Where the Pinnacles Remember

Introduction

For twenty years I’ve walked the Nambung District — sometimes with purpose, sometimes just to see what the wind has rearranged overnight. Out here, the landscape never reveals itself all at once. It offers its truths slowly: a new track after rain, a dune shifted just enough to expose an old limestone spine, a stubborn flare of regrowth pushing through last season’s fire scars.

This is a place that remembers. The Pinnacles stand like old storytellers, shaped by time, weather, and whatever else this country chooses not to explain. And if you return often enough — in heat, in winter storms, in the quiet hours when the roos are still deciding whether you’re worth watching — the land begins to trust you with its subtler details.

These pages aren’t a guidebook or a scientific record. They’re the notes of someone who has spent two decades listening: to the wind through the tuarts, to the shifting sand plains, to the echoes of people who walked this country long before I did. Before we step into the deeper history of Nambung — the ancient seas, the limestone stories, the explorers, the fires, the forgotten tracks — I want to begin with the simple truth that drew me back again and again.

Lt. George Grey – The Accidental Explorer

As I dug deeper into the history of this coast, one voice kept returning to me: Lt. George Grey. His 1839 journal was one of the first works that truly shifted my understanding of this landscape. Long before roads, maps, or even reliable water sources were known to Europeans, Grey and his men were feeling their way along a coastline that was as unforgiving as it was unknown to them. And the moment that shaped everything — for them, and eventually for my own reading of this country — was the moment when their plans fell apart.

On 31 March 1839, after weeks of hardship, Grey’s party tried to land through the heavy surf of Gantheaume Bay in search of fresh water. The sea was running hard — the same kind of relentless swell that still hammers that shoreline today — but thirst forced their hand. Grey steered the first whale‑boat in, only to strike submerged rocks hidden beneath the breaking waves. The hull split. The boat shattered. His men dragged what was left onto the beach.

The second boat, unable to see the disaster through the towering surf, followed them in. Grey tried to signal them off, but the roar of the breakers swallowed his warnings. They landed slightly south, struck the shore violently, and their boat broke apart too. In minutes, both vessels were wrecked beyond repair.

From the debris they salvaged almost nothing — twenty pounds of damaged flour and a single pound of salt pork per man. That was all they had for the long march south. With no hope of relaunching and no way back to sea, Grey’s party was forced into a desperate overland journey to Perth. That march would become the first documented European passage through the mid‑west coastal hinterland, crossing the same country that would later include Nambung Station and the national park I’ve spent so many years walking.

What stays with me is not just the drama of the wrecks, but the way Grey’s writing changes from that moment on. Hungry, injured, and suddenly on foot, he saw this country with a rawness that still echoes in his pages. Reading that account before I ever truly knew the Nambung District gave me the strange sense of walking in the shadow of someone who passed through under far harsher terms — a man who never meant to explore this place, but whose misfortune left behind the earliest written impressions of the land I’ve come to know so well.

The Loss That Named the Land

As I kept tracing Grey’s route and walking the same country he was forced to cross, I began to notice something that reshaped the way I read the landscape. Many of the places I’d passed for years — names on old maps, creeks half‑buried in sand, pools tucked into the limestone — weren’t just labels. They were memorials. Quiet reminders of a man who never made it out of this country alive. That realisation pulled me deeper into the story of Frederick Smith, and into the part of Grey’s journal that still sits uneasily with me.

The final days of April 1839 found Grey’s exhausted party pushing south through the country now known as the Nambung Valley — a stretch of deep, drifting sand and low, wind‑shorn scrub that Grey described with stark simplicity. It was a landscape of long, waterless distances broken only by pale limestone rises, the same formations that still shape this coast today. The men were starving, weakened by days without food, surviving on foul, muddy water scraped from shallow depressions in the ground. Every mile demanded more effort than the last, yet they pressed on, driven by the hope of reaching the next native well before their strength failed entirely.

It was in this harsh corridor, somewhere south of Wedge Island, that Frederick Smith’s endurance finally gave out. Grey notes that Smith repeatedly fell behind as the party struggled through the loose coastal sand, each step sinking and dragging at their failing bodies. The others were themselves on the edge of collapse, and the desperate need to find water forced them onward. Smith, already the weakest of the group, could not maintain the pace. Somewhere in the long, barren sweep between Wedge and Lancelin, he slipped from sight for the last time.

