Beasts of the Northern Wild

We had been looking forward to getting out of the city so much - getting to some place where we could feel a little more connected with the natural world.  Now we're living here we're loving being able to just duck down to the beach - or even just out into the front yard - to find some creatures doing their their thing - combing the beach for food, hiding in logs, eating each other...

Here's some of the local characters from round here.

 

Above the Kimberley ~ ranges and rivers

These were taken in the East Kimberley, flying between Kununurra and Kalumburu.  It was raining when we landed in Kalumburu, and even felt a little cool.  It's one of the most isolated places I've been and felt strangely like being in PNG (probably helped by the rain and the missionaries).  The flight crosses over some remote territory, and I realised pretty quickly that the famous gorges of the Kimberley are just a fraction of what's really out there.  Would have been nice to have had a better camera, better weather and a less bumpy ride, but hopefully I've captured some of the sense of mystery and wildness out there.

Local tales

Since coming here to WA, one of the things we've enjoyed is getting into some local stories.  Tim Winton has never been too far from the top of our reading lists, and we've both read a little of him here, as well as enjoying Cloudstreet on DVD, The Turning at our local Picture Gardens, and his interview with Jennifer Byrne on ABC a little while back.  We loved watching Satellite Boy at Sun Pictures so much that we did it twice.  I've read Jandamarra and A Town is Born, both gut-wrenching, brilliant accounts of people rising against injustice in the Fitzroy Valley.  We got Bran Nue Day on DVD too, a bit nuttier than I expected.  

It's intriguing how soon after coming to a new place you start to feel a special connection to the local stories, and how the stories then help to build and deepen your connection with the place.  Those stories from the Fitzroy Valley especially had more meaning for me as I've developed more of a sense of the place, and reading them has given me a much richer appreciation for both people and land.

I've just finished That Deadman Dance, a great book that caught my eye at a yard sale in Derby.  It seemed somehow familiar to me.  A beautifully told story from the south coast of the state, a place once known as 'the friendly frontier', although of course, no frontier has ever been 'friendly' for too long.  Looking forward to our travels down there.

Above the Kimberley ~ the dry lands

Work has had me flying around a bit, mostly in small planes.  Seeing the land from above, the patterns crafted by soil, water, wind, fire, and cattle, the occasional straight line of road cutting through, I love it.  Thought I'd share the view.  These pics are from the Fitzroy Valley - an open space, the ranges of the Kimberley to the North and the Great Sandy Desert to the South.

 

BROOME! / first impressions

So - it's actually 3 months now since we arrived here, got a little bit behind in the posts!  But it's fun to go back and look through the photos from our first weekend in Broome, remembering that feeling of looking out across the bluest sea after weeks of dragging ourselves on and on through the dusty vastness of nowhere...

Photos are -
 / boab at town beach
 / the courthouse markets (unbeleivable!  these two were playing at our local market in Brisbane just before we left, then we arrive in Broome and... voila)
 / roebuck bay
 / camels?  yes - camels!
 / cable beach
 / cable beach again
 / stepping into a new sea - gav...
 / ... and mel
 / streeters jetty
 / sunset at gantheaume point

DARNGKU / Geikie Gorge

So right here at the end of our trip (almost!) we finally booked ourselves in for a tour.  We had read about the cultural tour on Geikie Gorge (read about it here, get the details here) and were keen to book in, not just for a boat trip on a beautiful gorge, but also to get some insight into the aboriginal culture around where we'd be living for the next 6 months.  Geikie Gorge is just out of Fitzroy Crossing, a town about 4 hours drive from Broome where Gav would be spending a bit of time doing some work.  The drive from Parry's Lagoon took us through some of the dramatic East Kimberley ranges, through Warmun (where we stopped at an amazing arts centre - you can now view a Warmun artwork from the Eiffel Tower!), and Halls Creek (where we stopped at the best visitor's centre we've seen, but missed the famous IGA), and finally into FX.  It's a bit of a unique town, hopefully some more on it some other time.  And after a day in FX, we headed out for our gorge tour, with our local Bunuba guide, Bill.

The gorge was formed by the Fitzroy river cutting through a limestone range that is actually an ancient fossilised reef, made by some distant ancestor of our modern corals back in Devonian period.  The river cutting through the limestone creates amazing rock formations, and the annual wet season floods keep the lower parts of the cliffs a pristine white.  Bill's tour took us through the natural history of the area as well as touching on some aspects of Bunuba culture.  He took us up the gorge in his boat, spotting freshwater crocs on the way, and for a bit of a climb up through a cleft to the top of the reef, pointing out bush foods and bush medicines.  Looking out across the reef was like gazing over some alien landscape - with all the jagged rocks, deep clefts and caves, it's easy to see how the Bunuba people were able to hold out against the European invaders back in the 1880s.

We camped out beside the Fitzroy river a couple of nights, then got up early on Saturday morning for our final dash into Broome!

WYNDHAM / Sea At Last!

In the end we couldn't get out of Kununurra too soon - not because of any problem with the town so much as the backpackers in our caravan park keeping us awake all night, the grey nomads with their caravans packed in shoulder to shoulder on all sides, and a bit of a sense that we hadn't come all this way just so we could hang out in a town and drink coffee all day.  So we gave up our plans to spend Mel's birthday relaxing under a tree, packed ourselved up, and hit the road.  [actually, to be more accurate, Gav did the packing up.  And in his eagerness to prove that he was a big boy who could do it all by himself he successfully reversed the car into the camper trailer.  Happy birthday darling.]

We set out through the East Kimberley - vast dry open ranges and distant gorges.  We'd heard of a little out-of-the-way place called Parry's Lagoon where we could camp, and we found it down a corrugated road not far from Wyndham, a little tumbleweedy sort of a town on the coast.  Parry's Lagoon was one of the great finds of our trip - nothing spectacular, but a quiet little campground run a couple who cooked up homestyle meals for us (such a relief after some of the crap we'd been eating!) which we shared with a select group of companions, including some very sincere bird-watchers.  They (the bird-watchers that is) would say things like: "we got 60 this morning" and "that one's a Yellow-Tinted" and "have you seen any Gouldians?".  They were far more interesting than drunken backpackers, and we even got in a bit of bird-watching ourselves: Plumed Whistling Ducks, Brolgas, Grey-Crowned Babblers, a Brown Goshawk and our very first Mistletoebird - among many more.

We stayed 3 nights at Parry's and used it as our base for exploring Wyndham and some of waterholes in the area.  It's an area I'd be happy to explore some more one day - the landscape feels a lot like central Australia, but with stunning little water-filled oases tucked away here and there.  And, or course, The Sea.

The photos:
 / five rivers lookout at Wyndham
 / Old Wyndham
 / The Wyndham train
 / Emma Gorge lower waterhole
 / and higher waterhole
 / reflections in The Grotto
 / a Kimberley sunset