This rock is done. We’ve explored it every which way and, as a form of exercise therapy, it’s done its job. We’re out of here tomorrow, and back to Muka for our last overnighter before we move on.
The only other monolith worth a look close to here (and you should list it) is Beringbooding — been there, done that, just two years ago, as part of Kay’s post-hip-op therapy. Not hip hop, although a few of those moves may have happened. It was her first climb since the surgery, and she aced it.
Which got us reminiscing about the place, because Beringbooding deserves more than a passing mention. It’s not just a big lump of granite you drive out to for a leg-stretch — it’s a genuine feat of Depression-era engineering hiding in plain sight in the Central Wheatbelt.
Looming over the campsites and wildflowers is Australia’s largest rock water catchment tank, holding over ten million litres, built in 1937 by around a hundred blokes on “sustenance labour” — city fellas shipped out by rail to Bonnie Rock, handed a shovel, and told to make friends with a granite dome. Rationed too. Four kids in the family meant four weeks’ work.
They lit fires on the rock overnight, doused the hot granite with water to shatter it into slabs, then stood those slabs on end and cemented them into a wall nearly two kilometres long, all to herd rainwater into the tank below.
It’s the kind of detail that makes you look twice at what appears to be a fairly unremarkable pile of rock, and mutter something like “struth” under your breath.
There’s also a proper balancing boulder up top, a couple of gnamma holes big enough to make you nervous walking near them in the dark, and a cave with the Kalamaia people’s hand paintings tucked at the back — so the rock’s been doing useful work for a lot longer than 1937 suggests.
Anyway. We climbed it, we tested the hip, we explored and ticked the box. Beringbooding has been thoroughly done and dusted, and there’s no reasonable excuse to swing back that way again — not on this trip anyway.
So tomorrow it’s hitch up, back to Muka for one last overnighter, and then back on the move. Just over a week up our sleeve before we’re due back in the big smoke for more reviews, which means one week of open road, sometimes dodgy bush caravan park facilities, sorting Starlink and finding the next rock to inflict on Kay’s hip.
We’ll keep you in the loop.
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