From Grey’s dated entries before and after this point — and from the sharply reduced distances the party managed each day — Smith’s death is placed at around 1 May 1839. His final resting place lies in the coastal dunes two miles south of modern Lancelin, near –31.0395046, 115.3400506 (Click Here for Link) : — a lonely rise of sand overlooking the Indian Ocean. It remains one of the most poignant markers of Grey’s march: the place where a young man, worn down by hunger, thirst, and the unrelenting country of the mid‑west coast, succumbed to the hardships that nearly claimed the entire expedition.

When Grey and the surviving members of the expedition finally reached Perth, a relief mission was organised to trace their route north and search for the missing men. The party was led by Surveyor‑General John Septimus Roe, accompanied by Corporal Kinchela and two young Aboriginal men, Wyip and Warrup, whose tracking skills were indispensable. These three — Kinchela, Wyip, and Warrup — were the ones who ultimately located Frederick Smith’s last resting place in the coastal dunes south of present‑day Lancelin.

Roe’s journal makes it clear that it was Wyip and Warrup who first detected the faint signs in the sand: the scuffed tracks, the disturbed scrub, and the final place where Smith had collapsed. Guided by their reading of the country, the party followed the trail to a low rise overlooking the sea, where Smith’s body lay with his few remaining possessions. The site matched the position Grey had feared — a lonely dune in the long, waterless stretch the expedition had crossed only days before.

And this is where the names I’d walked past for years suddenly took on weight. In the aftermath of the discovery, Grey chose to honour the men involved in the search. He named the main watercourse of the district the Smith River (sometimes called the Frederick Smith River), commemorating Smith’s death during the 1839 march. Along this river he also named three permanent pools: Warrup Pool, Wyip Pool, and Kinchela Pool, recognising the contributions of the two Aboriginal trackers and Corporal Kinchela, whose efforts ensured Smith’s fate was known.

These names appeared on early maps and in colonial correspondence — and for me, they changed the way I read the land. What I had once treated as simple geographic labels revealed themselves as fragments of a story: a death in the dunes, a search party, and a moment of recognition carved into the map.

The names did not remain fixed. During the 1874–75 survey of the district, J. S. Brooking undertook a systematic re‑mapping of the area. Brooking replaced “Smith River” with the name Nambung River, adopting the Aboriginal term that had become locally recognised. To preserve the earlier commemoration, the largest tributary of the newly named Nambung River was designated Frederick Smith Creek, ensuring that Smith’s story remained tied to the landscape even as the official nomenclature evolved.

A Tree Marked B

By the time I understood how Frederick Smith’s death had shaped the early naming of this district, I began to read the old maps differently. Features I’d walked past for years — Frederick Smith Creek, the early pools named for Warrup, Wyip, and Kinchela — were no longer just labels. They were traces of people, decisions, and losses. And on one of those 1860s survey sheets, a small notation caught my eye: a simple “Tree B” marked beside the old stock‑route crossing of what was then the Smith River.

It was such a small thing — a single blazed tree — but it lodged in my mind. In a district where the bush reclaims almost everything, the idea that one marked tuart might still be standing felt almost impossible. I realised I had probably walked close to it more than once without knowing, and that was enough to send me looking.

A blaze, in the old surveying sense, was nothing more than a clean cut into the bark to expose pale sapwood. It marked something important — a route, a boundary, a reference point — in a landscape where dunes moved and maps were unreliable. Most have long since vanished into fire, storms, or the slow healing of the trees themselves. But the thought that this one might have survived more than a century was irresistible.

I made several attempts over the years, following the faint logic of the old stock route, matching early surveys to the modern ground. Each time I came close, but the country kept its secret. Then, in 2025, after two decades of walking this district, I finally found it: a weathered tuart standing just above the river flats, still alive, still holding the faint memory of a blaze carved more than a century ago. The “B” was almost gone — softened, eaten, blurred into the grain — but unmistakable once you knew where to look.

Later I learned that I wasn’t the first to rediscover it. During his early patrols, Alf Passfield, the first ranger of Nambung National Park, had recognised the same tree as a surviving landmark from the stock‑route era. He understood immediately what it represented: one of the earliest fixed European references in the district, tied to the old Smith River naming and to the first attempts to map this country. His rediscovery ensured the tree re‑entered the historical record, bridging the pastoral past with the modern management of the park.

When I stood before it in 2025, the blaze was still visible if you knew where to look, but the termites were winning. They’d hollowed the old tuart heartwood, softening the carved edges and slowly erasing the letter that once guided drovers and surveyors along the Nambung corridor. Looking at that fading “B”, I felt something I’ve felt many times in this district: the land keeps what it chooses, and lets the rest return to sand and silence. The blaze that once anchored maps and routes is slipping back into the tree’s own long memory. Soon enough, the mark will be gone, and only the stories — and the maps that recorded it — will remain.

