Bush legends: Walpole’s Gary Muir is WA’s most enthusiastic tour guide

A teenage boy’s fascination with the comparatively large testicles of the honey possum has brought Gary Muir full circle in his love for Walpole. Arguably the State’s most enthusiastic tourist guide, Mr Muir said that discovery had been pivotal in his passion for nature. “One of the things I found was that it had the largest testicles (for a mammal) and I thought that was pretty cool so I did a high school project on it,” he explains. “Walpole is pretty famous for testicles, don’t you worry. The orchid means testicle and we’ve got 130 species of terrestrial orchids here. It’s also the breeding place of the southern right whale, which has the biggest testicles of any other animal. “Even the little blue wren (described by David Attenborough as ‘the most promiscuous bird known’ and the emblem of the Walpole and Denmark district), he’s got the largest testes in comparison to body size of any vertebrate ... up to 21 per cent body weight when they go blue. It would all make a great postcard.” The Muir family is very much part of the Lower South West region’s DNA. They even pre-date the settling of Walpole, with Mr Muir’s great-great-great-grandfather Andrew Muir first going to the area in 1856. The town has only been officially known as Walpole since 1934, after permanent settlement began in 1910 with famed French lawyer Pierre Bellanger and his family. And what was once Muir’s Tours is now Mr Muir’s WOW Wilderness Ecoprojects and dates back more than a century in an initial partnership with the region’s legendary boat builders, the Swarbrick family. The Swarbricks, after watching then British Opposition leader and later prime minister Edward Heath win the 1969 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race with a boat called Morning Cloud, bought its mould and built several boats of high repute. They included Jon Sanders’ Perie Banou, David Dicks’ Seaflight, Jesse Martin’s Lionheart, Jessica Watson’s Pink Lady, America’s Cup defender Kookaburra III and the vessel used by Jamie Dunross as he became the first person with quadriplegia to circumnavigate Australia unassisted in 2010. Mr Muir, whose favourite book is a book about naturalist Alexander von Humboldt called The Invention of Nature, has a deep concern for the environmental impacts caused by changing temperature patterns, particularly in Walpole — “the wettest part of the State” with 1432mm of rain annually. The 55-year-old once held the record for completing the Bibbulmun Track’s 980km in just 17 days in 2002 and this year ran the 100km Lake Muir Stock Route. In short, he knows the area back to front. And his WOW Wilderness tour aboard his Rainbow Lady catamaran really is something to behold from the unique facial expressions, mimicked accents, dramatic pauses and regular sourcing of a wide range of props, to the intimate knowledge of the area and the stunning surrounds. Oh, and his mum’s lemon Madeira cake. In many ways, he is a living documentary of the town, with an irrepressible energy that would give the Energizer bunny either windburn or exhaustion, or both. And the jocular quips never stop coming. “How cool do you have to look to be an Australian?” Mr Muir asks his passengers as he looks at a modestly dressed passer-by in a aluminium dingy. “Just wait until he hits the sandbank up ahead.” When one passenger asks, because of his breakneck-speed personality, what he had for breakfast, another quips it has to be either “Red Bull or ecstasy”. But he continues unhindered. “My trips are all about connections and building links,” he said. “People leave here and realise they are not separate from it, we are all connected. They leave here with a different view of their world and how they’re related to it and their role within it.” Mr Muir, who was named the inaugural Australian Ecoguide Award in 2002, has such a deep-seated love for nature that he almost pops a blood vessel at the mere sighting of a stingray or the chance discovery of some dugite poo. For the latter, he quickly points out it has likely been left from one of his squamate friends Denis or Denise, a long-time resident couple regularly seen in the area. He is also constantly on the lookout for DAMs, or “David Attenborough Moments”. “When you see the Moses Line where the blue water pushes back the river water and you get a fever line of 100 stingrays, that’s classic DAM,” he says. “Once an osprey dived in front of the boat and picked up a flounder right in front of the vessel. Everyone was screaming and you could see the eyes of the flounder. Then to make it a DAM, the white-breasted sea eagle dive-bombed and took the osprey in front of everyone.” As Mr Muir drops to his knees on the eastern peninsular beach of the Nuyts Wilderness to mould sand in different shapes while explaining the movement of the world’s tectonic plates, he presents as a hybrid of Attenborough, late WA naturalist Harry Butler and legendary comedian Jerry Lewis. He scatterguns so much information at you, by the end of his tour you feel like you have just spent two hours in a laboratory with a group of medical scientists telling you how they are going about finding a cure for the coronavirus. During the trip, he makes note of a pair of long-time local pied oystercatcher birds, who recently had two babies. They are now known as Storm and Dusty after Melbourne and Richmond’s respective NRL and AFL premierships. He also points out a spot known as “The Peppermints”, which he later explains is one of the most special meeting points for his family. It is where the sealers lived even before Albany existed, where the Murrum people camped and where his grandfather Ron is buried. “The family would bring the cattle down just after Christmas and they’d all be belled up,” the 1982 Manjimup Senior High School head boy said. “There were three different bells and every third cow had its own bell so they could tell which group was which by the music they would give off. My dad (Ross) was only 10 years old and with his younger cousin, Aunty Pam, they’d bring a hundred head of cattle down by themselves. “If they went missing they knew about it, but if they did their job ... (they’d) get a tin of condensed milk, which was the ultimate lolly. “Now I come from our farm every day, 100km through the bush on the routes of my great-great-grandparents to the coast.” Mr Muir joked that he had made the trip so often, always with a natural science audio book playing for extra learning, that it felt like a 100km driveway from his house and back. But his conversations always stem back to the environment. The former Conservation and Land Management ranger, who invented boot-cleaning and biosecurity hygiene stations to help guard against the spread of dieback and was also the project leader for the Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk, said he felt a responsibility to help protect the surrounds through his business. “We set it up as true ecotourism, investing in the environment, community and globe right from the start,” he said. “Seeing the role of education and communication as your biggest environmental management tools was always an important part for us. “There is a lot of emotion in environmental management, but I really want people to base their emotions on truth and knowledge and methodical observation to get them inspired. “It’s the perfect environment here to do that. Life is to be enjoyed, and understanding and enjoyment are the same thing.” The WOW team also helps co-ordinate the local school’s “UR Walpole” education program to ensure the environmental message is growing organically in the town’s youth. Mr Muir is convinced Walpole has a significant global standing and goes about convincing others in telling the story of the surprise 2004 discovery of a case belonging to town pioneer Frank Thompson — a Fabian philosopher who once lived next to celebrated author Rudyard Kipling and was also a housemate of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and a friend of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. The case had been hidden in the false floor of Walpole’s historic Tinglewood Lodge’s boat shed and contained extraordinary documents, including original letters from Tolstoy and speech notes from his 80th birthday. For Mr Muir, who co-authored the book Tolstoy to Tinglewood after the find, it was just further proof of Walpole being at the globe’s epicentre. “There is the North Pole and the South Pole and in the middle is Walpole,” he claims. “Every place has some place to offer in the world, but there are some really special ones and people know when they leave Walpole that this is special. “You can’t get any more wilderness than Walpole wilderness with some of the most magnificent forest, the second-tallest flowering plant on earth in the karri trees, the largest girth-flowering plant in Australia in the tingle forest and its amazing ecosystems. “It’s the belly button of the world and while all roads lead to Rome, where does your fluff end up?” If you have a worthy “Bush Legend”, email steve.butler@wanews.com.au with the details.