by Lorna Hendry
The same thing happened in reverse in the morning. I climbed out of bed at first light to get ready for a day of hiking in the gorges. I put on both my jumpers and a beanie and my fingers were stiff and frozen as I tried to pump water out of the tank to fill the kettle. The sun slid over the horizon and ten minutes later I had stripped off to my T-shirt and promised James and the boys that it was much warmer outside than it was inside the tent.
Extremes in temperature dogged us for the next three days as we walked through gorges made from dark red rock. It was this rock that made the Pilbara irresistible to mining companies. Iron ore deposits were discovered in the early 1950s and the region now produces nearly all of Australia’s iron ore exports. More than 100 million tonnes of iron ore are removed every year, transported on heavy-duty railway lines that carry the longest trains in the world – 200 cars stretching for up to 3.75 kilometres – to Port Hedland or Dampier and loaded onto ships mostly bound for China.
In many of the high-walled crevices, the water got little, if any, direct sunlight. In some places we had to clamber along thin rock ledges just above the water. James negotiated one gorge by placing all four limbs on either side of the narrow gap, inching along above the stream. The boys and I had to splash through it, ankle-deep in the freezing water. The sharp rocks in the river bed meant we had to keep our runners on and our shoes soaked up the cold water until we couldn’t feel our toes. At Kermit’s Pool in Hancock Gorge, James and I stripped to our bathers and plunged into water that was so cold that for a moment I couldn’t breathe.
On the second day we found all the other campers. Fortescue Falls was a luxuriously wide staircase carved from layers of red rock that formed the base of a generous waterfall. Clear fresh water cascaded down into a green pool surrounded by lush ferns and giant white river gums. The whole place looked exactly like a set from a 1950s Hollywood movie. Beautiful European backpackers sunned themselves on the rocks, all with small bikinis, long tanned legs and golden hair. Their dreadlocked boyfriends leapt exuberantly from the top of the gorge into the pool. The place was packed. Everyone was staying at the other campground in the park. It was so full that the rangers had set up an overflow site in a nearby clearing.
On our last night we rugged up and went to a star-gazing talk. We tipped our heads back and tried to find familiar constellations like the Southern Cross and Orion’s Belt in the mass of stars above us. The Milky Way gleamed like a white brushstroke across the crowded sky. The astronomer told us that the local Indigenous people didn’t look up to the night sky, fearful of catching sight of a falling star. They believed that these were spirits falling to earth and that watching them might invite their unwanted attention. He showed us the shape of a massive emu in the black spaces within the Milky Way and said it was a protective spirit that looked out for all of us. We were transfixed, and looked for the emu every night after that.
Unable to cope any longer with the extremes of temperature, we left the next morning. On the way out we spotted an Aboriginal man – the first we had seen in the park – cleaning the barbecue.
Chapter Eleven
At the visitor centre in Broome I stood in a queue and listened to the woman at the desk say the same thing over and over again. ‘Have you got a booking anywhere? No? Then your best bet is the overflow campground at the showgrounds on the other side of town. They’ll let you stay for a couple of nights while you find somewhere else or move on.’
In my hand I had the brochure for Chile Creek that I had picked up months earlier at the Aboriginal community of Iga Warta. While I was waiting my turn, I also found a booklet listing several Aboriginal communities that ran tourism businesses on the Dampier Peninsula, north of Broome.
When I got to the front of the queue I held them both out. ‘Can you tell me if we would be able to go to any of these communities and do some camping? We haven’t booked anything.’
‘The only camping up there is at Middle Lagoon and Cape Leveque. Cape Leveque is booked out, you won’t get in there. You might get into Middle Lagoon.’
‘What about Chile Creek?’
‘You can’t camp there.’
‘But it says in their brochure you can’, I said.
The woman sighed. She turned to a man beside her. ‘Any camping up at Chile Creek?’
‘They’re not one of ours’, he told her.
She turned back to me. ‘We don’t do bookings for them. Sorry, I can’t help you with that.’
I looked at our map. The people at the camping shop in Melbourne had marked Middle Lagoon with an orange cross. Chile Creek was further up the peninsula, almost up at the top, near booked-out Cape Leveque. Middle Lagoon it was, then. I didn’t want to risk driving an extra 100 kilometres on a dirt road to Chile Creek if we couldn’t camp when we got there. I was also nervous about driving into an Indigenous community, no matter how friendly the brochure sounded, without some kind of reassurance that it would be okay.
Outside, the footpath was packed. We navigated the crowds awkwardly, bumping into people constantly. We all seemed to have lost our ability to negotiate busy streets, somehow taking up more room than we used to and being unable to anticipate other people’s movements. We sat shivering in an air-conditioned cafe for twenty minutes waiting for coffees and wondered why we used to enjoy doing this so much. After spending a small fortune in the supermarket we left Broome to drive up the corrugated, sandy and slippy road to Middle Lagoon. The road acted as a filter, keeping out people with cars and caravans that couldn’t cope with off-road conditions. When we arrived, the campground was busy but not crowded. Tents and dusty off-road vans nestled under gum trees that circled a central bathroom and laundry area. Lots of washing flapped on the lines, mostly bathers, kids clothes and towels, and bikes were strewn on the grass. It was one of the most welcoming campgrounds we’d seen in ages. A German woman in the office gave us a campsite on the top of a sand dune, which looked down onto a small cove with a tumble of rockfalls at either end.