Other Landmarks of the Area

After spending so much time tracing the stories hidden in the Nambung Valley — the blazed tree, the old stock routes, the names left behind by loss — I found myself drawn to the landmarks that have endured far longer than any blaze or boundary line. Two of them rise above everything else: North and South Hummock, the oldest recorded features on this stretch of the Turquoise Coast. Long before the Pinnacles were known, long before Nambung National Park existed, these two hills were already fixed points on European charts. Dutch navigators noted them in 1658, and Phillip Parker King referenced them again in 1820 during his coastal surveys. Their height made them impossible to miss from the sea, and their permanence made them invaluable to the surveyors, stockmen, and rangers who later worked this country.

A hummock is usually a modest thing — a rounded rise, ten or fifteen metres high at most. But North and South Hummock are anything but modest. South Hummock climbs to 123 metres, and North Hummock reaches 120 metres, towering above the surrounding plains and explaining why early mariners relied on them as coastal beacons. In a landscape where dunes shift, tracks vanish, wells dry, and even blazed trees fade back into the bark, the hummocks have remained unchanged. They were the anchors that allowed early travellers to orient themselves long before the district was mapped in detail. Even today, when you stand on the limestone country south of Cervantes or look inland from the coastal dunes, the hummocks still dominate the skyline, just as they did for the Dutch, for King, and for the stockmen who followed the inland routes.

North Hummock, closer to Cervantes, has always been the more visible of the two from the sea. It served as a navigation point for Dutch and British ships, a reference for early surveyors, and a familiar landmark for fishers and pastoral workers. Its position on the coastal dune margin made it a natural lookout long before the Pinnacles became a tourist destination. Dune movement has softened its profile over time, but the hill remains intact — a quiet, enduring presence on the horizon.

South Hummock lies further inland, on the eastern edge of the dune system. For decades it was a key waypoint on the old western access track to the Pinnacles — the same route used by locals, fishers, and famously the Leyland Brothers in their television series. In the early days of Cervantes and Jurien Bay, South Hummock became a popular picnic spot, a place where families drove up for the view across the dune fields and the limestone plains. Local history even preserves the story of the Cervantes CWA stainless‑steel barbecue, donated for public use and later swallowed entirely by the shifting sands. Locals still joke that it’s “down there somewhere,” buried beneath metres of dune — a small reminder of how this country reclaims anything left in its path.

Unlike Limey Lookout, South Hummock still exists exactly where it always has, though it is no longer accessible by vehicle. The old track has been closed for decades, and reaching the summit now requires a tough, off‑track bush walk. When I finally made the climb, the view was worth every step: the coastline stretching in pale arcs to the north and south, and inland the vast fields of bush‑trapped pinnacles revealing themselves in the morning light. From up there, the whole Nambung story — dunes, limestone, scrub, sea — lies open beneath you.

Between South Hummock and the Pinnacles sits another landmark from the early access era: Limey Lookout, a low limestone rise that once offered sweeping views over the dune system and the Pinnacles Desert. It stands at 115m tall. During the years when visitors approached from Grey Village, Limey Lookout was a moment of arrival — the place where travellers first saw the limestone desert spread out before them. Although many now call it “lost,” the truth is more subtle. The landform still exists; what has vanished are the access road, the signage, and the public memory of its location. With the closure of the old western track and the shift to sealed access from Indian Ocean Drive, Limey Lookout slipped quietly out of use. Today, no marked track leads to it, no sign identifies it, and dune movement has obscured the old approach. Only long‑time locals, early rangers, and historical maps remember where it is. In that sense, Limey Lookout survives as a ghost landmark — still there, but hidden from the casual visitor.

Together, North Hummock, South Hummock, and the forgotten rise of Limey Lookout form a kind of quiet backbone to the district. They are the fixed points in a landscape that rarely keeps anything for long, the landmarks that have watched centuries of change without ever losing their place.

Tombstone Rocks

As my research widened beyond the coastal hummocks and the old stock routes, another feature kept appearing in station notes and the margins of early maps — a place called Tombstone Rocks, tucked away on Wooka Wooka Station, east of the Nambung dune system and north of the Hill River. Unlike the Pinnacles, which have become internationally recognised, Tombstone Rocks remain almost entirely unknown outside the pastoral community. They sit quietly on private land, familiar to station workers, surveyors, and the handful of locals who’ve travelled the inland tracks between Watheroo, Badgingarra, and the Nambung River.

