Em and Stu do Australia Part 2: WA’s Dampier Peninsula
Want to get notified of my next post? Subscribe. On Western Australia’s Dampier Peninsula is a spot so far off the beaten track that when you hit the remote Aboriginal community of Beagle Bay, known for its mother-of-pearl church, you still haven’t gone far enough.
After a further half-hour of negotiating unnamed 4WD paths according to a supplied mud map (Augie, who never sleeps in the car, finally fell asleep during his first 4WD-ing experience) we reached Arrow Pearling Base. Here, on the bay’s coastline, perches an AirBnB run by a pearling family who have “pearled out” their quota and so turned their hands to hospitality, while others operate the pearl farm.
My sister Mel and my niece Lily joined us for three of our four nights there, and together it seemed like we almost stepped out of space and time, so far was this from life in Perth, or even Broome.
The region’s 10-metre tides that are the biggest in the country and almost the world, helping create the Kimberley’s premier tourist attractions such as Horizontal Falls and the Staircase to the Moon.
These tides, combined with our position on the western side of Beagle Bay, also created spectacular views. One, rare in WA, was sunrise over the water (not that we opened shutters to this given Augie will wake at 5am if a sparrow farts nearby). Two, a water’s edge that by 3pm crept so close we could skip stones across the ocean from our bedroom window.
With just a fridge, bed and table in our room, we had common ablution blocks, indoor and outdoor camp kitchens and outdoor chill spaces packed with beautiful relics: some valuable and official, such as catalogued antiques from a shipwreck off the Beagle Bay coast, and some just piles of shells and curios so casually beachcombed it was almost as if a high tide swamped the place and left them behind when it receded.
A huge tub parked on the beach just above high tide mark served as “infinity pool”, but there was really no need; the sea was warm and clear and when halfway in, the tide made rock pools for Augie to paddle in, shrieking with delight, chubby fingers busy collecting shells and coral.
The lines between worker and guest here seemed in some cases blurred. I got the sense some came for a holiday, or a short-term job, that hadn’t ended on schedule. One woman returns with her husband regularly (annually) and bakes cakes (apparently daily). The temperatures on the oven are rubbed off but her cakes seem to turn out perfectly. Another guest (or perhaps a worker) spends his days tinkering with the solar array/battery/generator interface, an impressive pioneering endeavour powering the whole enterprise. It rewards owner Steve’s gutsy environmental investment by being dreadfully temperamental. This causes us guests no significant interruption, but seems to give Steve no end of headaches.
Despite this he has plenty of time to take guests or workers out fishing and I walked past him conducting impromptu filleting lessons outside the kitchen, using huge freshly caught fish the like of which I have never seen outside markets. A coral trout shimmering orange with electric blue dots. A bluebone, its massive gleaming body shot through with turquoise, illustrating for me the line from the Pigram Bros’ ode to Broome, ‘Going Back Home’: now the bluebone are starting to bite.
One morning Steve, when not fishing or filleting or doing something in one of the enormous sheds dotted around the place, takes out a kit for dyeing kangaroo leather after a guest mentions her friend wants something to hang a pearl from. He can do black or white or a deep red, created by ground red mangrove extract.
The gang throws together enormous communal dinners and eats them arguing lazily over the Spotify playlist. Such is their abundance of fish that more than once our little family party was touched by the unexpected delivery of a steaming platter of battered fried fillets, rendering unnecessary our plans to cook something we’d carted up from the Coles in Broome.
Another family member, who doesn’t work onsite but is also in pearling, dropped in and took us and another couple of guests out in her ute down yet another track unknown to Google, to sand dunes on which we make the only footprints (and Augie discards sand-coated bread and cucumber). She takes no bookings, expects no payment: she has simply visited this spot since childhood and loves to share it. Here we watched the sun set, then turned to see an immediate moonrise: the first of three exclusive Staircase to the Moon viewings over Beagle Bay, unspoilt by crowds.
Back at base, with Augie asleep, a small crowd of fascinated ladies gathered like moths to a flame as she held an impromptu lecture on pearl classification and pricing, the different names and shapes, what makes one more valuable than another. How they are deemed pink, white or silver, or a combination thereof, this area’s creations sporting coveted highlights known as ‘Beagle Bay Pink’.
Another day brought another adventure, as we drove from the base north to Cape Leveque, or Kooljaman, as the Bardi call the tip of the peninsula.
We spent an easy 1.5 hours on a road that in my childhood was teeth-rattling corrugated dirt but is now bitumenised, for “Bundy’s Coastal Tour”. This Indigenous bush tucker/cultural tour starts from the Djarindjin/Lombadina Aboriginal community 20 minutes south of the cape, home to a few hundred people.
