Bights and Birthdays

Our greeting party

We crossed the Great Australian Bight to get to Albany.  If you look at a map of Australia, you can see an area to the southwest which looks as if a large bite was taken out of the continent.  That is not how it got its name.  In geographic terms, a bight is a large shallow and wide bay.  Different sources say it faces the Indian Ocean but others call the water the South Sea.  Whatever you call it, it can be a bit rough.  We made it to Albany unharmed.













My tour took me to the Old Gaol (Jail) and a wind farm that powers the city of Albany.  If you have seen one wind farm, you have seen them all.  Much the same could be said about old jails in Australia.  They were usually built by convicts sent from England, even though not too many of the convicts were ever held there.  Instead, the nonviolent offenders were sent out to help settlers subdue the Australian landscape and to build homes.  This jail housed local offenders and those convicts from England who got into trouble in Australia.

Some of the indigenous people were held there, but in a separate room where one of them carved aboriginal symbols into the walls.  This was not a prison where you could easily escape over the walls.










The courtyard outside the jail and museum had this huge fig tree.






Whales were once abundant in the oceans south of Australia but were almost driven to extinction by the whaling industry before whaling was banned by international treaty.  Albany had the last great fleet of whale boats. For this reason they have a museum entirely devoted to whales and whaling.
Darrell went there.  There were no live whales, just skeletons and an explanation of how whales were slaughtered.

The last whaling ship

The main Street

The main street of Albany is a mix of the old, the new and the memories.  Little shops and restaurants line the main street interspersed with two large churches and the Town Hall.

Baptist church

Town Hall

Memorial to soldiers on the Great War

It was at Albany that many thousands of soldiers from Australia and New Zealand departed to fight in World War I.  Thousands of them were killed in Turkey.  These troops were part of the ANZAC or Australia New Zealand Army Corp.  Albany has a large museum and memorial dedicated to them and also a small sculpture on the main street.

There are also animals to be seen.  Kangaroos are separated from horses by fences which stop the horses, but not the kangaroos.  Australia has a program to beautify the waterfronts by painting murals on the grain terminals.  This is the local dragon.

In the evening we attended the 90th birthday party of the man who invented the lithium battery.