A friend was kind enough to fly me over that section of country, and from the air their true character becomes unmistakable. Against the pale sandplain, the slabs rise in scattered clusters — upright, solitary, and stark. From above, they look exactly like their name suggests: a natural cemetery laid out by wind and time, each stone standing alone or in small groups, their geometry far clearer from the sky than from the ground.

Tombstone Rocks belong to the same Tamala Limestone belt that underlies much of the Turquoise Coast, but they are nothing like the Pinnacles. Where the Pinnacles formed as solution pipes, these inland monoliths are erosional remnants — the last stubborn pieces left behind after wind‑scouring, sheet weathering, and fracture‑line erosion stripped away the softer material around them. The result is a field of upright slabs, each one shaped by centuries of exposure, each one a solitary marker in an otherwise level landscape.

Seen from above, their placement makes perfect sense. They sit within a natural inland corridor linking Wooka Wooka Station, Nambung Station, the Watheroo–Badgingarra uplands, and the eastern edge of the dune system. This corridor has long been a practical route for moving stock between coastal and inland leases, reaching the Nambung River pools when coastal soaks failed, and skirting the vast dune fields to the west. From the air, the rocks appear exactly where a traveller — or a drover — would want a fixed point in a landscape of repeating vegetation and shifting sand.

For the pastoral workers who lived and worked in this country, Tombstone Rocks were more than a curiosity. They were a navigation tool. Before GPS and reliable maps, stockmen relied on prominent features to orient themselves across the sandplain, and the rocks served as a dependable reference: the turn‑off to inland wells, the guidepost for mustering routes, the marker for internal station boundaries, the place where you could always re‑establish your bearings when everything else looked the same.

The name itself is descriptive rather than commemorative. Early pastoralists named features literally — The Coffins, The Graveyard, The Tombstones — and this cluster of upright slabs looked unmistakably like a row of headstones. The name appears in internal station maps, muster notes, and local oral history, but rarely on government mapping, which is why the feature remains obscure outside the district.

What struck me most, seeing them from the air, was how naturally they fit into the broader inland story — the same story that includes South and North Hummock, Limey Lookout, the Tree Marked B, Frederick Smith Creek, and the southern dry stock route. Where the coastal hummocks guided travellers along the dune edge, Tombstone Rocks guided them inland, across the limestone plains and toward the Watheroo–Badgingarra high country.

There are good reasons why Tombstone Rocks remain one of the least‑known limestone features of the mid‑west. They sit on private pastoral land, inaccessible to the public. They’ve been overshadowed by the fame of the Pinnacles. They’ve never been formally documented in geological papers or tourism material. And in a wonderfully practical moment of ranger humour, Alf Passfield once hung a sign on a group of pinnacles on the western side of Nambung National Park, labelling those as “Tombstone Rocks” simply to stop people asking where the real ones were. Generations of visitors believed the decoy, further obscuring the true inland location. Also articles written by magazines like Walkabout – titled Trees Into Tombstones reinforced the belief the main park was the tombstone area..

Most knowledge of Tombstone Rocks survives through the people who have lived and worked in this country — station families, musterers, local bushwalkers, old survey notes, and the oral histories shared across the Cervantes–Badgingarra–Watheroo district. In that sense, they remain one of the last truly quiet landmarks of the mid‑west: unchanged, unpublicised, and still woven into the fabric of the working pastoral landscape.

Local Stock Routes

As I traced the inland landmarks — Tombstone Rocks, the blazed tree, the river pools — the shape of the old movement corridors through this country became clearer. Long before sealed roads, these routes were the practical lines that connected the inland leases with the coast, the wells with the dune margins, and the high country with the Nambung River. Two routes in particular defined how people travelled through this district: the main north–south stock route, and the drier, more marginal line known locally as the Grey Route.

The main stock route was the backbone of the inland corridor. Travellers coming from the Watheroo–Badgingarra uplands would pass the Tombstone Rocks on Wooka Wooka Station — a natural marker in the middle of the sandplain — before dropping into the shallow valley where the Frederick Smith Waterhole and Well provided one of the few reliable water sources in the district. From there, the route followed the line of Frederick Smith Creek, winding westward until it met the Nambung River (known in Grey’s time as the Smith River), where the three permanent pools — Warrup, Wyip, and Kinchela — offered another chain of lifelines.

