The wild coastal landscape of Innes National Park creates an awesome impression on visitors, as Kerryn Goldsworthy discovers.

CONSIDER the Western Whipbird, a small mousy-brown creature whose two signature tunes are either a harsh and grating squawk or a sweetly sung half-bar of Happy Birthday. Pathologically shy, it makes its home exclusively in dense mallee scrub; subsequently it was not discovered until the early 1960s to be living at the “Bottom End” of Yorke Peninsula, one of a few small colonies of the species to be found in similar country across southern Australia.

I have a theory that one reason Cornish settlers were attracted to Yorke Peninsula, apart from the copper mines, was that they were used to living on a peninsula and therefore felt at home. Both the old home and the new were awash in sea-light from all sides and were sticking out an adventurous toe into a cold, wild ocean.

In the case of Yorke Peninsula, this exploratory toe was declared a National Park in 1970, in response to the need to preserve the mallee habitat. Were it not for the Western Whipbird, much of the extraordinarily beautiful and fragile coastline of that part of the world would be in line to be degraded and destroyed, as the peninsula begins to open up to holidaymakers, tourists and retirees, and as the astonishing surf beaches of Innes National Park become known, not just to locals but on a national, even international scale.

So it’s a paradoxical kind of place, for its very wildness is its greatest attraction, and the park has been carefully developed to preserve its unspoilt character. It’s clear that at every turn and in every way a delicate balance is maintained between attracting visitors and making sure the place doesn’t get trashed by them.

There’s compulsory registration of all visitors; clear signposting to beaches, walking trails and campsites; one very good sealed road following the line of the coast with some good, well-maintained tracks radiating out to the beaches and cliffs; lots of information about animals, plants and history on unobtrusive interpretive signs and plaques; and all of it grounded in an ongoing compromise between preserving the environment and keeping it accessible.

The dense low-growing mallee scrub does not feature tall sheltering trees, so the sky is huge and the horizon largely unbroken. This is the kind of unpretentious, survivalist vegetation that thrives with its roots in ancient rock and its crown in salt-laden, windy air.

At Ethel Beach you look down to where the rusty ribs of the wreck of the Ethel poke out of the golden and inaccessible sand like some long-dead beast.

Further north, behind Dolphin Beach and Shell Beach, the sand dunes rear up over head like giant waves about to break.

At the more exposed points, such as the West Cape lighthouse or the southern head of Pondalowie Bay, you look down from the edge of the water-worn and honeycombed limestone cliff into churning white surf and black water.

It’s not a landscape for the faint-hearted. It’s not a trip for the faint-hearted, either; the last leg of the drive, from Warooka to Stenhouse Bay, takes you through a flat landscape of low scrub in which the only fellow living creature I saw for 40km was a little hovering hawk. You’re acutely aware that you are headed for land’s end, and that if you keep going in the same direction you’ll skim past the western end of Kangaroo Island and end up in Antarctica.

At 300km from Adelaide, it’s really too far for a day trip. Getting there, getting around and getting back is the equivalent of driving to Ballarat. The best way to see this park is to camp; or, if you’re not one of nature’s campers, to make it part of a longer and more leisurely driving holiday, or at the very least to stay overnight or longer in the nearby towns of Marion Bay or Corny Point.

In the sheltered parts of the coastline around the park, the water is a flat transparent aquamarine, and you can bask and snorkel in the rockpools at Shell Beach, or fish at Brown’s Beach, a blue and gold landscape for the well-travelled salmon who have caught a ride on the Leeuwin Current from the southwest coast of WA, and stopped to feed and breed in the sheltered waters of the bay.

If you don’t like landscapes or water sports – as well as swimming, surfing and fishing (there are several dive sites where you can inspect the many submerged wrecks) – there’s the wildlife. It starts with 90 species of birds, including the one for whom the park was dedicated, as well as the eccentric mallee fowl, imposing sea birds such as ospreys and sea eagles, and the emus who wander at will through the landscape. There are lizards, snakes and pygmy possums, and kangaroos who will sit in the middle of the road and stare at you as though daring you not to stop.

If on the way to the park you stop in Minlaton and go to the Visitors’ Centre to pick up whatever you can in the way of information and maps, you can see in the attached gallery the work of local artists, including Allyson Parsons and Mark Short, whose paintings teach you how to look properly at the endless variations of shrubs and grasses.
In the chain of salt lakes across the park you can find what the interpretive signs call the Rarest Rocks on Earth: stromatolites, made of blue-green algae filaments built up over thousands of years.
For a landscape so inhuman-seeming, the region has plenty of ghosts. There is an actual ghost town, the remains of the once-thriving Inneston, where roofless white stone walls loom up out of the limestone rock like phantom buildings, and where one of the several walking trails will take you. There are the ghosts of the many wrecked ships and their sailors. And there are, of course, the ghosts of inhabitants much older than any shipwrecked sailor or pioneer; there have been recent archaeological finds at Brown’s Beach indicating the importance of the area to the traditional owners.

This awe-inspiring place gives the feeling that if you don’t give it the respect it deserves, it will simply swallow you up, like the schoolgirls at Hanging Rock. It’s dangerous and gorgeous and fragile; you need to tread lightly there and leave nothing but your footprints behind.