Roadside flowers, Northampton, WA

On the road north to Shark Bay we stopped to look at some roadside vegetation just north of Northampton.

Sandstone, WA

Sandstone is a small town on the road between Leinster and Mt Magnet. The main street has a neat square that celebrates their gold mining and sheep station history and someone has had a brilliant idea to establish a few old cars as installations. It looks great and I reckon they should extend the installations as a real tourist attraction.

Flat battery

A sandy rise

After checking out Leinster (it's a very neat and treed mining town similar to Leigh Creek in SA) we turned west towards Geraldton. We happened to be there when there was a change of shift and saw lots of miners congregating to board the buses that ferried them out to the mines.

At one delightful spot on the way there was sandy rise with spinifex and beautiful eucalypts and discovered budgies in the trees.

Budgerigars

And I was particularly delighted to find a group of small and hardy plants with the beautiful red flowers right on the ground. It would be interesting to know what the pollinating agent is. And there was also a suite of other flowering plants that I hadn't seen growing elsewhere on our travels.

Wattle

River gums and more

We're on the road north of Kalgoorlie and Leonora, heading for the mining town of Leinster. The road, like all the bitumen roads in this area, is amazing. It's wide and smooth, the shoulders are graded perfectly, the water runoffs are all well-maintained. And the reason is that there is money in gold and all the minerals mined between Norseman and Geraldton. We see a lot of roadtrains on the road and they're not there for the local station owners, they're there because of the mining industry and they need good roads.

So it can be easy to be mesmerised by the road because there are few geographical features and the vegetation can be almost like a monoculture. It's grey, even though there are a number of species, and of uniform height. Mulga, saltbush, mulga, mulga. I find it fascinating.

So it came as something of a surprise when I'd been viewing mulga and saltbush, mulga and ... ?? River Redgum!!

River Redgum

It was the first redgum we'd seen. We pulled in to have a closer look and discovered an information board which stated that we were looking at Eucaltptus camaldulensis var. obtusa the first of the river red gums that grow to the north and east of this spot. It's related to Eucalyptus camaldulensis var. camaldulensis that grows in the Eastern states.

Thunderbox Mine, one of numerous mines in the west

And some more flowering plants on the rocky red plains.