Earth's initial oxygen source, Morse Code and dolphins

Continuing south from Coral Bay, we re-joined the North West Coastal Highway at the Minilya Roadhouse and then it's a mere 139 km to Carnarvon. Here we bought fresh fruit from one of the many plantations that line the river (which looks dry but there is water in there somewhere). One of the items we purchased was prepared mango, frozen for convenience and our later delight. Have you ever eaten anything better than defrosting mango when the temperature is in the mid thirties?? It was delicious.
Just another 206 km south is Overlander Roadhouse and that was our turnoff to Shark Bay Marine Park.

Our first stop was at Hamelin Station, another ranch but in complete contrast to Bullara in the north, this is an ultra modern campground in an utterly arid ranch. I honestly don't understand how any livestock can be raised here. There is nothing on the ground just a load of stumpy bushes.
The facilities are perfect and maintained by a farm employed husband and wife team; similar to others we have seen, they have quit their normal life and are doing something different.

Hamelin station is at the southern end of Hamelin Pool, a huge area of highly saline sea, part of the even bigger Shark Bay. It is famous for Stromatolites, as they still live in this area. Why are they so important? I hear you ask. Well many years ago, 3.5 billion to be precise, there was little alive on Earth and Stromatolites, some sort of special bacteria, started to form at the edge of the seas. These produce oxygen, just as plants generate it through photosynthesis now, and little by little, over the following billions of years, the oxygen generated by these things built up to a concentration that supports life as we know it.
At Hamelin Pool you can see these organisms; they look like rocks but bubbles are visible when the tide comes in. It's amazing really.




Also at Hamelin Pool is a little museum housed in the old morse telegraph building and housing a nice Stromatolite exhibition and also memorabilia of the Telegraph Office - a morse code repeater station that was established there in 1884, for the purpose of relaying telegraphs sent using morse code, up the wire to north west Australia. They even had a morse key like mine. (di dah  di dah di  dah di dah).

From Hamelin we continued west and then northwest to Denham, by now 128 km from the Overlander turnoff. This is a lovely village on a peninsular or cape, jutting north and splitting Shark bay into two.
There was an amazing stop-off at Eagle Bluff, a vantage point high above a shallow bay, that turned out to afford great views of sharks ( it's not called Shark Bay for nothing). We saw a Lemon Shark and a few Nervous Sharks, something that we would have been had we not been up on Eagle Bluff.
Close to Denham is the Monkey Mia 'resort' where each day, wild dolphins arrive for a feed on the beach. They have done so for tens of years and provide a great spectacle early in the morning. It's a no touch experience but nevertheless quite exhilarating.