentle giants. The last of their kind.
If you think, maybe, it's a bit foolhardy swimming with a shark,
they pose no threat to humans.
They're filter feeders,
so they just live on plankton
and small fish -
not bearded comedians.
I can't... I don't know what...
I'm just so excited!
I can't believe it!
Finally getting to do this, after all these years.
A mature whale shark can grow as large as a school bus.
In fact, everything's big round here.
And I've just noticed a giant prawn.
That is magnificent!
I don't think it's to scale,
but it's absolutely anatomically correct.
I mean, what kind of town are you if you don't have a giant prawn?
Before I am immersed in the wonderful world of the whale shark,
I'm off to meet another, more everyday, Australian icon.
I've just got a tip-off
that there's a couple of unsavoury-looking characters
hanging around the campsite, so I'm just going to investigate.
A couple of emus here.
Quite fearsome-looking birds.
They're just wandering around in the street.
Just bumped into them.
I'm keeping my distance a little bit,
because they do have quite a fearsome reputation.
There's been occasions when emus have attacked people.
And they go for your eyes,
so I'm just...
I'm not taking any chances!
We don't have emus wandering round campsites in Britain.
There was quite a famous battle with these birds
in Western Australia in the 1920s.
It became known as the Emu Wars.
What happened was
there was a lot of farmers were trying to grow wheat,
and it was the Depression, and times were hard,
so they didn't want to lose the crop.
And 20,000 emus were migrating through the state,
and, er, they didn't know what to do.
So, what they did, they called in the Australian Army...
..and, er, they tried to get the gunners to come
and, basically, shoot them.
It was straight out of the First World War,
they had these machine guns.
So, anyway, there were 20,000 emus...
..and they started shooting at them,
and then the gun would jam.
And then the emus would run away,
and they'd scatter.
And then they would try and shoot them,
and the emus would sort of split up into groups,
like they were organised.
And, basically, it was a disaster.
There were 20,000 emus,
the...the army,
and they only managed to shoot about a thousand of them.
And the guy in charge was this magnificently-named
Major Gwynydd Purves Wynn-Aubrey Meredith,
and he was in charge of the Australian Army trying
to sort of get rid of these emus.
And by the end of it, he was kind of defeated,
and he said, "If we had a military division
"of the bullet-carrying capacity of these emus,
"they could face any army."
It's a kind of mix of everything, isn't it?
It's like dinosaur feet, a straw hut,
there's this snaky neck, a big dagger beak,
a kind of slightly evil-looking demeanour.
Imagine 20,000 of them bearing down on you.
I mean, even with a machine gun, you'd be like...
BILL BREATHES TREMULOUSLY
I'm with Major Meredith on that one!
I'm lacking a couple of bits of kit,
so I'm just going to have a look here,
see if we can pick some snorkelling gear.
Oh, you see there? Whale shark tours.
This might be the thing.
I don't know whether this is the best model
for this equipment, though, is it?
Someone's transfixed,
like some kind of zombie.
I mean, look, that's not the best...
"Yeah, I love snorkelling. It's great.
"Really, really loving this snorkel."
I could do a better job. I could do a better job than that.
Like...
Or like...
"Wow!" Something like that.
Come on!
Just work it a bit.
Idiot.
Oh, my... Ha! Right.
So, let's get into it.
Now, OK, I'm sensing a marine theme here.
We've got the water, we've got the Hockney-esque ripples.
We've got the... Oh, look, you see, got the whale shark markings.
It's pretty... There's a lot of...
There's quite a whale-shark-heavy theme going on here.
What do we think?
Is this for...? Is this for the male snorkeller?
Yes. Yes.
Is it...? Does this offer a purpose, like, of camouflage or something?
Um... So, they're SPF50, so they'll protect you from the sun. Right.
And they'll protect you from any stingies. Stingies. Oh!
But, more importantly,
they'll look...make you look fantastic. They'll look fantastic.
Yeah. They're good for the office, as well. For yoga, for swimming...
Excellent. Multi... Multifunctional. ..functional. Yes.
Absolutely. It's context-based, isn't it, though?
Walking around in West London,
I might attract quite a lot of attention. Yes!
But here... But here. ..I'm fitting right in.
I'm just getting into me whale-shark-themed leggings
and rashie.
I mean, even if I say so myself, I look fantastic.
