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Sparky turned documentary road tripper, Aaron Green, shares WA’s most overlooked towns, best remote routes, and how he’s tricked up his four-wheel drive to take on just about anything.
Published
8 min read
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Published
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Aaron Green is pulling apart his four-wheel drive troop carrier, surrounded by a mess of threads, cables and crimps when we speak. The electrician by trade is rewiring his dash, which sounds straightforward enough until he mentions he’s also building an AI system for his vehicle.
“She’s called Laila, which stands for Local Autonomous Intelligent LandCruiser Assistant,” he says. “I cloned a voice, and it can do voice to text, so I can talk to it, hands-free, and get it to calendarise things as I drive.”
Aaron shares this as though it’s no big deal, and perhaps for someone who’s criss-crossed most of WA in pursuit of its nearly 700 towns, 3500 beaches and its many lakes, forests and deserts in between, it’s not.
“You can learn anything these days. There are entire courses online by the world’s number one ranked university, MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). There’s YouTube tutorials, and so many websites. I learned photography from research I did online. If you’re a good self-starter, you can learn all these things.”
Having grown up in Donnybrook, Aaron describes his adult self as following a conventional path – a fly-in fly-out mining job from age 19, a couple of investment properties and a home in Perth – before travel inspired the adventurer within. “I’d returned from a trip to Europe and was feeling a bit down about being back to ‘normal life’,” he says. “I thought, maybe I should treat my home state as a tourist would? Soon, it became more of an addiction.” He’d done zero road tripping before 2018; the shift became a major turning point in his life.
Switching to a week-on, week-off roster, Aaron’s road tripping passion continued to grow. “I thought I could drive around Australia in my week off. I’d leave my four-wheel drive in a place and fly back to work from wherever I was. Fares were cheaper then, and it was easier to accrue points, so it worked out that I wasn’t losing a bunch of money. I was breaking even, like I would if I was renting a home.”
So began his Lands Unseen project, photographing and videoing his Aussie roaming, and sharing his findings on social media channels.
Then COVID hit. It saw Aaron make a dash across the country to slide through the WA border two hours before it closed. But his travel handbrake was only momentary.
“Many months later, I was paying an enormous amount for my apartment and feeling a bit trapped. Everything made sense when I was on the road, and that had all fallen away,” he says. “I decided to message Tourism WA on Instagram.” It triggered a content collaboration in 2021, which has evolved into much bigger things. Aaron was announced as one of six Dreamers representing the state in January this year. He is the road tripping and station stays expert.
Asking Aaron to name his top five lesser-known WA towns is almost like asking a parent to name a favourite child. Yet, he manages: Mukinbudin is singled out as his number one spot. “It’s the gateway to the Chandler ghost town, where ruins of a 1940s potash mine look quite imperial. There’s also old house foundations and I saw lots of echidnas,” he says.
“Elachbutting Rock is north of the town. It’s like Wave Rock and there’s a hike around the outside. You can step between two rocks and it feels like a tunnel.”
He also loves the region’s astonishing history. “It’s the area where the emu wars happened. If you don’t know it, the Australian Army went to war with 20,000 emus in 1932 because they were destroying crops, and the armed forces lost.”
Another favourite is only 1.5hrs drive to the east: Wongan Hills. “It’s such a friendly town,” says Aaron. “I met Rod Clarke, a passionate volunteer at the visitor centre. Aaron particularly loves the wildflower season from September to December – there are more than 1400 species of flowering plants in the region.
He camps out by the 424m-high Mount O’Brien where he can tune into the wind in the trees. “The Noongar meaning of Wongan Katta is ‘talking’ or ‘whispering hills’,” he says. “If you listen in the bushland, you’ll hear the hills whispering.”
Hitting the coast, Aaron loves Denham in Shark Bay. “Denham is what Exmouth used to be: a quiet fishing town. Everyone knows each other and it’s right near a really beautiful coastal point leading into Francois Peron National Park.” While in the UNESCO World Heritage-listed area, he’ll stop at Shell Beach, Whalebone and Eagle Bluff, for the captivating views.
