Woodies on tour!: 1st stop Lake Argyle W.A.

16 July
Lake Argyle

We left Timber Creek and set off to the Border Control area on the Highway. It seemed to take forever along this stretch of road. We queued up at the Quarantine check point, eventually a nice young man came to talk to us and search through our caravan food store cupboards and fridge. All was fine, thank goodness, we saw about ten carrier bags full of fruit and vegetables laying on the floor near the office, ready to be destroyed.

We set off on our merry way and after about 20mins came to our turn off for Lake Argyle, we hadn't booked anything here so we were hoping to just get something. The scenery was once again just beautiful and we caught a glimpse of the Lake in the distance. We were given a very good spot well away from the main caravan area, we were very happy with it. After a short discussion with the reception staff about when and which Lake Argyle cruise to go on, we decided to book ourselves on the Saturday afternoon sunset one. This is the one where we will get complimentary dips, cheese and biscuits and free alcohol.

The Caravan parks infinity pool....freezing cold

View looking down towards the caravan

One of the Luxury Villas on CP $395 per night sleeps 2

The resorts helicopter

This afternoon we went on a drive to the lookout areas and the Dam that was only a couple of kilometres away, the views were just beautiful.

The construction of the Ord River Dam was completed in 1971 by the American Dravo Corporation.The dam was officially opened the following year. The dam is 335 metres long, and 98 metres high. The earth-fill only dam wall at Lake Argyle is the most efficient dam in Australia in terms of the ratio of the size of the dam wall to the amount of water stored. The lake was named after the property it partly submerged, Argyle Downs.
In 1996, the spillway wall was raised by 6 metres, which doubled the dam's capacity.
Sediment flowing into the dam caused concerns in the mid-1990s that the dam's capacity could be dramatically reduced. By 2006 continual regeneration of the upper Ord catchment appeared to have reduced the amount of sediment inflow.

Lake Argyle normally has a surface area of about 1,000square kilometres. The storage capacity, to the top of the spillway is 10,763,000 megalitres. The lake filled to capacity in 1973, and the spillway flowed until 1984. Lake Argyle's usual storage volume is 5,797,000 megalitres, making it the largest reservoir in Australia.

Lake Argyle, together with Lake Kununurra, is part of the Ord River Irrigation Scheme. There are currently some 150 square kilometres of farmland under irrigation in the East Kimberly region. The original plan was for dam water to irrigate rice crop for export to China. However these plans were scuttled as waterfowl, particularly magpie, geese ate rice shoots quicker than they could be planted. Other crops are now grown, but Lake Argyle still remains Australia's most under-utilized lake. The experts who built the dam estimated that the lake would take approximately 8 years to fill, but after two good wet seasons it was full!!

We visited the Durack homestead this was the home of the pioneers that discovered and worked the land known as Argyle Downs.

The magnificent homestead was originally built in 1895 by the Durack family on Argyle Downs Station (now mostly submerged by the lake). The famous pioneering Durack family home became known far and wide as one of the social gathering places of the East Kimberley.
Constructed of handcrafted limestone blocks with crushed termites mounds used as mortar, it was a magnificent building for its time.
During the early 1970’s a decision was made to remove the homestead before Lake Argyle began to fill in order to preserve this magnificent building for all time.
The homestead was dismantled stone by stone with every stone coded in such a way so as to be able to be rebuilt with every stone back in its original position.
The homestead now lives on as a museum dedicated to the pioneering spirit of the Durack Family, about one kilometre from the Caravan Park!

The Durack Homstead

Some of the families Headstones in the
grounds of the Museum

Some photographs of our Lake Argyle cruise
Our Saturday afternoon cruise was very good and we were lucky to have two amazing guides, Tracy and Jack. Tracy was like an encyclopaedia she gave us so much information about the area and the building of the lake and how the lake is used to clean the Pink Diamonds that are mined to the south of here. The Argyle Diamond mine is renowned for producing some of the worlds best Pink Diamonds, we didn't know this... Ben Afleck apparently bought Jennifer Lopez a massive pink diamond from here which cost millions of dollars! The town of Kununurra (where we go next) has a few jewellers stores selling diamond rings of upwards of $65,000. We saw lots of wildlife, many crocs sunning themselves, we fed some amazing fish and saw wallabies on the same sunny area as a crocodile, they didn't seem to be bothered with each other.