Are you ready for the reveal?
OK.
What do you think?
I think I could pass for a whale shark.
If somebody was snorkelling and they saw me,
they'd probably reckon they'd seen one.
But they'd have gone, "This one had a beard."
I might never take these off.
I don't have any inhibitions.
I feel cleansed of my city ways.
I feel at one with nature. I'm ready to connect.
Oh, I do look like some old bloke in his pyjamas.
There's that.
Right, cue the soaring music,
because I'm about to tick something spectacular off my bucket list.
BOLD ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Hello!
Hi! Ahoy there!
Hello. Right.
Hello. Thank you. Bill.
You're on. Jas.
Jas. Hey, nice to meet you.
You, too. Want to come aboard? Yes, please. Jump up.
My guide, Jas, has swum with
and studied Ningaloo's whale sharks for over ten years.
This is fantastic!
We're sort of matching.
It's the attire of the Ningaloo.
It is. I was thinking that I won't wear it, because, you know,
we're having a serious conversation... I know.
..about science. But you are a scientist. I am.
And you're wearing it, so I feel now at home.
Exactly. Exactly!
Why are they here?
So, the whale sharks come to the Ningaloo mainly to feed.
So, we get...
The majority, about 75% of the population, are juvenile males,
and, like the males from most species,
they've got a couple of things on the mind -
one of them's food. And they really just come here for the feed.
You're saying there's still so much about them
that we don't really know. Yep.
Well, we don't know where they mate, how they mate.
We've never seen them give birth.
We've only seen seven baby whale sharks in the entire world.
And I'm talking baby whale sharks
about this big. Oh! Tiny babies!
And from that size to about a metre and a half, they're not seen,
so there's a lot of their lifespan we just don't know anything about.
How long do they live?
So, between 80 to 130 years is what they think. Wow!
Yeah.
Jas tells me that whale sharks can dive to almost a thousand metres,
and females can have 300 pups, as they're called, at a time.
And then there's the spots.
As individual as fingerprints.
So, here's my question about the markings,
because I know that certain creatures,
particularly marine creatures as well,
they have quite unique markings
by which you can identify individual animals. Yep.
So, is that the same with whale sharks?
Correct. Right. Yes, so pretty much our attire here,
this would be the, ah,
I think it's based off one of the local photographers,
an actual photo of an actual whale shark. Oh, right.
But what we do on the left-hand side of...
this is my right-hand side,
but on the left-hand side of every whale shark,
just behind its pectoral fin,
the gill kind of area, just behind that. Yeah.
So we'll take a picture of that, send it in to the DVCA,
which is our governing body. OK.
And they put that through a little program.
It goes through there, it does all these little algorithms on the spot,
comes out the other end, and says, "No, that's this shark that we saw
"three years ago on Coral Bay" or something. Yeah.
So that's how we kind of ID them with their spot patterning
using that program as well.
Spot pattern. Right. OK. Hard with the naked eye.
Yes.
In the last 75 years,
whale shark numbers have more than halved,
due in no small part to fishing.
These days, they're officially classed as endangered,
which makes it all the more special to be here
and hopefully catch sight of one.
It's not that deep, is it?
Oh, the boys are giving me the signal for whale shark.
Oh, really? Oh, my God. Over here. OK.
Oh, my goodness, that's great news.
All right, we'd better get ready, then, I suppose.
Do you wanna get ready? I dunno, what do you reckon?
Let's go. Oh.
Whale shark. Whale shark. Come on back.
Yeah! Come on!
Go, go, go, go.
All right. That's it. Let's go. Go on in.
Here we go. Here we go.
Here we go! Wee!
Come on, whale sharks, I've given you a big build-up.
I'm gonna look a right mug if you don't show up.
I'm on the Ningaloo coast,
near the town of Exmouth in Western Australia,
for the wildlife experience of a lifetime.
And the whale sharks are every bit as spectacular as I'd hoped.
This handsome fella is a juvenile male.
Barely out of his teens,
he's already migrated enough distance to span the entire globe.
To be this close to such an extraordinary animal...
..is as good as it gets.
That was...
..amazing.
That was incredible.
Oh...my God,
that was absolutely incredible.
I mean...
..I've been trying to see these whale sharks for
as long as I can remember, and...
..to see them, like, for the first time is,
I've got to say, it's a bit overwhelming.