The Kimberley has the second-largest tides in the world. Over the course of a day, the water level rose up to 9 metres until it lapped at the base of the dune, then pulled back until we could wade for ages and still only be knee-deep. At low tide, rocky outcrops were exposed in the bay. As the sea returned, they became islands before disappearing underwater.
In Melbourne it was the July school holidays, so I declared it was for us as well. We had a holiday from our holiday. No packing up, no long drives, no school. We let it all go. The boys were on the beach at sunrise with a gang of other kids and had to be dragged back in at dusk. One day, they all decided to be pirates. As the tide came in, they paddled out to the closest rock, claiming it as their own. When the water rose, they climbed aboard their boogie boards and navigated to the next, higher one. We watched from the beach with the other parents, taking turns to keep an eye on them. The older boys shuttled the younger ones across the water on boogie boards and then came back for supplies of drinks, sandwiches and biscuits. When the tide flowed all the way in, they retreated to the rocky outcrop at the northern end of the beach. Here they were above the high tide mark, but would be cut off from the beach for hours.
When they disappeared from view for a while one of the dads swam over to check on them. He found them all huddled in a rock pool that filled and foamed with seawater with every wave, like a natural spa. Annoyed, they waved him away, telling him this was a ‘kids only’ spot today. As the sun set and the water retreated, they trudged back to shore, as exhausted and happy as I had ever seen them.
We did drive further up the Dampier Peninsula but we had lost track of the days and didn’t realise that it was Saturday. The communities of Ardyaloon and Lombadina were closed to visitors on weekends. I had hoped to go to Chile Creek as well – after all, I had carried their brochure halfway around the country – but the access road was off the Lombadina road and we didn’t feel comfortable about driving down it when the community was closed. We stopped in at the supermarket at Ardyaloon to b
uy lunch and asked the young white woman at the till if there was anywhere we could go. She gave us a map and marked the road to the trochus shell hatchery, and said tourists could go there on weekends. At the end of the road, near the ramp where boats were launched, we watched a tourist fishing charter leave. A young Indigenous man stood at the back of the boat as it took off and an older man sat at the helm. I envied their four passengers, not for the fishing experience, but for the conversations I imagined they would have with these men about their lives and their culture.
A large black man in his fifties leaned on a dusty red Volvo sedan that didn’t have one window intact. He wore a huge black cowboy hat that was painted in red, white and yellow, with a feather stuck in the top. His long white hair hung in two thick plaits.
He beckoned to James. ‘Hey, brother, where you from?’
‘Melbourne’, James confessed. I had never felt so white in my life.
‘Ah, my sister, she lives in Melbourne! Nice country down there.’
I looked around me. The sea was a colour I had never seen before. It was brighter than the dark blue I was used to – more like a deep turquoise – and it seemed to glow as if it was lit from below. It was very warm, almost too hot, but there was a cool breeze. Hundreds of tiny islands jutted from the water, rocky and red. The sea boiled and foamed around them as the tide rushed in. He thought Melbourne was nice country? He had to be kidding.
‘A man down there, he sells my paintings. I fly down for shows, meet people. All the time. I go overseas too. I’m a world-famous artist!’ He eyed us. ‘Where you stopped?’
‘We’re camping at Middle Lagoon.’
‘What you doing down there? You come camp on my country. I got a block just over there.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of the sea. ‘You camp with me. I’ll show you my country, tell you stories, teach the kids to catch crabs. I have white people all the time. Specially if they’re pretty women! I talk to all the visitors. I’m sick of talking to this mob’, and he gestured towards the town. ‘I’ll make you laugh.’
Here it was. An invitation to do what I had been wanting to do since we left home. This was a chance to have an actual, authentic, real-life experience with Indigenous culture. Except that, when I had imagined this meeting, it had always been a scenario that I somehow controlled. I didn’t know what to do in this situation.
James mumbled something about having already paid for a few more nights at Middle Lagoon.
‘That’s okay. You think about it. I’ll give you my number, you call me. Bruce Wiggan. Everyone knows me.’ He wrote a mobile number on a scrap of paper and, as he handed it to James, he came in close and said something so quietly I couldn’t catch it.
‘What did he say?’ I asked as we drove back through the quiet town.
‘He said he knew we were coming. He said he’d dreamed us. Like he’d called us here.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘That’s a weird thing to say. Was he just teasing, do you think?’ James just shrugged.
A few days later I went to the phone box opposite the Middle Lagoon office and dialled Bruce Wiggan’s number, promising myself that if he answered I’d ask for directions to his camp. He didn’t pick up and I was ashamed to feel a vague sense of reprieve.
Nannette flew in from Darwin – we had planned to have a week with her in Broome, but instead we drove to town, collected our mail, stocked up on supplies, and brought her back to Middle Lagoon. She didn’t seem to mind being dragged away from civilisation again. At least this time the toilets flushed and there was a shower block.
