A cruise on the “Kimberley Durack” around the lake must rate as the oldest cruise in Australia. Not because the cruise has been running a very long time, its more to do with the average age of it’s passengers.

Lake Argyle, named after the station Argyle Downs that was flooded with the construction of the Ord River dam. The lake covers about one thousand square kilometres and has a capacity of about eleven million megalitres (10,763,000).

The original plan was to grow rice for the Asian market however water fowl, particularly magpie geese ate the rice shoots as quickly as they were planted. This I believe.

“Lake Argyle is Australia’s most under-utilized lake”. Quite obvious, even to me.

“The lake is now home to 26 species of native fish and a population of freshwater crocodiles currently estimated at some 30,000. Fish species that are present in Lake Argyle include barramundi, catfish, bream, cod and many others. Saltwater crocodiles have to climb the dam wall to access the lake so the lake is “saltwater crocodile free”. O.K. but some locals say the “salties have snuck in”.

Cane toads reached the lake in late 2008, mostly via traveling along the Victoria Highway, with numbers rising significantly during the 2009 summer. Now this is total rubbish. There is no way the cane toads reached Lake Argyle via the Victoria Highway. I’ve driven it, so I should know.

The Victoria Highway is a single stretch of tar built for motor transport only, totally unsuitable as a toad conveyance. Cane toads, for those who have never seen one, are basically big frogs. There is no way on gods green earth that a frog can match the speed of even the slowest “grey nomad” let alone a fifty five metre long road train. Add to this the fact that toads are quite small relatively speaking and that “grey nomads” are mostly half blind (or pickled) the chance of a single toad reaching the lake from Queensland is very close to zero. Further the Victoria Highway has, at the Western Australian border, a quarantine station. Now these guys wont even let a jar of Western Australian honey across the invisible line so I find it hard to believe that the dreaded cane toad is going to hop straight past one of these “gunned up” quarantine types. I will concede that a group of toads dressed in a kangaroo suit could deceive one of our less sharp officials, but this would simply not account for the numbers that have crossed the border to date. No, there has to be another answer and I suspect it has something to do with the summer of two thousand and nine. By chance I came across the following image, which I find very suspicious, as the scooter is clearly a 2009 model.

By the way, if you are considering a cruise on the good ship “Kimberly Durack” and you are between sixty and seventy years old, you are in with a chance of being one of the “young whipper snappers” on board and probably wont be offended when during the course of the cruise they play “knock, knock, knocking on heavens door” on the stereo, sorry, radiogram. A word of advise though, when they bring out the cheese and biscuits the mood on board changes. Cheese consumption, from observation seems to be linked to age.

Nothing to declare!

Pass the Cheese Please.