Journey's end in Western Australia

The view of Perth from Kings Park. Photo / Jill Worrall

It's our last morning on the train. Breakfast - salmon crepes with asparagus for me - is served as the Indian Pacific winds its way along the Avon River valley. Tall eucalypts flank the river which flows between large rock outcrops. A kangaroo hops along the far bank.

We'd spent 65 hours on the train and travelled more than 4350km and not once had I been bored. I'd read, slept, looked out the window for hours and eaten.

I'd planned to skip the odd meal, or at least some of the courses, but never did. I'd have to walk it off in Fremantle although I suspected it would take something more like a trans-Nullarbor trek to do that.

A cool breeze was blowing along the railway platform. I'd expected sultry temperatures but the brisk wind was a wake-up call to senses that had lapsed into a stupor over the last four days.

Perth is a city on the edge of nothingness - its back is to the desert and the rest of the continent - its face turns to Asia.

Singapore and Bali are far closer for Western Australians contemplating a holiday than is Sydney.

While we had made the journey from Kalgoorlie overnight and in comfort, the early miners who travelled between the gold mines and Perth laboured for several weeks to do the same trip.

The poorest of miners transported all their possessions and equipment to the goldfields by wheelbarrow. Their goal when returning to Perth, other than the fleshpots of the city, would probably have been the Perth Mint.

At one time this downtown building processed all the gold mined in Western Australia (today gold is melted down into bars at an unmarked facility somewhere near Perth's international airport).

The mint still mints coins for investors and collectors. The gold pour/melting house is still operational - one furnace is heated to incandescence on an hourly basis to demonstrate how gold is melted down and transformed into ingots.

When the facility was converted into a primarily tourist attraction, one of the apprentices who was helping with the removal of decades of soot from the smelting room noticed tiny flecks of gold among it. The soot was gathered up and processed - it yielded about $17,000 worth of gold. Did the apprentice get a bonus I wondered?

The best place to admire Perth and the Swan River that snakes through it is to climb up to Kings Park and Botanical Garden. Although it was past the main wildflower season the brilliant red Sturt's Desert Pea was flowering prolifically and fluffy lemon eucalypt flowers were exploding from hard red flower cases.

It was a different story only a few metres away. Arsonists had been at work - swathes of trees stood with blackened trunks and shrivelled leaves but even after just a few weeks the grass trees were sporting brand new emerald green moptops.

We travelled to Fremantle by ferry along the Swan River. It was the weekend and waterway was bobbing with boats of all kinds - yachts with spinnakers and half a dozen crew shared the river with little wooden sailing dinghies skippered by boys so little they seem to sprout like mushrooms from their boats.

Motor cruises gunned past us - one seemed to be hosting a stag do, at least that's why I assumed there were two topless girls wound around several of the passengers.

There were canoeists on the river too, a couple of pelicans, dogs and children frolicking near the shore and amongst it all three pods of dolphins.

Mansions sprawled down the steep banks, the marinas were full of what my mother would call gin palaces. Would the recession be hurting here?

At the Port of Fremantle container cranes were gliding along the quays opposite a substantial blue and gold vessel - an Australian Customs and Fisheries boat.

Tied up beside it was a fishing boat from Lyttelton. Looming over the overseas passenger terminal was the largest vessel ever to dock at Fremantle, the cruise ship Diamond Princess bound for a tour of South East Asia. Couples with sets of new matching luggage were boarding.

Just along the wharf from them was a bronze sculpture depicting two of the thousands of child immigrants from Britain who'd been sent to the Lucky Country after the Second World War.

At their feet were two little cardboard suitcases.

- Jill Worrall

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Pictured above: The view of Perth from Kings Park. Photo / Jill Worrall