Bruce Newton•3 Sept 2026

FEATURE

THE BIG DASH: Tyre squishing

Overtaking dramas, island hopping and leaning jockey wheels

No matter how long we drive southward along the Western Australian coast, the wonder of the place just does not abate.

Sure there are times when the highway drudges through spinifex and red dirt, but every time we head back toward the coast and the blue waters of the Indian Ocean, we are captured all over again.

After Cable Beach, Exmouth and Coral Bay, after the Whale Sharks and Manta Rays, after the ridiculously colourful tropical fish, after the force of Quobba Blowholes and the remote majesty of Dirk Hartog Island, we thought we must have seen it all.

Then we got to Monkey Mia and Kalbarri and realised we were so, so wrong...

Towing the line

Tas, the Kia Tasman X-Pro, has had a relatively quiet week. Our shift from Denham to Monkey Mia was a 20-minute, 26km drive. We stayed there three nights.

Then came one solid day’s drive of about 400km to Kalbarri. There was some local driving over the next few days while we stayed there, but not that much.

That one day of substantial effort showed off the usual positives and negatives of towing with Tas. Comfortable and refined. Under-powered and slow. Too thirsty if you press too hard.

After the holiday traffic exiting Coral Bay, I was probably overly conscious of not holding up faster traffic. More than once I pulled into parking stops (there’s more of them the closer we get to Perth).

I also pulled off once just to give myself some space. We were following a caravan doing about 85km/h out from Denham toward the main highway at the Overlander Roadhouse.

Tas definitely had the power to pass, but the right-hand side of the van ahead was spending too much time on the wrong side of the centre divider for my liking. I just didn’t see the point in taking a risk.

This is a road where things could go wrong very quickly, so we opted out and pulled off at Hamelin Pool and checked out the stromatolites instead.

Stromatolites are microbial structures that have existed on Earth for about 3.5 billion years. Jane could see a connection between me and them. Something about me being ancient and the microbes (food stains) on my t-shirt.

As we drove south toward Kalbarri the countryside clearly changed. Suddenly, there were fences and pastures and farms. This is the point in WA where there are consistent winter rains and where grainbelt farming starts.

I know from past experience you can turn eastward round here and head inland to a vast sea of wheat. It’s a different type of ocean, but also awe-inspiring.

Here are this week’s fuel numbers:

Litres consumed: 130.37
KM travelled: 767km
Consumption average: 16.997L/100km
$ paid: $303.05 (best price paid: $2.269 per litre)
KM per $: 2.53km (was 2.77km per $ last time)

Sights and sounds

Things we enjoyed this week:

Monkey Mia: All we were expecting was a caravan park, a beach and maybe, if we were lucky, a dolphin fin in the distance.

After all, this place defines remote. It’s 850km from Perth on the Peron Peninsula. The sealed road goes no further.

Instead, it became one of our favourite experiences of the entire trip. The place is so peaceful it soothed us.

There are the pristine beaches and the crystal clear waters. And they really are populated by friendly dolphins that come right up to the water’s edge for a chat – yep, you can hear them clicking away.

If you stand anywhere on the beach for a few minutes you should see dolphins. Swimming, feeding, jumping. It never gets old.

It helped the park itself is maintained to a high standard. Owned and run by the RAC WA, it has nice, large flat sites, the amenities are clean and the rubbish bins are emptied regularly.

We appreciate that stuff.

And because it’s expanded in recent years from CP to full-blown resort with apartments and cabins, there’s an outdoor bar on the beach for sundowners and a restaurant if you feel like togging up and spoiling yourself. We did, one night. As the sun went down, kids were running up and down the beach just metres away chasing a playful dolphin.

These are not things you do in most CPs.

Our stay was aided by mid-winter mid-20-degree temperatures and a notable reduction in the wind gusts that had been a constant during our few preceding days in Denham (an entirely pleasant place I hasten to add).

I’ve listened to people rave about Monkey Mia in the past and nodded and smiled. Now I understand.

It was on our list of places to visit in WA more because of its fame than any burning desire to go there.

We both would love to go back, get one of those beachside caravan sites and stay for, oh I don’t know, a year or two (well, maybe a month).

Kalbarri and Kalbarri National Park: Monkey Mia is a caravan park and resort inside a conservation park. Kalbarri is a whole town almost surrounded by a national park!

Its geography makes it a beautiful place. There’s a bay where the town centre sits, but everywhere else there are cliffs and angry seas. You fall asleep to the sound of roaring surf, which is entirely pleasant.

A friend sent me this note about his childhood holiday memories of the place, I hope he doesn’t mind that I reproduce it here:

“We used to swim across the river with a large plastic rubbish bin and fill it up with oysters picked straight off the reef!

