Esperance, Western Australia

11/1/2019

The township of Esperance was absolutely swelling with holiday makers, so we had to opt for a three-night stay in the overflow caravan park at $35 per night located at the show grounds with a communal kitchen and dingy flooded bathroom facilities. Before even making it to the grounds however we had to find Florence a new jockey wheel. Shovel is so amazing improvising and sorting out these kinds of things, then once she was settled in her new home for the next few days, we were off to explore.

Like that of Kalgoorlie, Esperance, gazetted in 1893 was born out of the 1890’s gold rush and became a jumping off point for prospectors making their way to the Goldfields. Now the town is a jumping off point for tourists seeking the crystal-clear oceanic waters of the Southern Ocean and a sail through the Bay of Isles. In 2018 the town had a population base of approximately 12,000 with tourism, wheat farming and exporting through the port and fishing the main industries of employment. I was fascinated to read in 1979, Stan Thornton aged 17 flew to San Fransico with a few pieces of the space station Skylab for a San Francisco Examiner competition. He collected the $10,000 prize being the first person to present the newspaper with pieces of the Skylab that he had collected from the roof of his Esperance home. Furthermore, the Esperance council at the time fined NASA $400 for littering as fragments of Skylab had to be removed from the town. The fine was never paid by the US Government only being settled in 2009 by radio show listeners of the Highway Radio morning program. Also fascinating to learn was that Esperance was home to Australia’s first electrical wind farm, built at a research facility in 1987, and now boasts several wind turbine facilities that supply the town with electricity.

Skylab

Read more about the internationally famous Skylab incident by pressing the button above.

The Esperance Look Out

Around Town

Lucky Bay

Whilst sailing a treacherous route through the Recherche Archipelago in 1802, Matthew Flinders steered his vessel HMS Investigator into a cove to take shelter from a summer storm. He named this piece of paradise and his saviour Lucky Bay. Located approximately 60kms west of Esperance in the Cape Le Grand National Park, Lucky Bay is home to sunbaking kangaroos and the most spectacular beach of squeaky-clean sand lapped by magnificently coloured turquoise water.