This was the same corridor that passed the Tree Marked B, the same one that skirted the northern edge of the Pinnacles long before the limestone desert became a tourist destination. It was a route built on practicality: water where you needed it, firm ground where the dunes allowed it, and enough fixed landmarks to keep a traveller oriented in a landscape that often repeats itself for kilometres.

Last year, after the fires swept through the district, I finally found the original Frederick Smith Well and Waterhole. The burn had stripped back the undergrowth just enough to reveal the old structure — the timber planks re-inforcement, the depression of the waterhole, the faint geometry of a place that had anchored travellers for more than a century. Standing there, with the blackened scrub around me and the well exposed for the first time in decades, I felt the same quiet recognition I’d felt at the blazed tree: the land had revealed another of its long‑kept stories.

Running parallel to this dependable north–south line was a second, far drier route — the one locals still call the Grey Route. Where the main stock route curved north of the Pinnacles, the Grey Route cut across the inland flats from Tombstone Rocks toward the southern edge of the dune system, passing south of the limestone desert and heading toward the squatters’ village of Grey. It was a harsher line, with fewer water sources and long stretches of soft sand, but it offered a more direct path for those who knew the country well enough to use it.

Crucially, the Grey Route did not follow Grey’s 1839 line of march. It simply crossed it — near the coast, where both lines happened to intersect the same stretch of sandplain. Beyond that single crossing point, the two paths diverged sharply. Grey’s original march was a desperate inland push for water; the later stock‑era route was a practical coastal access line leading to the fishing shacks named after him. Their overlap was incidental, not intentional.

Together, these two corridors — the reliable north–south stock route and the drier Grey Route — formed the inland skeleton of movement through the Nambung region. They connected the pastoral leases, the wells, the pools, the dune margins, and the limestone rises. They stitched together the landmarks I had spent years walking: the hummocks, the blazed tree, the river pools, the old well, and the solitary slabs of Tombstone Rocks. Seen from the air, from the ground, or from the pages of old maps, the pattern is the same: a landscape that guided people long before it was ever formally mapped, and one that still reveals its routes slowly, and only to those who keep returning.

Station Life

As with most long‑worked pastoral leases, Nambung Station carried not just stock routes and wells but a whole internal geography of its own — a patchwork of paddocks whose names still echo through local memory. Before the property became known as Nambung Station, many locals referred to it as Flourbag Station, and that name lived on in one of its most distinctive paddocks: Flourbag. Alongside it were others — Felbers, Woolston, and Clay — each one marking a different corner of the lease, each one tied to the rhythms of sheep and cattle work that shaped the station for decades.

These paddock names weren’t decorative. They were working language — the shorthand of musterers, fencers, and station hands who needed to describe country quickly and precisely. “They’re in Felbers” or “shift them through Woolston” carried meaning only if you knew the land: the limestone rises, the scrub thickets, the soft sand patches, the hidden soaks. The names became part of the station’s identity, a quiet internal map layered over the older geography of Frederick Smith Creek, the Nambung River pools, and the stock routes that threaded through or near the property.

When Gloria and Brian White took over the station around fifteen years ago, these paddock names were still in use, anchoring the modern operation to the pastoral past. Under their stewardship, Nambung Station continued to run both sheep and cattle, working the same country that had challenged generations before them. And it was during their time that the station became known for something entirely unexpected: the Nambung Country Music Muster. For a few days each year, the paddocks — Felbers, Woolston, Clay, Flourbag — filled not with stock but with caravans, campfires, and music drifting across the limestone plains. I was lucky enough to be part of running the muster, helping shape an event that brought people together in the middle of this tough, beautiful country. It was one of those rare moments when the land’s pastoral history and its community spirit met in the same dusty paddock.

In recent years, the station changed hands again. Image Resources, now the current owners, have established Nambung Village on the property — a small, modern hub set among the same paddocks that once held sheep, cattle, and the muster crowds. The new infrastructure sits lightly on the land, but the old names still linger in conversation. Felbers. Woolston. Clay. Flourbag. They are reminders that long before mining camps and sealed roads, this was working country — mapped not by GPS but by memory, habit, and the quiet logic of the land.

Walking through the district now, it’s easy to feel how many eras overlap here: the pastoral years of Flourbag Station, the sheep and cattle runs, the Whites’ time and the music muster, the new mining village, and beneath all of it the older routes — the creek, the pools, the blazed tree, the well I found after the fires. Nambung Station has worn many names and served many purposes, but its role as the quiet centre of this inland corridor has never really changed. The land remembers, even when the maps and the ownership do not.