The Kimberley is another favourite, specifically Cape Keraudren, near 80 Mile Beach, five hours’ drive south-west of Broome. “If you get there when it’s a quiet time, outside of school holidays, it’s one of those places that has a feeling about it; a calming presence,” says Aaron.
“There are incredible sunsets, so much nature – eagles flying, roos hopping – and there are quite a few four-wheel drive tracks there, too.”
Getting off grid is a common pastime. At the other end of the state, Aaron likes to drive the gravel track to Mount Ridley, north of Esperance, which harbours a captivating rock formation. “If you hike up the side of the mountain for 10 minutes or so, you’ll find a part that’s just like Wave Rock,” he says. “Up top, you can see the sprawling salt lakes of Grass Patch and look all the way to the coast.”
He’s also drawn to Cape Arid, revving all the way through to Toolinna Cove, south of the 90 Mile Straight, via Israelite Bay. “After two hours of the sort of corrugated roads that make you question your sanity, you see tracks around salt lakes and there’s a place called Point Malcolm,” he says. “It’s a cape where it’s all low tide so you can walkway out. In the morning, I woke up to the sound of dolphins playing in the shallows.”
The importance of good preparation is something Aaron has learned through trial and error – like the time he ignored a bang he thought was a rock (it was actually his engine mounts collapsing) and pushed the fuel tank to fumes en route to the Great Australian Bight. It’s not something he’ll repeat in a hurry.
One of Aaron’s most useful four-wheel drive modifications has been installing a scan gauge. “It’s a no brainer,” he says of the plug-in diagnostic tool that works offline. “You know sometimes when the engine light comes on and you don’t know what it’s for? A scan gauge will give you a code that you can Google to tell you what’s wrong. It also calculates your fuel efficiency, so you can modify your driving style to get better fuel efficiency.”
Aaron uses Starlink for remote-access internet and Wi-Fi phone use. “The ‘roam’ plan can be paused when you’re at home, so you don’t need to pay for it the full time,” he says. Aaron still takes a satellite phone when going ultra remote, like when he drove from Purnululu to the Tanami Desert. “The corrugations mean either device might break – it’s a backup,” he says.
Aaron has two 200Ah (amp hour) batteries running all his auxiliary systems. “It runs my solar, Starlink, and the car. I have up to four days of power if everything goes wrong,” he says.
Communications in far-flung areas are so vital. Aaron recommends a UHF radio for any serious road tripper. “Wikipedia has a list of all the channels, which you can print out.
There are emergency channels, trucking channels, camping channels, and more,” he says. “You can contact the truck you’re stuck behind on UHF and see if it’s safe to pass. Drivers are usually approachable.” Enhancing situational awareness enables better decision making. “If there’s a breakdown or bushfires ahead, the truckies will be talking about it,” he says. Checking wind direction and the DFES website in bushfire season is also a must.
Aaron carries spare fuses, relays and switches in case something pops. “You can buy carry cases with individual compartments, so I have one of those,” he says. He’ll also check all the nuts underneath the vehicle before he departs, so nothing falls off. He brings extra oil, spare tyres, and gets a comprehensive service done pre-trip.
Aaron says the biggest challenge he sees getting in the way of road trip safety is the driver’s ego. “I was so confident early on. I had a jacked-up family SUV. I was heading onto a beach and got bogged in the entrance track,” he recalls.
He’s since invested in recovery tracks. “On the sand, the turning radius and the power are different and you’ve got to let the tyres down, which means you’ve got to have a compressor. Four-wheel driving is a steep learning curve.” The remedy? Dropping the attitude, opening your mind to learning, asking silly questions, and diving deep into research. “Even a bit of Googling to see what people are saying on forums can be useful,” he says. “They often talk about problems they’ve run into, so you can learn from others’ mistakes.”
With knowledge gained and trip preparation under control, you get to see what you’re capable of, Aaron says, and that’s when it gets really fun. His final tip? Take your time and soak up the journey. “I always add a buffer of four to five days, so I don’t have to feel rushed,” he says. “If I want to stay longer, I can.”
