The Fitzroy River and Derby – 24 to 27 July 2010

From Broome we drove to Derby a sleepy coastal town on the mouth of the Fitzroy River. We stopped at the Boab Prison Tree outside town and then drove in. It being Sunday when we arrived the town looked very small and abandoned.

This is because they put the cyclone shutters down when the shops close. Come Monday, the shutters open and presto there is a lovely little country town.

Derby has the largest tidal range in Australia at approximately 11.8 meters. It is also where the salt water crocodiles range begins.

The jetty is a nice place to sit and watch the fishermen and the tide and John got quite interested in mud crabbing.

There are two very nice cafes we found, an Italian Cafe the Jila Cafe and The Point Cafe on the jetty. The Point Cafe is laid back and a bit disorganized but is a nice place to have a coffee and watch the tide change.

From the Jila Cafe ( excellent) we learnt that Sandalwood is great for repelling mosquitoes and we have now enjoyed several mosquito less dinners. It is nicer and works better than citronella and is easier to carry. It is made by New Mountain Sandalwood www.newmountain.com.au and we bought it at the local Woolworths in Derby.

Broome – 18 to 24 July 2010

After our flight from Hong Kong to Perth with an overnight stay in Perth, we returned to Broome and collected our little pod from storage and returned to the Cable Beach Caravan Park for another week in Broome.   We were lucky to get a site at that time as Broome is fully booked, but because we had been there in June when it was quieter they saved a site for us. 

It was amazing the change in atmosphere, as gone were the groups preparing to venture into the Kimberly’s, replaced by those who know their plans two years in advance to book for a three month stay in Broome.  We used the week to recover from the long flight and do some sightseeing in Broome.   

We followed the heritage trail on our bicycles. Broome began as a pastoral town, but  became renowned as the biggest pearling centre in the world with mother of pearl [Pinctada Maxima] being harvested for pearl buttons.

Broome was exempt from the White Australia policy to allow Japanese pearl divers who were the best to operate with the diving fleet.  It became a culturally mixed town, with settlers including Chinese, Filipinos,Malays, Japanese and Koepangers (Timorese).  There is a large Japanese Cemetery, as many divers died from accidents and the effects of the bends which was poorly understood.

Broome experienced a gradual decline during the 1920's as plastics became available. The declaration of WW2 was the final blow. The Japanese who worked on the luggers were interned and sent south. The Industry depended on their skills and so it was no more. The bombing of Broome in March 1942 resulted in the deaths of servicemen and refugees from Java. Eight flying boats were sunk and Dutch women and children evacuees were killed. The town was evacuated and the luggers were sailed south or burnt as part of the scorched earth policy against possible invasion.

Pearling interests in the town were renewed in the 1950's but were no longer viable.  In 1949 the Government lifted a ban on pearl culturing and a pearl culturing farm was established which included American, Australian and Japanese interests. Today cultured pearls, tourism and the live cattle trade are Broome's mainstay.

The old buildings were built of corrugated iron. These cool down quickly at night. They are also light but strong in the event of a cyclone. Modern houses are usually built of corrugated iron for the same reasons. No Broome house has a letterbox or gutters as these can act as shafts, flying through windows.  We enjoyed the heritage trail and finished up at the Union Bank Chambers, now Matso's Cafe, a microbrewery.

We took a trip up to Cape Leveque. The road in is awful but about half way in the dirt road becomes bitumen, which enables access to the all weather airstrip for the aboriginal communities along the road.  We stopped at Beagle Bay and visited the Beagle Bay Church with its  mother of pearl altar and decorations. On the day of our visit a team of artists was busy restoring the altars.

Most of the communities were established by missions, which provided some protection to local aboriginals who were often treated badly by the pearlers, who  “black birded” them to provide labour for the pearling fleet in its early days.

Further up the Cape we visited  Ardyloon Fish Hatchery where we each fed a Barramundi.  We then visited Cape Leveque where we had a great swim and stopped at its West Beach and on the way home visited the Lombadina Community, originally established as a Palatine Mission, with a Church built of local timbers with a more traditional local architectural theme.

Back in Broome we took Sentosa Charters [who did an excellent job] to watch  the Humpback whales on their winter migration route. To get to their main vessel the 'Observer' they use a three wheeler boat that drives into the a water. It reminded us  of "The Owl and the Pussy Cat".

The 'Observer' is painted so it resembles an upside down whale.  There were a large number of whales and some played with the boat swimming round and round it and diving underneath.  They stuck their heads up and looked at us, causing us to wonder who bought tickets to see who.

We saw dolphins surfing with the whales but they couldn't compete.

We spent the rest of our time enjoying Broome and getting ready for the Gibb River Road.  On our way to Derby we stopped at the 12 Mile Cafe, a lovely organic cafe for Brunch, a great way to start the next stage of our  journey.