I'm a bit emotional.
I didn't know quite what to do there.
I was sort of a bit discombobulated with the experience.
Nearly dropped me camera out of my fins, I was all over the place.
It's...
..an amazing moment.
It's like a culmination of years and years of...
wanting to swim with them,
but...whatever you know about them,
whatever you've read about them,
nothing prepares you for seeing them right there in
the water, in their natural environment.
Absolutely...
..spectacular.
There's a timelessness about this part of Western Australia.
It's almost spiritual.
And the dry land is every bit as inspiring,
complete with its own ancient history.
So I'm up on the Coral Coast, up towards Ningaloo.
I'm going to a place called the Mandu Mandu Gorge.
I'm here to meet one of the traditional owners,
Hazel Walgar of Baiyungu People,
who is a great advocate for this area,
and someone I wanna learn a bit more about this region from.
It's one of things I wanted to do, really, with this trip,
is to actually talk to the traditional owners,
hear what they have to say about the land,
because I'm sure they have
a different perspective on it than I would.
You know, they would see things,
know things about it that I couldn't possibly know.
And I think the only way, really, to get a proper insight into
the land is to talk to the traditional owners.
Hello. Hello, Bill.
Hazel. How you going?
Really well, thanks. Long way from home.
Yes. Long, long way! Long, long way.
It's the first time I've been to this part of Australia.
You like it? I do.
This is Ningaloo. Welcome. Thank you.
Beautiful spot. What are you making here?
I'm making some bread. Ah!
We call this here Johnny cakes.
Just flour, bit of milk,
makes it nice and creamy.
Stick it on the fire you've got going over there?
Stick it on the fire.
Yeah, see, this is something I think I'd be able to knock up.
We're not allowed to really eat this.
Doctors always say there's too much sugar in it,
especially for us, with diabetes, you know?
After we go and check our sugar, bloody thing's up high,
thanks to the whole damper. Yeah, I know, that's the thing isn't it,
anything that tastes good, does you harm, doesn't it?
That's right.
Cultures as distant as Native American and Innuit
have their own versions of Johnny Cakes.
First Nations old people in Australia made their flour
grinding native seeds from native plants like acacia.
What Hazel made today was introduced with sugar,
by the European settlers,
who traded the ingredients as currency.
Oh, look at that. Shall we have some... Butter.
..butter and jam or something. Yeah? Jam. We got honey.
Knock the old sugar right up!
BILL LAUGHS
We're gonna be seeing double!
Oh, this is lovely, Hazel. Yeah.
We just don't have country like this.
It's just a totally new experience for me. Hmm.
Hazel's connection to this land sustained her through
one of the darkest chapters in Australian history.
As a child, she was re-homed as part of a government
and church-run programme that ran from the early 1900s
until as late as the 1970s.
An estimated 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children
were taken - becoming known as the stolen generations.
Been mostly here all my life,
you know, before we were taken away
and put in missions and stuff, but this was always home,
and that's one thing they never took from us. Yeah.
Our connection back home.
That must have been quite a big moment coming back here then.
Yes, it was. Especially coming back home. Yeah.
Back to country and most of all,
our old people that was once here when we were growing up,
no longer here.
You know, we saw how they had to try and adapt to suburban life.
Yeah. And we just saw their heath deteriorate.
We lost a lot of our old people.
But this is where I come Bill,
when I just want to find myself,
and do my healing right here on country.
This is a blessed place.
Just sitting around a fire doing this sort of stuff.
Hazel's experiences may have taken her away from this place,
but her traditions and knowledge are as strong as ever.
See these stones here? Yeah.
These are ones we old people used for their grinding stone. Oh, right.
You can feel the... It's got a bit of...
Mm.
That's one they'd get,
and they'd hold it like that.
Yeah.
That's for those making the flour.
Yeah.
Lot of our stuff we don't like to take away.
Mm.
We encourage visitors not to take things off country.
Mm. Mm.
The tragedy of the Stolen Generations is the broken families
and disintegration of a multi-generational
connection to country.
Thankfully, people like Hazel have come back
to begin these teachings all over again.
This quite spectacular canyon,
this is all part of the Cape Range National Park.
Great deep gorges
and narrow spurs of rugged limestone.
Spectacular.
