Yardie Creek.

Me and an Ant Hill Yardie Creek Road. 1970 something.


As a grown up, I don't camp. I don't like it. It's just not something I aspire to....ever. As a kid, when someone else was doing all the hard work I loved camping at Yardie Creek. It was a few hours drive from our little town on the cape and we always went with friends. Like most of my early childhood Yardie Creek meant hours and hours of unsupervised play. While the grown ups set up camp us kids took off. The road to Yardie is a long stretch of red dirt, punctuated by giant ant hills, scrub and dunes. At one point you have to drive across the creek to get to primo camping by the ocean. Back in 1970 something there was no campground, no main road and no satellite/cell communications. Really out in the middle of nowhere.
Me and the neighbor kids Yardie Creek Dunes.


Out in the middle of nowhere there are no rules to how kids play. The dunes were high enough that we could get lost ( and we did) there were tons of clearings in the scrub that looked like little rooms and we would devise entire towns full of buildings. Using driftwood, shells and rocks we made money and food and toys. And then...disaster. Always. At some point we would create a cyclone or great flood or mass murderer to decimate our town sending us screaming back to camp in time for real food. Some of my best childhood memories are of hanging out in those little bare patches in the scrub dunes out of the sight of grown up eyes with books and shells. Paradise for my eight year old self.Scrub camping on Yardie Creek, there is a smidgen of Indian Ocean visible in the corner.


It seemed like every meal included bread toasted on long spikes over the fire. Never has any pale wan thing that popped up out of a kitchen toaster compared with the smokey crusty sand covered bread on a stick. Maybe it was just that we were starving.
Campsite at Yardie Creek. That's my Mom in the red. Her friend Raelene in the stripes.

Yardie Creek empties out onto a wide sandy beach with high dunes. My Dad loved to take us driving along the beach letting the older kids steer. One time when he had probably had way too many Black Swan Lagers he took us dune jumping, except that there were too many kids to fit in the cab so we rode in the back. Going as fast as that big truck could go, jumping dunes, kids flying around in the bed. A favourite game of the Dads was too see how far up the side of a dune they could drive before sliding back down. They would back the truck out into the surf and gun that big FORD engine driving at full speed up the side of the dunes ending in an anticlimactic slow motion slide back to the beach. On this trip to Yardie with all us kids in the back, my Dad at the wheel we charged the dune wall up, up, almost to vertical. My Dad miscalculated and shifted as he went over a clump of scrub. The resulting lurch bounced a bunch of us up and over the sides of the truck. It was all funny until we realized that the the truck had hit the highpoint of the dune and was sliding back towards us. We scampered off through the prickle bushes and scrub. We chased down the truck, hopped back in and spent the ride back picking prickles off of each other. We never told out mothers.Our neighbor Ray in the bed of my Dad's truck. You can barely see the "Caution Left Hand Drive" sticker on the bumper. Australians drive on the right.

My kids will never experience Yardie Creek the way I did. It isn't there any more. The Cape Range and beaches have been discovered by Australian Tourists. It's still wild and beautiful but there are roads now, and satellite phones. Campgrounds and tours in beach buggies. Huts on the beach and probably ( hopefully) no drunken Dads bouncing their kids out of big American pickups. There are plenty of things about my childhood that I am not in the least bit wistful over. Plenty of dark scary places, bad adult behaviour and poor decisions. But Yardie Creek isn't one of them. This little gem of a place stands out as sandy and free. It's pretty unlikely that I will ever get back to Yardie Creek, but I hope that I can find that same sandy, dirty, free place in my heart again. I think I have been missing it.