Coffee and Serendipity in the Outback

A morning-after fog delays our departure until the coffee and calories mitigate the effects of our ‘Kalgoorlie Crawl’, a Friday night out in the outback mining town. Floating in the midday heat a quiet 130kms drive away, Menzies (pop.235) emerges from a mirage worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. It’s a sleepy, historic gold boom town according to the tourist guide. It quietly and generously unfolds its charms. We tour the Italianate Town Hall, whose 100 year old clocktower, the visitors centre notes, was without a clock until 2000. Replacing the original, lost at sea en-route from England in 1905, the impressive new four-faced clock appropriately styled after Big Ben, first chimed to bring in the new Millennium.
In a land of good coffee and great pies, the Achievable Outback Café (our road trip ‘BEST OF’ award winner) serves the best of the best coffee, and lip-smackingly good homemade pies. Supporting the local economy, we replenish our caffeine and calories and amble across to the Visitors Centre to find out about meeting other, now urgent needs. It looks closed, the door firmly shut. As we peer through the windows a sharp tug opens the door and we enter a ‘Dr Who Tardis meets village hall’ space where, Catie, that's Catie with a C we're told, welcomes us with a smile, a key to the required facilities and an enthralling two hours of ‘watching, listening and asking’about; life and art; environment and tourism; community and social media, with visiting locals who just ‘drop in’. Oh, and more coffee. And all because we needed a wee.
Discovering Menzies is a serendipitous by-product to visiting Antony Gormley’s “Inside Australia” sculptures, a drive west to Lake Ballard. 51 humanoid metallic sculptures cast from body scans of some Menzies folk, are dispersed across the dry salt crusts like dreamtime alien ancestors. Views from our lakeside campsite are extraordinary; long sunset shadows which seem to walk across the flat crust. Later, the clear night sky and a near-full moon highlight the dark outlines against the white in stark monochrome. It is as spectacular as I’d hoped. Apart, that is, from the flies. Hundreds of them. And the recent rains that turned the crusty lake into a Glastonbury-like quagmire, whose clay-like soils still stain our boots after our wanderings. Oh and did I mention the flies? Visiting Lake Ballard is an effort, eased by coffee, pies and the Menzies charm. Check opening times, the weather and prepare for flies. It’s worth it.