Apparently, this is about,
I think it's something like over 50,000 hectares
of national park, teeming with wildlife and endemic flora.
It's a haven of nature,
and for bearded travellers.
This is Charles Knife Canyon.
320 metres above sea level,
21km wide,
and ridiculously beautiful.
Wow, look at that.
It's a weird sensation being amidst such strange emptiness,
but feeling curiously at home.
It's like the crags and cliffs are speaking to me,
probably telling me to watch my step.
I am a Capricorn,
so that does mean I'm sure footed, apparently.
I mean, don't want to jinx it.
Or perhaps, more accurately, they tend to land on their feet.
So, I might say that ascribes to me.
They can be headstrong, sometimes stubborn.
And will eat almost anything.
Again, all of that applies to me.
With my best foot forward,
I'm stepping out into history itself.
This is an old reef.
Part of the old Ningaloo reef, which is out there.
And everyone comes for the whale sharks
and the snorkelling
and the diving on the reef out there,
just off the coast,
but this is the remnant of a huge limestone reef.
You can see it all around in the evidence of fossilised shells
and crustaceans.
This is probably over 60 million years old.
But that's the science version.
What I'm getting from this is the beautiful sense of space,
of tranquillity,
stillness,
of the ancientness of the rock.
One of the great things about canyons is that,
you know, you're propelled upwards,
and you see these great valleys all around you.
I don't know, just,
they're immensely...
..sort of awe inspiring places.
Makes you stop, catch your breath.
It's one of those days where you think,
I'm glad to be on this earth,
to see this.
As I navigate my way through Western Australia's Big Country,
I feel connected to my fellow intrepid explorers.
So, I'm a big fan of maps.
Always have been.
When I was a kid, my Dad had a great collection of Ordnance Survey maps
and I just loved poring over them and finding every detail.
Every sort of contour in the landscape.
I kind of prefer maps in a way.
Sometimes actually, when we're out on this trip, you know,
there's been no reception,
so you can't even get the map on your phone at all.
You can't rely on them.
So, let's have a look and see what we've got.
All the way up here there's the Pinnacles.
Up past Geraldton.
Then a bit of a long drive up here,
up the Carnarvon,
and now we're right the way up here in Exmouth.
And then eventually up to Port Headland.
And then, the road just goes off the map.
So, I don't know where we go then.
BLEEP
Map...
Yeah, much easier than the old phone.
A good map will take you to places that reveal the unexpected.
I'm often gob smacked at how people can drive right past
the most glorious of sights,
simply because they didn't have a good map.
Just an hour down the road from Exmouth lies this hidden oasis,
carving its way through an arabesque of limestone cliffs.
It's called Yardie Creek, and my guide is a man called Boxy.
Hey, Bill. How you are? Boxy. Boxy. Good to meet you, mate.
Come aboard. Thanks very much.
Is it fresh water further up, then?
No, no. All salt? Salt right to the end.
Oh. Nearly a kilometre and a bit to the end.
Oh, so it's just a gorge that then just... Yep.
A gorge, or they call it a creek.
It just filled up from the ocean,
must be a few faults underneath where the water still comes through,
and it never, ever goes stagnant or horrible.
It's always fresh salt water. Right.
And if you lift your eyes from the crystal waters,
you might spot an iconic Australian species,
but in a place you might not expect.
Like seeing a koala clinging to a garden gnome.
I'll take you to the little wallaby just over here.
There's a couple up here.
There's one sitting straight ahead of us in the sun there.
See him in the edge on the rocks? Oh, yes.
That's little black footed wallaby. Look at him!
There's probably another one tucked around the corner here.
This little guy has come out for the sun.
He's so cute.
He's called a black footed, or black flanked rock wallaby.
This is where they live,
and all they eat is the vegetation around here.
They spend most of their lives in these rock walls.
They just live in these little cracks? Yes, in the cracks.
They can swim, but I've never seen one in the water.
They're very, very sure footed.
When you have a look at their colour,
when we go further up in the rocks, they're sitting in the red rock now,
but when they're in the other side, in the grey and red rock there...
Yeah. ..they're very well camouflaged.
You can hardly make them out unless you know what you're looking for.
They're funny, aren't they?
They've found this little environment,
and they've just adapted perfectly to it.
Yeah.
It's not just furry creatures here,
there are feathered ones, too.