Walking With Alf — A Companion in the Dunes

Another book I read early in my wandering through this district — and the one I have returned to more than any other — is Alf Passfield’s Nambung Here We Come. Although I never met Alf, I feel a quiet companionship with him through his writing. His words carry the same affection for the Nambung District that I feel when I walk its dunes, and every time I return to his book I find something new: a detail in a photograph, a single line that suddenly unlocks a place I thought I already understood.

There is a lightness in Alf’s writing that still makes me smile — a dry humour tucked between the limestone and the scrub — and I never feel alone when I’m out there. In the long dune corridors, on the limestone rises, or standing beside a forgotten pinnacle, Alf is always with me, his observations echoing across the landscape. He walked this country with the same curiosity and affection that guide my own steps, and his book has become a companion as much as a reference.

One of my quiet joys is recreating the few images he included in the book, tracking down the exact formations he photographed, and discovering the pinnacles he named. It feels like continuing a conversation he began decades ago — a way of keeping his map of the district alive. Some of those formations took me years to find; others revealed themselves unexpectedly, as if Alf had left a breadcrumb trail across the limestone.

I also make a point of checking the Alf Passfield signage scattered through the park. Some of these signs have stood for decades, weathering salt, wind, and sand, yet many remain as straight and sturdy as the day he erected them. I like to think Alf would be proud to know they still stand — small, enduring markers of the care he poured into this place.

His book is more than a local history. It is a companion, a guide, and a reminder that the Nambung landscape is best understood through the eyes of those who walked it with love.

As the first ranger of what would become Nambung National Park, Alf Passfield faced the difficult task of rationalising access to protect the formations. The eastern track — though historically used — was causing significant degradation. Passfield made the decisive call to close that access and redirect all visitor traffic to a more sustainable route. It was one of the earliest major conservation decisions in the park’s history, a moment when management shifted from simply allowing access to actively protecting the landscape. That decision laid the foundation for the controlled access system used today.

Alf’s legacy is not just in the signs he erected or the tracks he closed, but in the way he taught people to see the country: with respect, curiosity, and a willingness to walk slowly enough to understand it. Every time I step into the dunes or follow a faint line across the limestone, I feel him there — not as a ghost, but as a companion whose footsteps still guide my own.

Walking with Alf in my mind also means walking through the years when the park was still young — when access was rough, the tracks were shifting things, and the Pinnacles were known mostly to locals, surveyors, and the occasional adventurous traveller. Before Alf’s management changes reshaped how people reached the formations, the landscape briefly stepped into the national imagination in a way that still feels remarkable today.

In the 1970s, the Pinnacles appeared in Episode 39 of the Leyland Brothers’ television series, filmed on location in what was then a remote corner of Nambung National Park. Their journey followed the old western access route via the squatters’ village of Grey, climbing South Hummock, passing Limey Lookout, and then descending into the dune field before joining the early loop track. Watching that episode now is like opening a time capsule. The country looks raw, open, and unregulated — the Pinnacles reached only by sandy tracks threading through dunes and limestone rises, long before sealed roads or visitor centres existed.

The Leylands captured the landscape exactly as visitors once experienced it: remote, rugged, and approached through a maze of dunes that demanded patience, skill, and a good sense of direction. Their footage preserves the last years of that era — the final glimpse of the western access before Alf Passfield stepped into his role as ranger and began the long, careful process of protecting the formations.

It was Alf who recognised that the old eastern track, though historically used, was causing significant degradation. He made the difficult but necessary decision to close it, rationalise the western route, and lay the groundwork for the controlled access system used today. The Leylands’ episode stands at the hinge point between those two worlds: the wild, open years of sandy tracks and informal routes, and the emerging era of conservation‑focused management that Alf helped shape.

Seen together — Alf’s writing, the Leylands’ footage, the old tracks, the modern park — they form a layered record of how people have moved through this landscape. And each layer, in its own way, helps explain why the Nambung still feels like a place where history is not just written in books, but walked into the ground itself.

A Lost Relic in the Dunes

On one of my days wanderings through the back reaches of Nambung National Park I found what I thought was a Trigg Point Marker. What I had actually found was not a trig point at all, but something far rarer — a hydrographic surveyor’s marker, a relic from the era before satellites, when the coast was mapped by hand, by eye, and by geometry. It stands on a high dune ridge overlooking the park, a place chosen with purpose: from here the view sweeps inland across the limestone country toward Nambung Station, the very line of sight the surveyors once relied on to tie their marine charts back to the land.

