A lot smaller in size than nearby more famous Walga Rock, Garden Rock, near a small town Cue, is hardly known. Located only 18 km east of Cue, on Cue-Wondinong dirt Road (connecting Cue and Sandstone), it is easily accessible. This granite rock rises 20 meters above the sandplain and has a circumference of 1km, so it is quite an easy and pleasant walk around.
There were a number of loose rocks, as well as rock holes filled with water from the recent rains.
Garden Granite Rock was once the site of market gardens established in 1894 to supply gold rush population around Cue with fruits and vegetables. This is hard to imagine today, as there are no traces of the former gardens left ☹.
There is a free bush camp around the Garden Rock (unlike the Walga Rock). While we neither camped, nor saw people there, we noticed traces of people who camped before. Maybe, one of these days we’ll be back for a camp here :).
Perfect place for camping
Back on the road. While approaching Cue, at the end of dirt Cue-Wondinong Road we saw an interesting sign, urging all vehicles to stop and brush off wheels. For the record, we couldn’t find the reason why needed to dust off wheels, but we followed the rule 😊.
Lake Nallan was our first stop on the way to Karijini from Perth. It is 20km north of Cue, just off Great Northern Highway. It is a basic free camp site with no amenities but beautiful view of the lake. Being close to the road, it is popular too.
Lake Nallan in the evening in late September
There were around 10-12 families camping there when we arrived around 6pm or so, but it is big enough to find a secluded place for yourself. While some of the nice places with the fire pits already erected by some previous campers were occupied, we drove further and found a place for ourselves (even if it meant that we had to prepare our own fire pit 😊).
Preparing our own fire pit
There were a lot of road trains passing by in the evening and night, the sound being soothing and the lights adding nice feature to the night landscape.
Road trains on Great Norther Highway at night
We entertained ourselves with guitar songs and burning marshmallows in the fire.
In the morning the water in Lake Nallan started to turn pink which looked beautiful against the blue sky and red earth.
We have a long day ahead of us, with the first place to visit – Walga Rock! Off we go for an adventure!
Lake Nallan is located conveniently roughly half way to Karajini (if you take inland route), so it is a nice place to stop overnight. So, in April 2021 we stopped there again on the way back home from our Exmouth-Millstream-Chichester-Karijini trip. Even though it rained up north, Lake Nallan looked very dry. The lake was only half or even one third of what we saw the previous year in July).
You can see just how dry this place has become
Lake Nallan attracts a lot of birds in all seasons.
Black swans on the lake
The colours of the sunset and sunrise by the lake were amazing to watch.
Visiting Walga Rock was an unfinished business from our last trip to the Goldfields. This time, I decided to visit it first, so we don’t miss out. On a second day of our trip to Pilbara, after the first stop at Nallan Lake near Cue, we drove 48 km west of Cue on the Dalgaranga Road before we reached Walga Rock.
Walga Rock (also known as Wolgarna Rock or Walganna Rock in Aboriginal language, which does not have written equivalent, hence there could be many different spellings of the same name or word) is a huge monolith. Being 5 km in in diameter and 1.5 km long, it is considered the second largest monolith in Australia (after Uluru). It is a Registered Aboriginal Heritage Site, so it is fenced and you need to manually open the gate to proceed towards the actual Rock.
We spent 2 or 3 hours there, exploring and climbing the Rock, taking lots of pictures.
Climbing the Rock gave us a different perspective. Different people might have different experiences when standing on top of the rock, looking out in front at the isolated desert. For me, I felt a sense of serenity and harmony, and a revelation that there is a place for everything in nature – beautiful rocks, harsh desert, annoying flies, wild flowers trying to find their way out even in the rocks.
View from the top of Walga Rock
Kids were having fun too, climbing and playing in the rocks, inventing their own games (although, who knows what they were?)
It is interesting to see how relatively big rocks can stack themselves on top of the slanting side of even bigger Rock, without falling down.
Walga Rock holds deep spiritual significance for Aboriginal people and it is guarded by this mysterious creature. 😊
The main attraction of the Walga Rock is the gallery of Aboriginal paintings inside the large cave within the rock. This gallery of rock hand paintings, cast in rich red ochre, is considered the largest in the Murchison (and some say, the largest in the whole of Western Australia). Although it is hard to count, but a report by the University of Western Australia indicated there were more than 988 motifs on a 100-metre-long panel of the Rock.
Walga Rock Aboriginal paintings
There are paintings representing goannas, snakes, boomerangs, kangaroos and handprints, which are estimated to be 10,000 years old.
There is even a painting of a ship, which looks like a modern addition to the ancient Aboriginal paintings. The origin of the painting is unknown, especially considering that Walga Rock is 325 km inland from the West Australian coast. According to one theory, it was done by a Dutch sailor shipwrecked on the coast who was looked after by Aborigines.
Before leaving this place and heading to our next destination near Newman, we decided to drive around the Rock. It looked interesting in its changing patterns and shape and I kept admiring the colours and contours of the Rock as we drove by.
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