Condon TO THE Bar
T HE WHEEL marks went up and over the dry, grass-covered sand hill, but as we’d been asked by the property manager not to drive on the dunes I got out of the Cruiser and wandered to the top of the low rise. To the east and south, flat and grassy plains near devoid of anything taller than half a metre stretched to the horizon; while to the north a salty flat bordered an inlet of light blue-green water where short and narrow strips of mangroves gathered to find a foothold on this remote coast.
As I topped the hill, a series of dunes parallel to the one I was standing on marched their way towards the ocean just a few hundred metres away which was wild and wind-capped. Almost at my feet, near smothered in the grass, was what we had come to find: an old cemetery from a long-abandoned pearling port … if you can call three or four markers a cemetery.
We were at Condon, the once important shipping outlet on the far north-west coast of WA, which few people have heard about and even less have visited. Gazetted as Shellborough but rarely known
