Williams has plenty for a pit stop — or a destination

It’s been a few years since I’ve been to Williams.

On that occasion, I was, like most people, passing through on my way to Albany.

Naturally, I stopped at the popular Woolshed for a restorative pie and caffeine, but that was about it — which, I now realise, was a mistake. Because, like many Wheatbelt towns, there’s so much more to Williams than meets the eye.

This time, I leave Perth before winter dawn breaks and enjoy a spectacular 2½-hour drive along the Pinjarra-Williams Road — broken by a coffee stop at Pinjarra— on winding roads through misty forests, valleys and pastures before arriving in town.

As I drive slowly up the main street, Brooking Street, nothing immediately presents itself as remarkable (I’m told it’s ablaze with rose displays in spring).

But Williams has been deceiving travellers like this since 1831, when Capt. Thomas Bannister’s overland expedition from Perth to King George III Sound passed through what his maps couldn’t yet name — and found the country far more demanding than expected.

That capacity to surprise hasn’t diminished. In May, Williams walked away from the Keep Australia Beautiful National Tidy Towns Awards in Launceston with the top prize and three category wins — behaviour change and engagement; young legends; and heritage and culture.

“A small but mighty town,” said council chair Elizabeth Carr AM on the night. It was a judgment the district’s history could long since have justified.

Bannister’s party blazed the track through here in late 1830. By 1833, the first settler, Joseph Strelley Harris, was running sheep across the Williams River flats. The military arrived in 1836 to protect the scattered pastoral grants, and by the 1840s the town had become a vital staging post on the Perth-Albany road — a place where licences were renewed, livestock was traded, and mail changed hands. Floods eventually forced the township’s relocation to higher ground. Except for the hotel, flour mill and agricultural hall, most of what you see today was built after 1905.

It’s a layered history made more legible by the Williams Heritage Trail, developed by the town’s historical society and district high school and offering a 1km town walk and a 35km scenic drive south to Quindanning.

The trail loops past the Old Williams Cemetery — donated to the Church of England by the Hamersley family in the 1870s and containing about 30 unmarked graves believed to be those of ex-convicts — and the site of William Playle’s blacksmith’s shop, marked today only by a pomegranate tree. The agricultural hall of 1898 served as an aircraft spotting station during World War II, staffed by women during the day. It is now an arts and crafts centre.

Nearby, the extraordinary brick Convict Tank of the 1880s still sits underground behind the post office site, its domed roof intact. The Williams River Bridge, built by convicts in 1855, was one of the earliest spans across a major WA river. Constable Lee’s station records from 1888 note a traveller heading to Williams for kangaroo hunting — one Joseph Johns, who was in fact the bushranger Moondyne Joe.

Beyond the trail, the Jesse Martin Museum, a private collection on a family farm, gathers replica pioneer buildings and farm machinery spanning the district’s full history. You can see it by appointment, with proceeds going to cancer research. Lions Park on the riverbank offers a pleasant picnic stop; a cycleway threads along the water from the Shell Roadhouse. Half an hour south, the Quindanning Hotel provides an excellent reason for a leisurely lunch. Thirty minutes in another direction, Dryandra Woodlands shelters numbats, while the Barna Mia nocturnal wildlife sanctuary rewards after-dark visitors.

My own perambulations take me, among other places of interest, to the beautiful Holy Trinity Church (1925), also on the heritage trail. I slip inside and am rewarded by the sight of exquisite stained-glass windows glowing jewel-like in the gloom.

My Williams sojourn at an end, I take the more usual Albany Highway route back to Perth — not as scenic, but quicker. As next year’s host of the national Tidy Towns Awards, Williams will find itself again receiving visitors who come for a stopover and stay considerably longer than planned. I’ll be one of them.

fact file

+ Williams is 160km south-east of Perth on Albany Highway.

+ The Heritage Trail brochure is available from the Williams Shire office.

+ It can be downloaded as a PDF at williams.wa.gov.au/Profiles/williams/Assets/ClientData/Document-Centre/Public-Documents/Heritage_Trail_Williams.pdf