Temporal setting: 1970s
Location notes:
Red Dog frequented Dampier Beach, especially when his friends were having BBQs.
Dampier was designed and constructed in 1965 by Hamersley Iron as a port-town for the transportation of iron ore. By 1968, however, the population had outgrown the town's capacity and Karratha was established twenty kilometres to the south-east.
Dampier Beach has an ocean pool, barbecue facilities, and a boating and sailing club.
The Burrup Peninsula and the Dampier Archipelago, fourteen kilometres north-east of Dampier, contains the largest collection of rock art in the world. The petroglyphs are estimated to number between 500,000 and one million, with numerous works depicting the now extinct Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger). It is a significant site for Aboriginal country groups of the Pilbara and beyond. The Ngayarda language groups call the location Murujuga, meaning "hip bone sticking out".
Quotes
“The pair of them set off for Dampier beach, just when the western sky was beginning to turn gold at the edges… Man and dog made their way down to the beach, where a gentle swell was dropping wavelets onto the sand. Opposite was the strangely named East Intercourse Island, and south-west of that you could see Mistaken Island huddling in the sea, though no-one seemed to know who had originally been mistaken about what, in order for it to have earned itself such a quirky name. The beautiful islands of the Dampier Archipelago lay strung out across the ocean.”
(p. 16-7)
Temporal setting: 1970s
Location notes:
Dampier Salt, owned primarily by Rio Tinto, began operation in 1972.
Quotes
“Don worked for Dampier Salt, the company that had transformed the landscape of the area by digging out huge, shallow rectangular pits that they filled with seawater. The water then dried away, leaving behind it the gleaming white carpets of salt that sparkled and shimmered in the bright sunshine.”
(p. 83)
“If you stood on the high ground outside Dampier, you could look across
the saltfields and see a great white mountain in the distance, where the
company had heaped their harvest high, in preparation for processing.”
(p. 84)
Temporal setting: 1970s
Location notes:
Karratha was designed and constructed as a mining town in 1968-9 in a joint initiative by the State Government and Hamersley Iron after Dampier's operations and population outgrew its capacity. Karratha takes its name from the pastoral station which operated in the area during the late-nineteenth century and is an Aboriginal word meaning "good country" or "soft earth".
The town now services much of the Pilbara area, with many administrative centres and Government departments being housed there.
Quotes
“Red Dog called in on the new
vet in Roebourne, and then he went to Point Samson and Cossack. He visited
Jocko, Peeto and Vanno at Hamersley Iron, and afterwards he went and stayed for
a night at the Walkabout Hotel at Karratha, where the chef was one of his
providers. Finally, he surprised the women by turning up at Exmouth three days
later… He seemed pleased to see them, but by the next morning he had hitched a
loft to Onslow.”
(p. 75)
Temporal setting: 1970s
Location notes:
Red Dog was born in Paraburdoo, in the Pilbara region of Western Australia
Quotes
“It was a red-hot day in February, which in Australia is the middle of the summer, and all the vegetation was looking as if it had been dried in an oven. […] It seems as if the heat is going straight through your shirt, so you go as fast as you can from one bit of shade to another, and everything looks white, as if the sun has abolished the whole notion of colour. Even the red earth looks less red. Visitors to that place can’t believe that the mining companies are actually allowed to leave all those heaps of red stones and red earth all over the place, without caring about it at all, but the strange fact is that all those heaps and piles were put there by nature, as if She had whimsically decided to mimic the most untidy and careless behaviour of mankind itself. The difference is that nature managed to do it all without the help of bulldozers, diggers and dumper trucks. Through this ungentle landscape galloped Tally Ho [a name by which Red Dog was known], raising his own little plume of red dust in the wake of the greater plume raised by Jack Collins’ car.”
(p. 7-8)
Seven kilometres away the car stopped outside the perimeter fence of Paraburdoo airport, and Tally Ho was let out.
(p. 7)