A sojourn on the Moore River, Western Australia

It's difficult to imagine the snowfall in London sitting here sweltering in the 40 degree heat of Western Australia; even more difficult to imagine the surprise and diesenchantment of the English pioneers who travelled here when Dreamtime was the order of the continent.

This time last year, freshly returned from a London winter, dreaming of stories of haunted castles, imagining the dogmatic rustle of Henry VIII's robes as he strutted through the halls of Hampton Court, picturing the painted ladies selling fleshy wares under the Bridge near Southwark, while the resident ghost at the local inn, the George, hovers benignly over the stairwell, Australia was reimagined for me once more. No gloomy ghosts in antiquated inns or royal palaces here: pure godforsaken country this one, built on deserts, ancient songlines, gnarled eucalypts and sunbleached coastal plains...amongst the other cliches of the Great Southern continent.

Travel is a great way to reinvogorate what becomes ordinary to us: recalling those sojourns, we learn to travel again at home.

So it was that my husband and I refreshed our memories of our sojourns abroad and decided to reinvogorate our pictures of home. Yesterday, we took our sad and wearied bodies to a spot known for its prehistoric untouched beauty and sought to refresh our souls and learn the rhythm of our home again.

At that time, it was another dry, hot January day in Perth. Thirty one degrees celsius - only a slight relief from the forties we've been having lately - but with a gale to blow in further relief and then some. To break the circuit of home and work and work and home (in French poetic slang, the "metro-boulot-dodo" of life, an expression recited with puffing steam train emphasis and roughly translated as "train, work, sleep"), I took the plunge and insisted on a day's excursion to a place I have been meaning to visit for several years now. We set off by car down the Mitchell Freeway north to the Wanneroo, Guilderton and Lancelin Roads to arrive, an hour and a half later, at the sleepy little holiday coastal town of Guilderton. Here, we hired a double kayak and set off on a quiet, if windy, paddle down the Moore River.

Once past the odd power boat or two, the river wends its way through several snake-like bends - on some of these points, fishermen and women cast a line or balance precariously on the metal edge of their tinnies, hoping to catch their supper or post photos of their whopper to a mate. Further on, there are some very steep, pristine dunes - some parts of the dunes surrounding low lying shrub are untouched but mostly they are pockmarked by footprints. They are to me the modern songlines of children's dance and play as they run and roll down the dunes or ride cardboard boxes down the sandy slopes to end with an almighty "sploosh!" in the river. On the way back, my husband and I park our kayak by slithering up the bank with a forceful last paddle and clamber breathlessly up the dune. We make the euphoric and freeing dash down the steep slope, feet lifting, sliding and sinking softly down the steep sandy slopes. We pull up abruptly before we spill into the water.

On the way up, round another bend, we pull into a shady spot with a small sandy beach. Bringing the paddles ashore, we park ourselves on an exposed tree root beneath a peppermint gum and munch on sandwiches and talk hopefully about the future. The river is silent; only the leaves of the eucalypts swish and rattle in the wind.

Back out on the water, those sounds are even more pronounced. Sometimes still, sometimes pushed by the wind, we sit on the water and watch the wind move through the branches, ruffle the water.

We reach the final fork where a sign announces limited access to power boats before we circle Diamond Island several kilometres upstream and turn around to count our strokes afresh on the home leg.

Oddly, this expedition into the 'prehistoric' for us was refreshing and in spite of (or perhaps because of) its arid, gnarled landscape and the feelings of desertion and isolation that it engenders, our Moore River sojourn offered us a welcome respite from the wearying hurry and repetition of modern life. With each slow stroke away from civilisation and deep into the river and its enchanting ancient flora, our muscles ached and our minds rested. Unlike the namesake of that beautiful stretch of water, we returned home with renewed vigour, refreshed.

Mr Moore's story was quite a different one.

The Moore River in the Swan River Colony

The Moore River is a river found in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia. It is 193 kilometres long and includes a catchment area of 13,540 square kilometres which is mostly cleared and used for broadacre farming, horticulture and tree plantations. The catchment area extends from Three Springs all the way to its place of discharge into the Indian Ocean near Guilderton. Originally known as the Garban River it was renamed in 1836 by Private Patrick Heffron, after the colonial early settler, George Fletcher Moore.

George Fletcher Moore had travelled to the Swan River Colony, arriving 30 October 1830 on board the Cleopatra from Dublin in a bid to climb the hierarchy of his profession in law and, feeling stymied in the UK, sought to pursue a judicial appointment in the colonies. He had been offered a letter of introduction by the Colonial Office when he made his inquiries, but this was the best they could do to satiate his ambitions as appointments were the responsibility of the Governor of Western Australia, Sir James Stirling. Arriving in the colony, Moore learned his ambitions had been thwarted with the appointment of William Mackie to Chairman of the Courts of Petty and Quarter Sessions in the December before his arrival. Any chances of an immediate official judicial appointment for Moore effectively vanished.