Living rent free in homes built by their great, great-grandparents.
You can see the osprey in there? Is she in there?
I think she is. Should be in there. Yeah.
These guys return to the same nests every year to breed.
This place is such a sight that I want to get even closer to it.
A paddleboard is quiet, low on the water,
and at one with nature.
Yeah, bet you thought I was going to go in there.
The age of this land is just mind-blowing.
I feel like a five-year-old surrounded by giants.
It's just fantastic
to see ospreys on nests that have been there
for hundreds of years.
To see rock wallabies,
perfectly adapted to their environment,
and to see kestrels flying overhead.
But also just spending time in a place like this.
Getting out on the water, having a paddle, is just wonderful,
and I can see why people are drawn to this place.
Starting to sort of get under my skin a bit.
In Britain, we think we know "old."
We have the Jurassic coast
with fossils dating back 185 million years.
Pfft! In Western Australia, that's nothing.
There's an even more antiquated inhabitant here,
and I'm heading south to Hamelin Bay to meet them.
SINGS TO HIMSELF: # Strum out the lights...#
This area teems with microbial life
in a colony that began before the dinosaurs walked the Earth.
Too small to be seen by the naked eye,
these microscopic life forms are all around us.
Dr Therese Morris is an expert in planetary science,
which is just as well,
as I need her planet sized brain to fully comprehend this place.
So, this whole area, then, is part of this world heritage.
Absolutely, yeah. Protected site. Yes.
The landscape all along this coastal area is part of what's called
a sedimentary reserve, because having a beach made purely of shells
that are predominantly all the one type does not occur
in very many places in the entire world. No.
It is truly unique.
So, where we are,
you can see in front of you,
you've got the beach.
And at the end bottom point of that,
you go into this black coloured material. Yeah.
And then further beyond that,
we go into the structures that are columns.
So, which bits can we walk on, then?
We're going to minimise our impact by just staying on the sand.
OK. It's quite squishy.
That's right. Is that good?
Well, it's full of life.
There's living microbes all through the sediment.
I feel slightly concerned that I'm leaving footprints on something
that's going to be here forever.
We have to be really, really careful here
because the sediment here is alive.
It's enriched in microbial material.
Now, if we put our feet onto that,
we will move the guys that are keeping away from the oxygen,
into spaces they don't want to be.
We're really interfering with their system.
Yeah, yeah, physically disrupting them by doing that compaction space.
OK.
There's one feature that's unique to these parts.
They're living fossils, called stromatolites,
and they're like colossal microbial skyscrapers,
growing at under half a millimetre a year.
These things here.
The stromatolites here, how old are we talking ?
Up to 2,000 years old. Wow.
But what we're looking at are organisms that have been around
a lot longer than that.
The microbial mats that forms these rocks...
This is the stuff that's... The stuff that's over...
Flowed over the top of this. Yep, growing over the top of it.
That community was one of the first ecosystems
to be on this planet,
all the way back to about at least 3.47 billion years ago.
Wow.
So, this is what the Earth would have looked like
nearly four billion years ago.
Yeah, that's our understanding of it.
Well, not four billion. Well, nearly. No, not quite.
Three and a half. You've got half a billion years...
Yeah, but come on, what's half a billion?
You know, that's the... THEY LAUGH
Morning.
This is one of the things I love about Australia -
there's bins everywhere.
I mean, from where I'm standing,
I can actually see four bins in line of sight.
Now, this is obviously some old heritage bin,
and I thought that might just be kind of cosmetic.
But, no, it's an actual functioning, working bin.
There's one over there, one over there,
and one over there. This is amazing.
I've just seen another one.
That's six! Six bins!
In 100 metres radius.
That's unprecedented.
In London, where I live,
there's one bin for every square kilometre.
In Northampton there's 5,592 bins
per square kilometre.
In a neat reversal on population density...
BILL LAUGHS
Bin, bin, bin, bin, bin, bin, bin!
Surrounded by bins.
This is Northampton, Western Australia,
home of the bin!
You'd struggle to find a trace of litter in these parts,
but one thing WA is knee deep in, is shipwrecks.
Battered by high winds off the Indian Ocean,
with perilous reefs and a treacherous coastline,
WA's so called "shipwreck coast" is a navigator's nightmare.
It's reckoned there's 1,600 wrecks out here,
including Australia's oldest,
each with a tale to tell.