USA – 16 June to 18 July 2010

We flew from Broome to Sydney then to San Francisco to spend time with Alex, Sophie and Gillian. 

From there we flew to Virginia to visit Katharine, Amelia and Tafadzwa and then on to Buffalo to see Chris, Monica and Jeremy.

We flew back to Broome from Toronto via Hong Kong.  In Hong Kong we visited our friends Vivien and Anna Mae.

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.

Whim Creek , Port Hedland and Marble Bar – 1 to 2 June 2010

Whim Creek was situated on the North Coast Highway between Roebourne and Port Hedland. It is a worked out gold and copper mining area. Cyclones and time mean nothing remains of it but the pub. It is a nice stop for a meal or cold drink to break the journey.
From Whim Creek we traveled to Port Hedland.

Port Hedland is where the ore from BHP Billiton’s Mt. Whaleback mine is loaded for export, mostly to China and Japan. The Information Centre provided a tour of the Port.

It was fascinating to learn that to dump the ore from the rail cars they are rotated, track and all in the dumping shed. The cars couplings rotate and two cars are emptied at a time. It makes sense is it is quicker and there is less room for human error.    
   
Port Hedland also exports salt evaporated from the sea. We probably use some of that salt in winter as it is mostly used for salting roads.
 

We managed to see the stairway to the moon from the beach behind Port Hedland Caravan park.

From Port Hedland we drove to Marble Bar, situated in the Shire of East Pilbara, as the signs proclaim “the world’s largest shire – with bugger all in it” and “Australia’s hottest town.” It holds the record in the Guinness Book of Records for having a temperature over 100F (37.8 C) for 160 consecutive days from October 1923 to April 1924.  The town’s temperature is over blood heat for 6 months of the year.

Marble Bar gets its name from a Jasper Bar over the Coongan River.  An early pioneer mistook it for marble.
The town is powered entirely by solar power.  We visited the nearby Comet mine an old gold mine.  Most of the residents spend the three cooler months fossicking.

Tricia likes the pioneer memorial wall. A local grader driver kept grading up bones as he graded the roads. These were from people who had died on the track and been buried by the next passer by.  He researched as many of these people as he could and a memorial wall was erected with a plaque for each person he was able to discover.
Many gold seekers and other workers died a lonely death in this very unforgiving country, the pioneer wall memorializes some of them and is very touching.

The government buildings, built in1895 of the normal high quality in gold mining towns of that era are still in use today.   Regrettably the Iron Clad Hotel had recently closed because in the owners absence on a trip to the UK, the manager had absconded with all the alcohol.  As the song says “there’s a nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear, than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer.”

Karratha, Dampier, Roebourne, Cossack, Pt Samson – 28 to 31 May 2010

Karratha, named for the original Station that had the lease before the town was built, is an aboriginal word meaning 'soft earth'. For us it was a pit stop, where we washed out the red dust of Karajini and John got some replacement bolts from the excellent Atom bolt shop.
It is a bedroom town for the port of Dampier, named for the English buccaneer William Dampier, and the main port of Hamersley Iron [a Rio Tinto subsidiary] for export of its Pilbara iron ore. 
It also exports salt and is the service point for the vast North West Shelf Natural Gas Project and the new  Pluto liquid natural gas project.  The scale of the onshore facilities are very impressive.
Driving through Roebourne, once the administrative capital of the North West, and Wickham, a mining service town for Cape Lambert, another Rio Tinto iron ore port, we came to Point Samson a small, very up market holiday town.   It was the principal Port of the area but traffic declined when the mining companies set up modern shipping facilities at Dampier and Cape Lambert. We stayed at the Cove Camping Park, a nice modern park within easy walk of Honeymoon Cove an idyllic swimming beach. There is a nice resort with a first rate restaurant Ta Ta's.   This was the time for seeing “The Staircase to the Moon” but we think the published times were somewhat inaccurate.



 
 
Point Samson is close to Cossack, originally known as Tien Tsin, and established in 1863 as the North West’s first port for the pastoral and pearling industries. Miners heading to the Pilbara Gold Rush also passed through here. There was a large population of pearlers operating from Cossack mostly getting mother of pearl for buttons and inlays. The pearlers fished out the area and moved to Broome.

Cossack has a difficult harbour, ships could only come and go on the high tide. The harbour silted up and wasn't big enough to take the larger ships being built at the turn of the century and in 1904 a jetty was built at Point Samson and all shipping movements relocated there. Cossack is now a ghost town although it does have a cafe courtesy of the shire. The buildings remaining have been renovated and there is a historical interpretation trail.   It was fascinating to read that the ships delivering mail would bury it near the rocks  on Settler’s Beach,  carving a mark on the rock so the residents knew where to dig for their mail.