Albany 12th June

 

We stayed for two nights at the Albany Gardens Holiday Park, This is the first camp site that I have seen with en-suite bathrooms.

 

Albany is a port where vast amounts of timber is still shipped all over  the world. Fortunately there has recently been introduced some control over the cutting down of the forests in Western Australia as some species of trees are almost extinct.

The picture below is of the arts centre on the harbour near the docks.

 

This ship is a replica of the Amity. On the 25th December 1826 she arrived in Princess Royal Harbour. She brought a military convoy and convicts. They came to establish the first European settlement in the western part of Australia three years before the Swan River settlement that eventually became Perth. The Amity brought immense change to the Minang People who over thousands of years had developed a deep and complex relationship with this land they called Kinjarling “ the place of rain “. Eventually the convicts that had not escaped were returned to Tasmania as the land was found to be very difficult to cultivate and the anticipated major settlement never materialised.

 

 

The crew and convicts quarters were very cramped, the ceiling was my shoulder height.

 

This was one of the officers cabins.

 

The Captains cabin and also the main hub of the ship.

 

A shag perched on a pole drying it’s wings close to the Amity.

 

There were many small but interesting museums in the town which I visited too much to cover here. This is one item that I thought was of interest. This is a piece of a Mundrabilla  meteorite it is probably a fragment of an asteroid. Albert John Carlisle  visited Albany museum some years ago and commented that they did not have a meteorite and said that the next one he found would be theirs. He kept his word this fragment was found in 1988 at Kybo Station. It weighs 3.5 ton, is approximately 4,600 million years old and has been on the earth for about a thousand years. It is 50% iron and nickel and 50% iron and sulphur. This is the largest piece of a Mundrabilla meteorite ever found. 

 

This is The Patrick Taylor Cottage Museum and is the oldest building in Western Australia.