Day 445 | Boyup Brook Kojonup Road: he finds some more roadside shelter with a picnic table

70 km | Heading west total: 16,090 km

The Kulikup diversion continues.

The completely rusted sign at the “outskirts” said it all, if somewhat indistinctly: Kulikup Reduce Speed.

It’s not a case of blink and you will miss it because it’s hard to find anything there at all. There’s a fair amount of vegetation regrowth now.

At first all I could find was the tennis centre, four prehistoric tennis courts with a once sealed, if somewhat sloping, surface. A high fence around the courts and a ring of large obviously introduced pine trees. Must have been some social scene once upon a time.

The railway line was quite overgrown having been discontinued in the late 1960s.

This information was supplied by one half of the current population, a guy called Anthony, arms covered with tatts when his shirt came off in the sunshine. The other inhabitant, Darren, lives 150m away.

So the sum total of the remaining buildings was a 7th Day Adventist church, still frequented on Saturday by the local farmers, a big hall complete with coronation photo portrait of the Queen, ie, from 57 years ago, the old shop and 5 houses, 3 deserted and the other 2 occupied by the blokes.

Back in the 1920s Kulikup was the largest source of railway sleepers in Western Australia with 2 sawmills, 2 shops and 2 trains a day. The local white gums are resistant to termite attack.

Both the inhabitants are rabid junk collectors but Anthony at least has a discerning eye and spends time restoring the items. All the 5 antique chainsaws in the old shop window are operational. He bought the shop, the workshop and the adjacent house on half an acre for $32k back in 1989. Now he’s been offered $450k for the lot but says he would prefer to go out in a box. The shop is not the original however. This one was built in 1937.

I found out the school had been next door to the tennis courts with those pine trees but had been moved to Boyup Brook and restored as a museum. The cricket ground now has a small forest growing on it but the concrete pitch is still somewhere in the jungle if you care to look. Down the hill, around the local swamp, is the remnants of a 4 mile horse racing track, once the best outside Perth, but now also completely enveloped by the return of nature.

So. Kulikup, finally.

Will investigate the history when I get to the State Library in Perth. I’m not exactly obsessive about this, more like curious.