And down the road, off the coast of Geraldton,
lies a legend of maritime misadventure.
In 1629, a huge Dutch vessel,
the Batavia, set sail from Holland,
on its way to the city of Batavia,
modern day Jakarta,
laden with riches and gold and lord knows what.
The captain, Jacobsz, was a bit of drunk.
He was a liability, effectively.
Plus, on the long journey from Holland,
he'd taken up with one of the fine ladies on board's maid.
So, he was often otherwise engaged.
So, one night, as the boat approached the coast of Australia,
disaster struck.
The Batavia wrecked on the Abrolhos Islands,
which are 40 nautical miles just off the coast here in Geraldton.
The Portuguese had even warned shipping about this,
by naming the islands up here the Abrolhos Islands.
It means, abre vossos olhos - keep your eyes open.
Literally, the name of the islands was the warning
and our Captain Jacobsz singularly failed to do that.
He had one job. One job!
Literally, the islands were called, "Look out!"
The ship was wrecked on the islands,
the survivors struggled onto two little coral reefs,
but that wasn't going to last long.
If you stayed with the wreck, the wreck was foundering,
so they had to find water.
So, the upper merchant, the VOC man, Francisco Pelsaert,
decided to set off to look for water with Captain Jacobsz.
And they set off in that little boat - the long boat.
And they headed up the coast,
and they headed here.
And all this coast up here.
But they didn't find water,
they couldn't find anywhere to put in,
and on a couple of occasions, they saw smoke.
And they thought, "Oh, smoke, that's people. That means water."
So, they came on land
and they met with some Indigenous folk.
Probably the first time these people had ever seen
Europeans or white people.
What an amazing meeting that would have been.
So, all of this happened in 1629,
almost 200 years before European settlements
on the East Coast of Australia.
So it's quite an extraordinary moment in maritime history.
There's one final stop on my travels through the Big Country,
and in keeping with WA's technicolour grandeur,
it's also the most lurid.
So, this is Hut Lagoon,
the famed pink lake,
just outside Northampton.
I've got say, it has got a pinkish hue.
Apparently, it has some health benefits.
People bathe in it, people get in it.
I don't know about that. I might want to get on it.
All right, get my shoes and socks off.
OK.
So, the reason it's pink,
is that in the water there is this algae
which produces carotenoids.
It's a naturally produced colourant.
Beta carotene is one of them.
You can find that in food preservative,
in food colouring,
in medicines, even in cosmetics.
And it is really pink.
I mean, it's just bizarre.
Apparently, it changes.
It varies from a sort of deep lilac,
to a lighter mauve colour, to this, what it is today.
This kind of bubble gum pink.
When you come to places like this,
you feel a sense of the vastness, the loneliness,
and a bit of isolation.
And sometimes you associate that with negative thoughts.
You know, being on your own, being cut off from people.
But I think, certainly what we've been through in the past few years,
certainly during the lockdown and during the pandemic when we were
isolated from others,
it's something that I thought we could draw some positives from.
You know, to feel that when you are isolated,
you remember that feeling of resilience that we all had,
and then use that as a pathway to happiness.
Fully inspired,
I'm heading out on my board to soak up the sheer...pinkness
of this curious paradise.
Oh, shit!
Yeah, well, that was a little bit trickier than I thought.
Because it's so shallow,
I couldn't put the fin on the bottom of the paddleboard,
so you get no stability.
So, when you're tracking forward,
you just go left and right, and then the wind suddenly got up,
and I was being buffeted like a leaf.
Then my hat blew off!
It was all going wrong,
but then,
I had a banana stashed in my pocket.
And I realised, I'm eating a banana on a pink lake.
I feel like I'm in a Doctor Seuss cartoon.
It's hard to truly describe this part of the world.
It's simply too big, too old, too beautiful,
to fully take in.
My senses are still reeling from all this wonder,
but these experiences are already lodged deep in my memory.
And if I've ever had enough of grey London,
I know I can retire to the cleanest country town on the planet.
On the next episode, in the world's loneliest city,
I make some new friends...
WILD ELECTRIC SOUNDS
Get some tasting notes from Bill Bailey.
It's got like a big forehead.
These are called karri trees.
You hear a big creaking sound, run.
LOUD THUD Oh! Easy, tiger.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media