Eighty Mile Beach and Broome – 3 to 15 June 2010

We broke the long journey from Port Hedland to Broome with an overnight stay at the Eighty Mile Beach, a perfect fishing spot and a great place to watch the sunset over the water. Our neighbours that evening arrived in two four wheel drives and immediately headed for the beach with their fishing rods, returning after wards to erect their tents.

Broome was first visited by William Dampier in 1688. In 1879 Charles Harper suggested the pearling industry would be better served by a port close to the pearling grounds and that Roebuck Bay would be suitable.

In 1883 John Forrest selected the site for the town and named it Broome after Sir Frederick Broome a governor of Western Australia.

We stayed in the Cable Beach Camping Park in Broome. In 1889 Cable Beach was the land fall for a telegraph cable which connected Broome with Banjowangie in Java and then England thus it was called Cable Beach
This is a beautiful beach with hard white sand and almost perfectly flat. There is a gentle swell. It is a lovely place to swim and to walk at sunset.

Lord Alistair McAlpine built the Cable Beach Club here, a great resort, and was the driving force for preserving the atmosphere of Old Broome.

There are great bike paths and we have had several good rides, to do our shopping and tour the town. The jetty is lovely to walk out on and there is a Restaurant called the Wharf nearby which cooks local seafood.

We visited the Saturday market in the Courthouse grounds. The Courthouse is the old Cable House where the Cable terminated. This elegant teak house was built as an office and accommodation quarters for the English staff of the Eastern Extension Australasian and China Telegraph Company

Although the papers can come at any time between 10.00am and 4.00pm it is a wonderful to get a paper on the day it is published. We love to have a coffee at one of the excellent cafes and read the paper.

We had a fitting split on our hot water service. There was some water leakage, fortunately not much and John could easily replace it. It was fortunate we were in the caravan when it happened. Nothing was damaged but the caravan cupboards are now very clean. We would have preferred to do that after the Gibb River Road, but were grateful it happened when we were in a town so we could buy the fitting.

The film “Bran Nue Dae” an exuberant and irreverent musical about a young aboriginal’s search for meaning in modern Australia was shot in Broome. We went to see it at Sun Pictures, which is an outdoor picture house, and one of the locations for the film. It was fun to see the place you were sitting in up on the screen.

We took the town bus to Gantheaume Point and walked to the Cable Beach Resort along the beach. We visited the town beach at low tide. Tricia enjoyed doing yoga at the Buddha Temple, also related to the Cable Beach Resort.