Let me tell you all about the Busselton Jetty


Today we tried to stay local in Dunsborough, rather than drive across half the state. That was fine in the morning, but there just isn’t that much going on here midweek in the winter, so after a morning of drinking coffee in every café in town (including one named after Nikolai Tesla where they didn’t spell him name correctly:

) we all had a nap and then drove down to Busselton.

There’s a jetty at Busselton, a bloody big jetty, and this was something that La Serpiente could not get straight in her head. "What’s a jetty?" she kept asking. We pointed to the jetty. We mentioned other jetties she’s previously encountered, in Seattle, Penang and Nova Scotia. We pointed to the jetty again.

She asked us why there was a jetty. This is a greater mystery. As far as I can tell, the main purposes of Busselton Jetty are to provide a source of revenue for the ticketing office on Busselton Jetty, and provide somewhere for the train that goes up and down Busselton Jetty to go, rather than have it fall in the sea. Beyond that, Busselton Jetty has the same existential meaning as Everest for mountain climbers – "because it’s there".

Busselton is next to Dunsborough, which means on clear roads it’s a half hour drive away. We’d promised the girls that they’d see the sunset today, so as we only got there at 4:30, we stayed down in Busselton to watch the sun go down. And very nice it was too , even if this far from the equator, the sunset is a few fiery orange seconds and then a rapidly encroaching darkness:

We ate at The Goose, which is right by the Busselton Jetty. Maybe that’s the reason the Busselton Jetty exists, so that you can have somewhere to photograph on your way to The Goose. I don’t mean to denigrate The Goose; the pizza is good (even if we were planning on eating less pizza with the girls, after it metastatised from a Friday night treat to 75% of their diet) and there’s a great view of the Busselton Jetty, but doesn’t that strike you as a bit of a coincidence?

Paranoid, (or at least I was) we went back to the car, children doing their best to lose their shoes along the way, then drove back to Dunsborough, which seemed to take three times as long as the drive there. Then it rained, a first after the perfectly dry days we’ve had all week, and this somehow inspired us to put the kids in the swimming pool at the resort. It’s a nice swimming pool, if a touch deep for two foolhardy girls, and it was hard to tear them away from it, but all that screaming and shouting meant they went to sleep more swiftly tonight.

After which my wife, exhausted by Busselton Jetty antics, fell quickly asleep leaving me to write this record of the day.


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