Back to the Australian Bush!

But in style.

Travelling to the Kimberley region in Western Australia (WA) has been on my bucket list for decades.  Since I was unable to explore it as a geologist, I decided to visit it as a tourist[1].  This fascination began in the early 1970s when I worked as a junior geologist in Australia.  I was dispatched to the outback of Northern Queensland to prospect for mundane commodities such as zinc and copper but envied my colleagues who were exploring for diamonds in the remote Kimberley.  Are not diamonds a girl’s best friend?  My boss should have taken the song seriously, and sent me to the Kimberley with the boys. 

At the time I was probably mixing up the Kimberley names.  Diamonds mostly occur in a rock called kimberlite, which was named after the town of Kimberley in South Africa[2] and not in Australia.  Coincidentally, the two Kimberley names derived from the same person, British foreign secretary John Wodehouse, the first Earl of Kimberley. The name Kimberley is forever associated with diamonds, and in WA the discovery of diamonds is forever associated with a woman geologist.  In 1979, Maureen Muggeridge discovered loose diamonds in a floodplain near Smoke Creek, and soon after she located the host rock, coincidentally near an indigenous women’s sacred site.  The Argyle mine started operations in 1983 and became the world’s largest diamond mine by volume.  It is notably known for its unique production of gem-quality pink diamonds. 

  

During its peak operation period, the Argyle mine supplied 90 percent of the world’s pink diamonds, and employed hundreds of workers including some recruited from the traditional land owner communities, and it paid millions of dollars into funds and trusts for post-mining development. These funds, which are administered by the land-owner families, seem to have been squandered in consumer goods and useless investments.  Sadly, diamonds are not forever and the mine will cease its operations in 2020 due to the low production of gem-quality diamonds.  “Jewelers are already nostalgic for the end of pink diamonds”[3], and their price will substantially increase; at present a pink diamond carat is estimated between $1 and $3 million!

Rio Tinto, the mine owner, plans to dismantle the mine and rehabilitate the grounds to its pre-mining state, to the regret of the indigenous people who had dreamed of converting the mining village into a camp for tourists.  Now the lack of money makes their plans unachievable.  It is “boom turned to bust”.  Hopefully they will not make the same mistakes in the future.  We also flew over the mining dam and the opencast mine; both are so gigantic that it will take at least two decades to rehabilitate.  Diamond exploration goes on in the region, and with luck, another female geologist will discover the girl’s best friend in the future.  My trip to the Kimberley was therefore well-timed, even if the mine visit left me with low-spirits.  

The Kimberley lies in the north west corner of WA. It is about three times the size of England with a sparse population of 51,000 with Aborigines 40% of it.  A growing number of tourists (400,000 in 2017) are attracted by its remoteness, wilderness frontiers atmosphere, breathtaking landscapes and peculiar wildlife.  Animal birth comes either from eggs or pouch. Crocs (estuarine and fresh water), toads (indigenous and pest) and birds are in the first category and wallabies and less well-known quokkas in the second.  The adorable, and defenseless cat-size quokka has been described as the happiest animal in the world (always grinning).  To me, it is an absurd moniker because the quokka has lost most of his former habitat to predators.  It now survives in small islands like Rottnest off the coast of Perth.  Oddly, the larger animals are all feral escapees like camels, brumbies, donkeys and pigs. 

Beside the Argyle mine visit, the highlights of my trip were El Questro, Broome and its region and Darwin.  El Questro is a working cattle station (farm) with thousands of heads of cattle located at 100 kms west of the town of Kununurra.  The station has diversified into a wilderness park with tourist accommodations ranging from basic camping to luxury bungalows.  At Emma Gorge resort, we slept in safari-style tented cabins.  During this nature immersion, I challenged myself to spend three days without Internet and checked my fitness level by hiking to the Emma Gorge pools.  The second test was more strenuous than the first, and sadly not as rewarding.  It takes one long hour to trudge along the rocky and picturesque gorge to reach the pools and waterfall.  I reached the upper pool quite exhausted eager for a pleasurable swim as promised by our guide.  Bad luck, the pool was mobbed by noisy day trippers and the waterfall was dry.  After a quick dip in the icy water, to my satisfaction I reflected that I was certainly the oldest hiker. 

