9^th August: Onslow

Well, Onslow surprised us! Having read all the info, we expected a sleepy fishing village. What we found was anything but! Dongers everywhere, a number of great appartments over-looking the sea with more being built, utes and hi-visibility shirts all over the place! A positive hive of activity! Information is obviously out of date!

Apparently, the mining boom has hit Onslow. As we came in, we saw the salt fields – looked bigger than Port Hedland. The company is expanding operations at the moment. They have a very long conveyor belt system that takes the salt out along a jetty that goes 500 metres out to deep water. This company is related to the operations in Exmouth. A huge pile of salt nearby!

Then there is the gas! Gas was discovered just off the coast and a gas liquifaction plant is being built near here – on an island in the delta of the Ashburton River. So they are building drilling platforms and the plant.

A lot of movement on the water too with what appear to be pilot, customs and tug boats with big deisel motors rumbling around. It is so still here (surprisingly as this place as the reputation of being the windiest and most cyclone prone place on the coast) that the noise really echoes. I suppose they are for the salt ships. There are a number of large ships standing off shore.

Hence Onslow is no longer a sleepy village. As one women was heard to say :Up here, it is either iron ore, salt or gas. I think she is right! No iron ore trains but there are mines just up the road between here and the Fortescue River. After the kilometres of very dry spinifex country with non-water rivers (except the Fortescue which was flowing at the bridge), Onslow is a pretty place with a point jutting out into the sea where you can watch the sunrise on one beach and the sunset just around the corner on the next!  There is a great boardwalk that runs along the coast. It ends in arather spectacular war memorial.

 But it is dusty again! We look like refugees from the desert!