July 17^th

South to Beacon after a lovely campsite at Billburning Rock. We have had a great day, all very interesting and excellent roads to travel on.

Beacon is a very smart well cared for town. The school is quite large as in buildings, but with only 37 pupils in Prep to Year 7. There are 5 part time teachers. I imagine the children are being exposed to a wide education. After completing Year 7, children go off to Boarding School in Perth.

The General Store is very good so we have replenished our food supplies. John filled EC with fuel ..the cheapest we have had at $1.40 per litre.

The Information Centre has wonderful records of all the native trees of the area. We took some time looking over  the details about Eucalypts..in particular Mallee Eucalypts. There are nearly 20 different species. The collection consists of details of pressed flowers and leaves, photos, buds and nuts. All botanical details are recorded as well as the common names used for each tree. This project as well as the Botanical Park Project was developed about 20 years ago. The teachers and pupils at the school grew and planted many of these local trees into a Botanical Park. What a wonderful project for the school and the local community members to work together on.

A natural avenue of Gimlet trees.

After a couple of hours we headed east into ‘Gimlet’ country. These trees are absolutely sensational. I first saw them about 25 years ago, east of Norseman, and eventually made a wall quilt which was inspired by them, particularly the copper trunks. These trees have made our trip today quite spectacular. The bitumen road made its way through wide broad acre wheat crops. The town of Mukinbuden is a progressive little town as well with a camping ground, an IGA store and a Hardware shop.

 We continued on and eventually camped before we reached the town of Bullfinch. Lake Baladjie Nature Reserve has wonderful red soil growing typical Mallee scrub. We have our washing hanging on a line amongst the trees. It is a fine cool and peaceful night.

Gimlet tree showing fluted copper coloured trunk