“And then would head to the jetty and buy fresh snapper off the back of the fishing boats for a seafood feast.

“Used to set up tents with 2 other families in the Riverside caravan park and the town consisted of a general store, pub and 2 caravan parks.

“I’m sure things have changed a lot though in the past 40 odd years!!”

They have, but not so you much can’t connect with that lovely description.

The National Park itself has two famous attractions, the Skywalks, which jut out over the Murchison River, and the Nature’s Window where you literally have to queue to get your photo taken (I mean, we’re 10 miles from nowhere here!).

Being committed tourists, we did both.

But then, unlike most other people visiting the park that day, we went on and did the Loop Walk that descends to the river, follows its course for several kilometres and then ascends to the finish.

All up it’s 9km and it is festooned – I mean you can’t miss them – with quite graphic warnings about how risky it is to do this walk, especially in summer.

Well, as it was mid-winter, we weren’t worried about the heat. But I’ll tell you what, some of the scrambling we did over rock ledges 10m above the river certainly got our attention.

We made it, though, and that made the time spent on the walk all the more satisfying. It felt like a real achievement.

This place has a different feel to Dales Gorge at Karijini National Park, which we also hiked and loved. That was more enclosed and sheer. This place feels vast.

FYI, the pub on Kalbarri’s foreshore is a great place for a sundowner, while there’s also a characterful micro-brewery tucked away in the backstreets called called Finlay’s.

Denham: The only town on the Peron Peninsula was our launch pad for our day trip to Dirk Hartog Island, but we actually stayed there four nights.

We really enjoyed the small independent CP we stayed at called Mia Mia Shark Bay. We had a water view, were shielded from the (pretty constant) wind by a solid grove of trees, and the place – under new owners (just one month!) - was spic and span and friendly.

Bit like the town really. It’s the gateway to the Francois Peron National Park and Monkey Mia but hasn’t got the same vibe as Exmouth or Broome, even though there are plenty of visitors, mostly grey!

It’s a working town with a working vibe. No micro breweries here!

Leaning mystery

OK, so I related the story of replacing our jockey wheel in perhaps too much detail a few weeks ago.

But I’ve noticed the Trail A Mate hydraulic jack we’ve swapped to has now developed a lean. Or at least it does sometimes.

I wander CPs a bit and have noticed some other jacks lean and some others don’t. So it’s a bit of a mystery.

I finally had a bit of time on my hands so I rang Trail A Mate in Adelaide and got on to a very nice person named Shaun, who looked at my photos, talked to me over the phone and educated me about tyre squish.

“When you take the car off the hitch does the hitch move sideways?” Shaun asked me.

“Yes, it sometimes does,” I answered.

“OK, that’s tyre squish. It’s because you’ve backed in at an angle and there’s some distortion built into the tyre. The movement is the tyre straightening itself.”

Ah, fascinating stuff! Shaun’s suggestion was to reverse in to where I want to set up the van, then reverse back a further four or five feet, then drive forward past the mark four or five feet. Then, finally, reverse back to the chosen spot again.

He reckons that should eliminate the squish and the movement and my jack will sit straight.

Great, can’t wait to give it a try. I just keep learning new things all the time.

And he says the jack is fine – which is $650 relief!

Number crunching

I’ve already mentioned RAC Monkey Mia Resort, but I thought I’d give you a bit of an insight into the sort of numbers involved in running a big facility like this.

These numbers come from the resort manager Martin Greenside, who very kindly gave me some time to explain the challenges of running a big CP.

The resort includes 165 powered caravan sites, around 60 unpowered camping sites, beachfront villas, hotel-style rooms, family accommodation, backpacker dormitories, two restaurants and bars, a retail store, commercial laundry, two swimming pools and extensive guest facilities.

All up 110,000 people visit the site every year. About 40,000 stay at least one night. At peak times during school holidays there are 1200 guests on-site each night.

Around 85 people work there, all of them living on-site. Around 90 per cent of the workforce are backpackers completing regional work requirements for their visas.

In the course of a year the site uses 1.74 tonnes of beans to brew around 70,000 coffees, cooks up 95,000 rashers of bacon (that’s 2380kg!), serves up 10.6 tonnes of hot chips, 11,705 pizzas using 1560kg of mozzarella, 22,848 waffles and 10,260 Magnum ice creams.

And a not entirely unrelated statistic: the joint works its way through 4128 jumbo toilet rolls per annum!

Now you know. Maybe you never really wondered, but now you know.

THE BIG DASH: Tyre squishing

Also read:

Towing the line

Sights and sounds

Leaning mystery

Number crunching

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