An adventurer at heart, Moore instead looked to obtain his land grant and establish a farm. In those days in colonial Australia, land grants were unique to the Swan River Colony and were granted by the Colonial Office in the form of land in proportion to the value of assets and labour that a settler brought to the colony. To ensure productive land use, settlers would only be given full title to their grants when their land had been sufficiently 'improved'. The system of land grants continued until 1832, two years after Moore's arrival in WA, after which crown land was disposed of by sale at auction.

Newly arrived in the colony - an educated free man and white - Moore was able to obtain his land grant with relative ease. However, this was not possible for the longstanding Aboriginal inhabitants of the region. Wrongly assumed at the time to be nomadic, Aboriginal people were not entitled to lay claim over the land on which they travelled. Most settlers refused the Aboriginal people permission to camp on or even travel across their grants. As more and more land was granted and fenced off, the Aboriginal people were being denied access to their sacred sites and traditional hunting grounds. By 1832 the Beeliar group - now a defunct Aboriginal group - found themselves unable to safely approach the two major rivers of Perth, the Swan and the Canning, with the extent of land grants that lined their banks.

Moore, unlike many of his contemporaries, exhibited some human interest in his fellow Aboriginal occupants of the land and, as he learned more about them, he was to become an advocate for Aboriginal compensation for their loss of land. As he established both his grant in the Avon Valley and half of William Lamb's grant in the Upper Swan by agreeing to undertake the improvements necessary to secure the entire title, Moore befriended the Aboriginal people he encountered. In mid 1833, Moore's scholarly interest and personal friendships with the Indigeous occpants led to his publication of an account of the language and customs of the local Aboriginal Australians in the Perth Gazette. Moore also, for a time, funded Robert Menli Lyon - a pioneering WA settler from Inverness, Scotland and one of the earliest outspoken advocates for Indigenous Australian rights and welfare in the colony - to learn the Aboriginal language, before determining to learn the language himself. In 1842, Moore published his A Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language of the Aborigines.

Alongside the many hats he donned, Moore was also something of an explorer. Through a road cutting expedition in September 1831 led by Robert Dale, from Guildford to the Avon Valley, Moore was able to refine his grant land to better pasture land and, by 1833, owned the largest sheep flock in the colony. In January 1834, Moore undertook explorations up the Swan River and was able to confirm the belief that the Swan and Avon Rivers were one and the same. In April 1835, he discovered extended pastoral land near the Garban River, which was eventually to become his namesake, the Moore River. In March 1836, he explored the land between the Moore River and the northern end of the Avon River. In October 1836, he joined an expedition under the lead of John Septimus Roe, which explored inland in the hopes of finding an inland sea, but these dreams were met only with the discovery of very arid land.

Moore's position as a leading farmer was helped by the good salary he commanded when he finally achieved his much sought after judicial appointment, being appointed as a Commissioner of the Civil Court in February 1832.

Moore kept extensive diaries of the time he spent in the Swan River Colony between 1834 and 1841; diaries which are now kept in the State Library of Western Australia. He also wrote extensive letters to his family from 1830 to 1833. In 1834 his father, Joseph, sought - successfully - to have these published as Extracts from the Letters and Journals of George Fletcher Moore, now filling a judicial office at the Swan River Settlement. It is surmised that their publication may even have been made without George Fletcher Moore's knowledge.

In 1846, Moore was to make politically favorable connections when he married Fanny, the stepdaughter of Governor Clarke. In the final months of 1846, both the Governor and the Colonial Secretary Peter Broun were seriously ill. As son-in-law of the Governor, Moore was one of a few persons allowed access to the Governor by his doctors. Because of his serendipitous relationship, Moore was appointed acting Colonial Secretary in November 1846. When Broun died that same month, and Clarke died in February 1847, Moore continued acting in the position until the arrival of the new Colonial Secretary. His favour and fortunes were to change considerably however, under the acting governorship of Frederick Irwin. Theirs was an extremely unpopular government, exacerbated by years of colonial depression and hardship taking their toll on colonists whose inclination was to blame the government. The eventual appointments of Madden and the new Governor Charles Fitzgerald saw Moore wield almost no influence in the new government.

In 1852, Moore returned to Ireland. One author (Cameron) notes that his main reason was concern for the mental health of his wife and, back in Ireland, it was reported that her condition deteriorated. She refused to return to Western Australia. Moore was forced to resign his seat and his request for a pension was denied. In 1863, Fanny Moore died but Moore did not return to Australia.

Sadly, despite his broad successes as an influential colonial in Western Australia, Moore's legacy fell victim to the vagaries of political disfavour, colonial disenchantment and personal tragedy. With the loss of his wife and of his allies in the powerful ruling elite and with his popularity equally besieged by the struggles and depression of the colonies, he chose to remain in the UK. He was reported to have died "friendless" in London on 30 December 1886.