Marble Bar - hottest town in Australia

13^th August

Don’t know why but I (Jo) had a hankering while we were in this part of the country to visit Marble Bar. A bit of back tracking and a roundabout way to get to where we were headed next but what the heck – we are on holidays and really not in any hurry.

Marble Bar sprang up as part of the gold rushes to the Pilbara in the late 1880’s and was named after the extraordinary colourful jasper bar that crosses the Coongan River just west of the town. A gold prospector mistook this jasper bar for marble and hence the name. We drove the 4km out of town to the Marble Bar Pool and Chinaman’s Pool to view this amazing mineral deposit. Fantastic colours and you can see how it was mistaken for marble back in the day.

Another claim to fame for Marble Bar is ‘the hottest town in Australia’. For 161 consecutive days leading up until 20^th April 1924, the temperature never dropped below 37.8 degrees Celsius and this record still stands today (listed in the Guinness Book of Records). Fortunately, it was a more pleasant temperature for our visit.

We were tricked into thinking  there was a café in town in the council buildings (beautiful old stone buildings) claiming to serve good food and ‘real coffee’ by some signs of the way in but on further investigation the café wasn’t due to open until Saturday and we weren’t keen to remain in Marble Bar to wait out the extra two days. Instead we drove up to the Water Tank Lookout and then headed out of town.

From Marble Bar we took the Hillside-Woodstock Road – a 130km dirt road which joins up to the Great Northern Highway. Wow – this took us through some of the most incredible countryside and made us really feel like we were in the Pilbara that we had imagined from reading about the area. The colours, rock formations and mountains are almost impossible to describe – some photos below may do it some justice but it really was a case of ‘you had to be there’. Saw our first Sturt Desert Pea in the wild along with an abundance of other wildflowers along the way which just added to the fantastic scenery. We finished our 3^rd audio book – Paper Towns, as we pulled into the Auski Roadhouse for the evening. A room here rather than camping to ensure an early get away tomorrow as we head into Karijini National Park.