Northam W.A.

Yesterday I drove with my cousin Val to Northam about 97 kilometres from Perth. We visited Val's daughter Anne and Neil her husband and their two kids. Anne is a police officer in the town and Neil is a long distance truck driver doing 5,000 kilometres a week delivering diesel fuel to an isolated mine site past Kalgoorlie.

Northam is a pleasant, colonial era town which has the Avon River running through it.  The Avon Descent is an annual white water race of all sorts of water craft over a grueling 133 kilometre race from Northam to Perth waters.  It attracts Australia wide and international competitors to this two day event.

We had a very nice lunch and later a coffee at a smart local venue. Before we left for home we visited a wonderful house on top of hill overlooking the town. Joan and I inspected this house maybe 25 years ago, when it was for sale for $85,000. It needed quite a bit of work to bring it up to standard and a number of other factors made us give it a miss. We did not know how we would go both gaining employment as teachers in the town; we had just bought a boat moored on the Swan River and our kids didn't want to move to a different school away from their friends...all good reasons not to shift from our own colonial house near Fremantle.

It was a nice drive and a most pleasant 'catch up' with family.

Here is that Northam house yesterday. Sitting pretty on about an acre of land I expect that it would be worth about $1M+ now.