Today I went on a scenic flight & island hop to the Abrolhos Islands and the Batavia shipwreck site. It was brilliant! On board the tiny little plane was an interesting bunch of people, it was a bit like the Gilligan's Island cast list - Rose, (glamorous New York pathologist), Debbie and Frank(Dutch/Belgian entrepreneurs), James and Janis (grey nomads from Manchester), me, and excitingly, Professor Rosario the Italian aeronautics engineer. Scott the fresh-faced young pilot was a good match for Gilligan, but with a brain.
Rosario was great because he's been flown in from Italy to consult on the Square Kilometre Array telescope project. When he told us this, everyone kind of went "oh, right", not realising what he meant, but I got wildly excited and he was really pleased so we had a really amazing conversation about it on the long walk from the landing strip to the beach. The project sounds breathtaking. Unfortunately he gets flown out again tomorrow otherwise I'd be begging him to take me out there for a look.
Anyway, the Abrolhos are a chain of coral reefs about 100 km off the coast of Geraldton; the name derives from a Portuguese phrase meaning "if we had a GPS we wouldn't keep crashing into this thing". Once the scourge of would-be European colonial sailing vessels in the 1600's, it is now home to several seasonal crayfish-catching villages. It's a maze of reefs amid turquoise waters and the villages look like they're just floating on the water.
We flew over the southern reefs and landed on a dirt airstrip on East Wallabi island, home to sea eagles, ospreys and sweet tiny little wallabies who were sleeping under bushes until we arrived to take photos of them. We had a nature walk to the osprey nest and I snorkelled in Turtle Bay (no turtles).
Scott refused to give us the Batavia story until after lunch when we were back at the plane & therefore close to the sick bags. Basically, the ship hit a reef on Beacon Island in 1629, interrupting the evil mutineering plans of merchantman Cornelius and his offsiders. As the shops in Geraldton were not open at the time, Captain Pelsaert hopped in the longboat with a few helpful rowers and headed off to Dutch Indonesia to get help, which took, like, ages. When they returned, they discovered that Cornelius and his henchmen had pretty much massacred and eaten most of the passengers.
This all took place on a tiny island about the size of a football field with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The captain clapped them in irons and was going to take them back to civilisation for a trial and hanging but then thought, "this is the part in TV shows where you yell at the good guys for being stupid by giving the bad guys a chance to get away or do it again." So they had a quick trial on the beach and hung the mutineering cannibals on the spot.
So now, four hundred years later, you can fly over and have morning tea & a swim while imagining what it must have been like to be a stranded Dutch settler family sitting on the same beach. It must have been like being stranded on the moon.
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