The website and the folk who take the bookings are casual about the details. We worked out through a combination of last-minute scouring of the website, TripAdvisor reviews and on-the-spot realisations, that:
We would be driving our own 4WDs in convoy to the various tour locations;
The meeting point was somewhere unspecified at Djarindjin (turns out it’s the servo);
We would be wading waist-deep;
We need(ed) to bring reef shoes;
Servo folk had not opened early for us as Bundy had asked them, so anyone called by nature would have to do, as a friend’s toddler calls it, a “bush wee”;
Prebooked picnic lunch would not be arriving (indeed we had not prepaid, so did it ever really exist? Was it a tongue-in-cheek reference to the tucker collected on the tour? We will never know.)
Once we resolved to find all this authentic and charming rather than stressful, we were free to enjoy the morning with the soft-spoken yet knowledgeable and passionate Bundy, who was very accommodating about adapting his itinerary to make things easier for us toting “the bub”.
Fearsome, finely handcrafted spears adorned his battered 4WD which escorted our embarrassingly clean rental versions, tyres hastily let down, through the shady, ramshackle Djarindjin neighbourhood that seemed to hold little in the way of community infrastructure other than the servo, a shop selling ice and tackle and so forth, and houses surrounded by mature trees, car corpses and the occasional peacefully cropping roo.
Where the houses ended, we engaged 4WD and scaled a sand dune into the Bardi Jawi Indigenous protected area, of pristine mangrove forest fringing crystalline waters full of crabs and shellfish.
Stu and I, trying to keep “the bub” happy as the sun beat down and naptime came and went without him once closing his eyes, did not distinguish ourselves in spearing mud crabs or prying oysters loose. But others gathered a little collection of meat Bundy cooked on a casually thrown-together beach fire, and they shared delicious salty morsels with us while conducting one of those desultory and somewhat awkward conversations held by tour groups everywhere.
Given Bundy’s quiet voice and our preoccupation with trying to feed Augie bits and pieces he was more interested in burying in otherwise clean sand, and trying to keep him happy given the poor mite being so hot and tired, I caught little of this talk. But I gathered from Mel it gave fascinating insight into the challenges of life as an elder trying to protect native title land from the never-ending corporate grabs coupled with the never-ending internal community disputes over responses to these. I wish I had heard more, but tried to accept that travelling with a baby has changed things. And baby or no, always when you travel there will be something you miss; and we have already had many wonderful experiences to be grateful for.
On our final morning, Steve set to yarning as I quizzed him about the pearl descriptor, ‘Beagle Bay pink’. I apologise to him for this vast oversimplification, but my understanding is that a microalgae in abundance off the northern Dampier Peninsula coastline, especially Beagle Bay, is a prolific “fixer” of Omega-3 fatty acids. When pearl oysters eat lots of Omega-3 rich algaes, they grow well and are healthy, with abundant stem cells. This means when they are growing a pearl, the alternating crystalline and protein layers of the nacre (mother of pearl) grow in such a uniform way that the resulting gem is superior in its ability to both reflect and refract (scatter) light; and the pink comes from light’s red wavelengths.
I further learnt that the WA pearling business is somewhat arcane and complex and like any other industry, not without its politics; and that Indonesia, the other main producer of South Sea pearls, also has good natural conditions for pearls, and moreover cheaper labour costs and less government regulation. This makes its pearls more affordable, but cannot quite replicate the natural oceanic conditions that make for the superior size and beauty of the Dampier Peninsula’s creations.
I was tempted to sit and grill Steve about all this for hours, but the next step of our journey was calling.
Steve vanished mysteriously just as we were about to check out, then, just as we were stuffing Augie into the car, he reappeared from one of his sheds – bearing two enormous, heavy and beautifully polished pearl shells for us as a parting gift.
Full of the gratitude for the experience of Arrow, we drove south again to Broome, to Hannah’s “dry season hotel”. After period of recovery and packing we were as ready as we’d ever be for our next leg: the Northern Territory, Litchfield National Park and one of Australia’s most special World Heritage Sites: Kakadu…
JOBS TALLY
Bookshops visited: 1. Parmas eaten: 1
Broome’s Kimberley Bookshop is a very pretty, polished little store with specialist Indigenous lines and a gorgeous range of complimentary giftwrap.
The Roey’s Pearlers, Broome, does a parma that makes up for its underwhelming chicken with sheer size, plus ham cut “in bits like a pizza”. 7/10