On the way down, by the lower pool, we spotted an idle freshwater croc left stranded by the receding waters.  We were told that his buddy had made the upper pool his home. In hindsight, I can also pride myself for swimming with a lonesome croc.  In Kimberley, ranchers and crocs eagerly wait to the regenerating wet season to arrive.  As roads flood, the tourist camps close down for six months.  The last three “wets” have not been up to the task: the locals blame climate change and pray for a good flood this year.

  

Broome is an exotic place full of character.  A tropical tourist trap for some, it looks the part, but for visitors able to scratch its tacky crust, it is a quaint laid-back multicultural melting pot.  It is also a getaway to natural wonders like the Horizontal Falls, the red cliffs of Cape Leveque and Gantheaume Point and the pearl farms of Cygnet Bay.  From the late 1800s, the town has gone full circle. It was founded on the pearling industry, the largest in the world when in 1910 pearling luggers were manned by multiethnic workers coming as far as Japan.  It plummeted during WWI and now it is booming again.  Pearling pre-dates European colonization.  Aborigine people who are first-rate swimmers harvested the shells and traded them with the Sulawesi islanders.  To improve yield, colonialists employed women Aborigines under slave-like conditions as well as indentured workers from South Asia.

Our resort was located on Cable Beach, famed for its 22 km of white sand and turquoise blue sea.  My nightlife highlight was to lay on a deck chair al fresco to watch the film Downton Abbey in the oldest functioning movie theater, the Sun Picture Garden in Chinatown, which was built in 1916. The spectacular Cable Beach sunset hyped in the tour brochure did not materialize.  In the matter of sunset, Darwin one-upped Broome in a big way. 

In 1971, flying back from Portuguese East Timor, I stopped in Darwin.  The sleepy frontier town still displayed the damage from the Japanese air bombing of February 1942, but had not yet been flatten by the devastating cyclone Tracy (Xmas 1974).  In 2019, the capital of the Northern Territory is unrecognizable, even if its historic downtown still exhibits the scars of both disasters, a badge of honor for the city.  I kept wondering how the glass skyscrapers will behave during another Tracy-strength cyclone?  Cyclones are not uncommon in the region, but Tracy was the fiercest and killed 71 people.  Oddly enough, I was the only one in the group who had visited pre-Tracy Darwin! 

Tourism and the government sector seem to be the Top End (the nickname for this region), and Darwin’s major economic drivers.  Thanks to both, the laid-back city has reinvented itself as a striving night life scene with lots of interesting pubs and multiethnic restaurants on the harbor and waterfront.  It is also culturally interesting: the region’s original inhabitants, the Larrakia people play an important part, attracting the attention of international tourists keen to discover their cultural traditions.  As a solo tourist, Darwin offered me plenty of exotic “culture vulturing opportunities.  The city is very spread out and its landmarks cannot be visited on foot.  The Military Museum and the Museum and Art Gallery are both worth a long visit.  For an history buff like me: The Military museum was a revelation, it focusses on WW II, with videos, and artifacts, and its tropical garden displays rusty military vehicles and guns. The Japanese bombed the Darwin region 100 times.  Their first air attack was carried out by the same squad which had shattered Pearl Harbor.  Hundreds of people mostly civilians, lost their life.

The Art Gallery displays creative Aborigine art (not the run-of-mill stuff found elsewhere during our tour) and illustrates the story of the region whose past behavior positively compares with that of the United States Wild West.  These rough and tumble times are long gone and now Darwin prides itself with its international film festival.  I watched a film released in Cannes, sitting on a deckchair under the stars, and I took the picture of this stunning sunset over the Indian Ocean.

                                                                    A picture is worth a thousand words.

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[1] I traveled with AATKings.  Our means of travel were buses, 4X4 trucks, boats and planes for extra activities.  We were 26, mostly Australians from the East Coast, Americans, British, Canadians and Swiss.  Couples and many single women.  We stayed in upscale accommodations, pretty amazing in the small locations we visited!

[2] Where diamonds were discovered in 1867.

[3] Bloomberg, October 22, 2019.