Mawbanna - Wynyard

Had a fabulous night in the deafening silence of the bush. No crickets or birds, just the wind. It was beautiful. Had a walk down to Dip Falls; along the very steep set of sloping steps to the bottom. It’s a popular place offering several sheltered seating areas, toilets and even a couple of BBQ’s albeit wood ones.

A lovely solid timber bridge over the river tops it off. We arrived at 11am and found the next tour at 11:30am, so we had time to enjoy a Bush Stew and beautiful soup both with herb damper – yum! We sat at fabulous tables made of burl eucalyptus slabs made all glossy and shiny by varnish topped off with a base made of train wheels.

We then enjoyed a tour with just 4 participants. He started in his shed made with the slab weatherboards lining the walls (like in the photo of the house from Beaconsfield). It looks fabulous in the raw, as you see all the colours in the timber. He showed us the cutting tools including metal wedges used to help split the green timber. Interesting fact: split timber is best for shingles and weatherboards and left untreated will last 40 years due to the water just running off them. Machine cut rots in a few years without treatment!

We then walked through some of the 50 acre property of old logging forest. It had been logged in the 1930s and 1970s in the better selective logging method, where only the oldest an large trees are removed, leaving the younger ones to grow to their full potential. We also saw a Sassafrass sapling and were able to sniff a leaf. It was used in the earlier days as a tea as well as flavour in beer. It has a lovely sweet smelling oil scent when crumpled up. Fabulous stuff!

Well it looks like we’ve missed Clean Up Australia Day. We couldn’t get on the internet to find out where to go for our nearest cleanup. Steve said I clean up almost every day as I’m always picking up rubbish anyway, so we’ll have to leave it at that.

But after hearing that SA have had a 20% increase in the number of drink containers collected since they increased their refund from 5c to 10c. Its also created a $13.5million recycling industry and saved tons of rubbish from going into landfill around the state. So many new jobs have been created though this and it all stays in the local communities that run the programs. It sounds so fabulous. So I encourage you to email your local member and request they immediately enable a Bill to be put to the WA Parliament to get this going in WA. We really do need it.