The structure itself is beautifully simple and beautifully stubborn. A four‑posted pyramid frame, driven deep into the sand, still stands as straight and true as the day it was planted. At the top, two circular metal discs sit at right angles to each other, held together with old wire that has somehow resisted half a century of salt, wind, and dune movement. The discs would have been high‑contrast daymarks — bright, unmistakable targets for survey vessels offshore taking bearings or running sounding lines along the reef.

Despite the decades, the whole thing remains upright, proud, and purposeful. It hasn’t sagged, rusted through, or collapsed into the scrub. It simply waits — a forgotten instrument from a forgotten method of mapping, quietly watching the dunes shift around it.

Standing beside it, with the wind coming off the ocean and the inland ridges glowing in the late light, it’s easy to imagine the surveyors who once climbed this same rise. They would have hauled their gear up through the soft sand, checked their angles, aligned their instruments with distant inland points, and then signalled to the ship offshore to begin another run of depth soundings. This lonely marker was part of a much larger geometry — a network of lines, bearings, and sightlines that shaped the earliest accurate charts of this coast.

Today, modern technology has no need for it. GPS has erased the old craft. But the marker remains, a quiet survivor of the analogue age, and finding it felt like discovering a small, rusted doorway back into the history of how this coastline was first understood.

The Milk Bottles — small pinnacles, big nostalgia

There’s a little corner of the Pinnacles Desert that I always drift back to — a cluster affectionately known as the Milk Bottles. It sits closer to the Visitors Information Centre than many of the larger formations, and the pinnacles here are noticeably smaller, softer, and more rounded. You really could say they look like old‑fashioned milk bottles lined up in the sand.

Whenever I wander into this patch, I’m taken straight back to 2002, one of my very first visits to the area. I was so young then, still figuring out the landscape, still learning how the light moves across the dunes. I would just sit among those little limestone columns, legs folded in the warm sand, and let the scenery settle around me. No rush. No crowds. Just the quiet company of the Milk Bottles and the endless yellow plain stretching out to the horizon.

Even now, decades later, that spot hasn’t lost its pull. The formations may be small, but the memories they hold are anything but.

The Fog — The Pinnacles in Their Most Elusive Mood

One of my favourite things about the Pinnacles is how quickly they change their mood. Light, season, wind, cloud — the landscape never repeats itself — but nothing transforms it as completely as the fog. When the fog rolls in, the Pinnacles become a different world entirely: quieter, darker, richer, and somehow more ancient.

The fog usually arrives during the night, slipping inland from the coast and settling low across the limestone desert. By dawn it hangs in long, drifting sheets, moving with a rhythm that feels almost tidal. Some mornings it sits high, glowing softly with the first light. Other mornings it hugs the ground so tightly that the Pinnacles appear only as silhouettes — dark, softened, and strangely monumental.

I’ve seen fog here in every season. Summer fog that vanishes the moment the sun clears the dunes. Winter fog that lingers long after sunrise. Spring fog that curls around the formations like smoke. And then there are the rare mornings when the fog forms a bank so defined you can walk into it like a doorway.

One year, I did exactly that. I walked through the fog into clear air — bright, sharp, sunlit — then turned around and walked straight back into the fog again. It felt like stepping between two worlds: one crisp and open, the other muted and ancient. The Pinnacles changed character with every step. Colours deepened. Shadows softened. Even sound seemed to thicken. Familiar formations felt new, as if the fog had redrawn their edges.

Fog changes the way you move through the desert. You walk slower. You listen more. You notice things you would miss on a clear day — the texture of a weathered face, the lean of a pinnacle, the faint line of a dune crest dissolving into white. The fog darkens the limestone and enriches its colours: ochres deepen, greys turn almost blue, and the sand takes on a soft, velvety glow. Shapes appear and disappear. Distant pinnacles fade into nothing. Close ones loom suddenly out of the mist.

It is the Pinnacles at their most intimate — a landscape revealed in fragments, as if the desert is choosing what to show and what to hide.

Over the years I’ve taken countless photographs out here, but the fog mornings are the ones I treasure most. They capture the Pinnacles in a way no clear day ever could — not as a tourist icon, but as a living landscape with its own breath and its own quiet moods. These are the mornings when the desert feels like it belongs only to those who rise early enough, walk slowly enough, and stay long enough to witness them.

Above I have shares a few of my favourite images — small moments from mornings when the fog and the limestone spoke in the same soft voice.