That night we sat outside the tent and watched the sun set. Unseasonal clouds streamed across the horizon like the slipstream left in the wake of an invisible celestial craft. Their scalloped edges turned golden, burnt orange, vibrant bright red and, finally, a deep, soft lavender. The light bathed us in the warm colours of fire. Just beyond the point, two humpback whales spouted and slapped their tails on the water.
James taught Nannette to snorkel at Middle Lagoon. He adjusted her snorkel, showed her how to waddle backwards into the water so that she wouldn’t trip over her flippers and told her there was nothing in the water that would hurt her. Ten minutes later, having been distracted by an octopus hiding in a crevice in a rock, he looked up and couldn’t see her. He finally caught a glimpse of a snorkel in the distance. She had been following a brightly coloured fish and was nearly half a mile out to sea. He caught up with her and brought her back closer to land and revised his earlier words with the caution that close to the beach there was nothing dangerous. Further out, there were bull sharks and crocodiles.
Our next-door neighbour on the ridge was a man in his late fifties, travelling alone in a cute triangular pop-up van. The only real problem with being on his own, he told us, was that it was always his turn to wash his dishes. Oscar and Dylan said they would do them, for a price. I suggested to James that we invite him over to our fire for a beer while they worked.
‘I don’t think he drinks beer’, James said.
I fossicked around in the back of the trailer. ‘We’ve still got some of that stuff from Margaret River. It’s probably got a bit hot, and it’s bounced around a bit …’
‘No. We can’t give him that’, James said, slightly panicked. ‘He’s a winemaker. He’s won awards. Winemaker of the year, or something like that.’
He did come over after dinner, bringing a bucket of dirty dishes and his own bottle of very nice red. I set the boys up with warm, soapy water and our cleanest tea towel and joined the adults around the fire. As our neighbour explained to Nannette why pinot was the only wine worth drinking, the giggling behind us got louder and louder.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked Oscar.
‘These glasses!’ he said. ‘They’ve got no handle bits!’ He meant stems. The boys were washing very expensive Riedel glasses in a plastic bucket. Our neighbour grinned at me and raised the chipped melamine mug we had given him for his wine.
After dropping Nannette in Broome with promises that we’d be in Darwin within a few weeks, we headed down one of the country’s classic 4WD routes. The Gibb River Road, originally a stock route, runs 700 kilometres from Derby to Kununurra through some of the Kimberley’s most beautiful and rugged country. Its notoriety had waned in recent years – mining exploration had led to major improvements to the road – but it still divided round-Australia travellers into those who did the Gibb and those who didn’t.
At Windjana Gorge we saw hundreds of freshwater crocodiles slide out of the murky dry-season waterhole to sunbake on the sandy riverbank. They were greenish brown, scaly and leathery, with long snouts that tapered at the end and identified them as freshwater crocodiles. Freshwater crocodiles, unlike their saltwater cousins, pose little threat to people. Although saltwater crocodiles can live in fresh water just as well as they can in the ocean, there was no way that they could navigate the waterfalls and escarpments to get this far inland. Nor could they survive the dry season, when many of the creeks and waterholes dried up. It was hard to believe so many of the freshwater crocodiles could survive in such a small body of water. At night we gathered a gang of kids from the communal campfire and took them into the gorge with torches. James had been spotlighting before and showed us how to look directly down the beam of their torch and see the crocodiles’ eyes reflect it back, shining like red Christmas lights. High-pitched squeals were soon echoing around the gorge.
Just past the Windjana Gorge turn-off, a sandwich board on the side of the road announced that a Snack Stop was open. A dirt track ran beside the Lennard River and a caravan was set up at the highest point of the bank. The man in the caravan was in his mid-sixties, small and compact with a grey beard that ended in a sharp point at his chin and drew my eye directly to the hole in his trachea.
He opened a sliding window to hand out my tea, placing the cup on a shelf attached to the outside of the van. On the shelf sat a sugar jar, a mug full of teaspoons and a tub of sweet biscuits that he picked up and rattled vigorou
sly as if to say ‘help yourself’.
When everyone had been served, he came out of the van and walked over to a small telescope mounted on a tripod on the edge of the high river bank. He shifted his cigarette into his left hand and placed a stained finger firmly on the open hole in the centre of his throat.
‘Here, come and have a look at this’, he rasped. ‘There’s a young male croc on the bank over there.’
I bent to look through the telescope. There he was, perfectly framed in the centre of my gaze, lying on the sandy bank on the other side of the river.
‘How do you know it’s a male?’
He grinned at me. I’d just walked into his trap and he was delighted. He put his hand back up to his throat. ‘Because it’s got its bloody mouth shut!’ he cackled.
We lingered on the Gibb for days. At Lennard Gorge we followed an unmarked track through high grass to the edge of a crevice that hid a narrow gorge with waterfalls at one end. Piles of rocks placed there by other travellers marked a safe path down the side of the steep cliff. At the bottom we threw ourselves, hot and sweaty, into the cool water. The boys shrieked with pleasure and a grey water monitor slid from its warm rock ledge into the water without leaving a ripple.