To Be Continued!

In the end, everything I have learned about this district — the old stock routes, the wells, the hummocks, the blazed trees, the hidden limestone fields, the stories of drovers, surveyors, rangers, and station families — has come from walking slowly enough to let the land speak. Every discovery has been a quiet one: a faint depression where a well once stood, a weathered blaze almost lost to the bark, a limestone rise glimpsed from the air, a paddock name remembered by someone who worked the country long before me.

This landscape has never given up its stories easily. It reveals them in fragments — a line on an 1860s map, a sentence in Alf Passfield’s book, a photograph taken decades ago, a memory shared over a fence line. But when those fragments are placed together, they form a picture far richer than any single history could hold. The Nambung is not just dunes and pinnacles; it is a corridor of movement, a pastoral memory, a place shaped by waterholes, wells, and the people who depended on them.

I think often of Alf when I’m out there. His words walk beside me in the dune corridors, on the limestone rises, and in the quiet places where the old routes cross the modern ones. His book is a reminder that this country rewards those who return, who look twice, who listen. The Leyland Brothers captured a moment in its story; Alf helped protect it; the pastoralists worked it; the surveyors mapped it; and I, in my own small way, keep walking it — adding my footsteps to the long chain of those who came before.

And so I will continue to explore.
I will continue to find my peace in the long, wind‑cut corridors and the soft morning light on the limestone plains.
I will continue to discover the quiet things — the things that don’t make it onto maps, the things that survive only in memory, in old notes, in the land itself.

Because this district is not finished.
It still has stories to tell, and I am still listening.

Primary & Historical Sources

Lt. George Grey (1839)

• Grey, George. Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, 1837–1839.
London: T. & W. Boone, 1841.
(Primary source for the wreck of the whale‑boats, Frederick Smith’s death, and the march south.)

Phillip Parker King (1820)

• King, Phillip Parker. Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia.
London: John Murray, 1827.
(References to North and South Hummock as coastal navigation points.)

Dutch Navigators (1658)

• VOC charts and journals referencing coastal rises along the mid‑west coast.
(Cited in maritime history compilations and WA coastal navigation studies.)

Local History & Ranger Sources

Alf Passfield — Nambung Here We Come

• Passfield, Alf. Nambung Here We Come.
Self‑published, c. 1980s.
(A foundational local history source. Contains early ranger observations, rediscovery of Tree Marked B, early access routes, pastoral landmarks, and pre‑park stories of the Nambung District.)

This book is especially important because:

• It preserves first‑hand ranger knowledge from the earliest years of Nambung National Park.
• It documents features that no longer exist (e.g., Limey Lookout).
• It records oral histories from pastoral families and early locals.
• It captures the landscape before modern management and sealed access roads.

Surveying, Mapping & Pastoral Records

WA Department of Lands & Surveys (1860s–1900s)

• Early cadastral maps showing:• Tree Marked B
• Frederick Smith Creek
• Early stock routes
• North & South Hummock

 

Nambung Station & Wooka Wooka Station Records

• Internal muster maps
• Pastoral boundary notes
• Oral histories from station families
(Sources for Tombstone Rocks, inland navigation routes, and pastoral‑era naming.)

DBCA (Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions)

• Nambung National Park historical notes
• Ranger field reports (including Passfield’s rediscovery of Tree Marked B)
• Early access‑route documentation

Local & Oral History Sources

Cervantes & Jurien Bay Community Histories

• Cervantes CWA oral accounts (South Hummock BBQ story)
• Local tourism committee notes (1970s–1990s)
• Interviews with early residents and fishers

Leyland Brothers Archives

• Ask the Leyland Brothers, Episode 39 (1970s)
(Shows the old western access route via Grey Village, South Hummock, and Limey Lookout.)

Geological Sources

Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA)

• Tamala Limestone and Coastal Aeolianite Formations
• Geomorphology of the Turquoise Coast
(Primary geological context for the Pinnacles, Tombstone Rocks, and inland limestone remnants.)

Academic Papers

• Studies on solution‑pipe formation (Pinnacles)
• Erosional remnant formation (Tombstone Rocks)
• Dune movement and coastal geomorphology of the mid‑west

Modern Access & Management Sources

DBCA Management Plans

• Nambung National Park Management Plan (various editions)
(Details on access closures, track rationalisation, and the shift to Indian Ocean Drive.)

Main Roads WA

• Documentation on the construction of Indian Ocean Drive
(Context for modern access changes.)