AUSTRALIAN OUTPOST
WEALTH OF THE KIMBERLEYS COAST AND INLAND SCENES
(By
K. McC.)
Unfortunately it has taken a War to turn eyes upon the lonely northwest coast of Australia. Yet in all the continent there is no coast so full of contrasts, no coast so picturesque, so Australian, and so unknown. The first thing that impresses you as you steam slowly north from Fremantle to Wyndham, in the far-away Kimberleys, is the immensity of Australia. Morning after morning you go on deck, and there on the Starboard hand is still W es t Australia—still the same coastline, the picture of which anybody could paint. Simply sweep a wide blue line across the canvas for the sea, a thin yellow streak for the sandy shore, then light blue for the sky above, and you 'have the northwest coast for nearly 1000 miles from Shark Bay to Broome. But this lifeless painting is far from an indication of either the charms or interests of the far north-west.
Eight days of steaming and swaying to the swell at strange anchorages that boast the name of “outposts,” and Broome is reached after covering a distance from Fremantle equal to that from Melbourne to Rockhampton. Here for the first time you find the enchantment of the tropics, the glamour of the East amid the charm of little ships that go to sea. For there is—or was—no other town in Australia quite like Broome. ■ From the wharf in Roebuck Creek a red road for two miles leads through boab trees to the town. On each side the picturesque homes of the pearlers nestle in shady gardens; the deep green is splashed with the scarlet red of poinsettia and blotched with the purple of bougainvilleas. Then, passing a sandhill, you are in the town. Well-dressed Japanese divers swagger round the streets with a contemptuous air. Chinese storekeepers invite you to a cigarette and a yarn before bothering about your wants. Yellowskinned urchins play in the streets,and everywhere you see Asiatics. The coloured population, you are told, outnumbers the white by four to one. In the town one is always conscious of Broome’s industry from the pungent smell exuding from the boatsheds built over the creek. For into these sheds the luggers unload their pearl shell, which, with the exception of pearls and a little sandalwood, is Broome’s life-blood. DERBY WAYS Leaving Broome, our captain keeps well out to sea, , for hereabouts the coastline is imperfectly charted, at anyrate by the British. What harbours, what wealth, the rugged cliffs for 500 miles due east to the Northern Territory border hold is at present not known, as two mission stations and the townships of Wyndham and Derby are the only seaboard habitations.
Next morning we are navigating the strong currents of Sunday Strait, at the entrance to huge King Sound, and presently we swing to starboard to hug the red-cliffed shore. We pass Cygnet Cove, where William Dampier, buccaneer and first-known Briton to land on this continent in 1688, careened his ship while hiding from the Spaniards. In 250 years it doubtless has changed. All the morning we are steaming up the huge sound, almost out of sight of land, and not till mid-after-noon do we berth at the end of a mile-long wharf. Ashore we see a cluster of roofs jutting above the green foliage of boab trees. This is Derby, the gateway to the Kimberleys, a district larger than Victoria; a district of wavy, grassy plains and fertile valleys, bordering the two biggest rivers in the State. Alas 1 the 1000 whites are centred in Derby, Hall’s Creek, Wyndham, or .along the two rivers. Mostly the rugged crimson and scarlet.-faced ranges between these rivers and the sea is still known only to some thousands of aborigines, who, in their native - state, do notalways welcome strangers kindly. With its population of 100 whites, Derby in pre-war days was first and foremost a cattle town, living the life of an out-station. Hard-case, hardliving, and hard-drinking stockmen, held together with wide-plaited leather belts, slouched about the street. A couple of stores and as many hotels look after the material wants of the people. The Government does the rest in a sort of a way with a hospital, a school, and a police station. Then you could not visit Derby without being impressed by its air of freedom and a sort of contempt for the more mundane ways of the outside world. Money was a secondary consideration even to a stranger so long as you look “ a likely kind of bloke,” willing to take the first job offering. Then you could get all the credit' needed for months, if need be. On my first visit to the place I carried my swag ashore and asked for a room at the hotel. “ Book a room ! ” exclaimed the astounded barman., “ Why can’t you roll your swag on the verandah, the same as other blokes what stop here ? ” At the table that evening the waitress thrust a cup of tea before me, and I asked for milk. What she said
cannot be repeated here, but ever afterwards it was impressed on me that black tea was the order of the day in the Kimberleys. But soon everybody knows you, and you know them. Time and money matter little; it is a land of hardships and bighearted, indomitable somehow it is a land you love, with a freedom that “ grips worse than rum.”
INLAND ALONG THE FITZROY
From the township of Derby only one road leads out—along the Fitzroy River, West Australia’s finest and largest waterway. Twenty miles along the bush track you reach the first habitation at Yeeda homestead, where the three white residents tell you of crocodiles worrying their cattle. From the mia-mias on the hillside floats the weird murmur of station aborigines playing the digerdodoo, and the shrill cries of gins as they “ cobber-cobber.” Here the telegraph line from Broome crosses the mile-wide river after traversing 120 miles of the appropriately named “ Madman’s Track.”
Proceeding along the river, only Mount Anderson and Liveringa homesteads are passed, till 140 miles out we come to Noonkanbah, the show station of the Kimberleys, and incidentally the largest sheep station in the State. It shears 60,000 sheep in a specially designed shearing shed built high on piles. ' Here, too, are seen a fine vegetable garden, more blacks, more mules and donkeys. Before crossing the Noonkanbah boundary we intercept a cordon of station blacks mustering on foot, Kimberley fashion, in a line of fifty or sixty strong, with half-caste stockmen mounted in charge. Nobody is in a hurry, for although the gins drive the sheep before them by brandishing bushes, halts are made while kangaroos are speared or trees shinned for goannas, because, as well as mustering, these aborigines have to “ catchem tucker.” Kimberley blacks are not paid—they only “ stopem plug of tobacco or pound of tea if good pfellar.”
Forty miles on from Noonkanbah the river is crossed by the hotel-store at Fitzroy crossing, and the sheep country is left behind. As you head on east only here and there does the high grass between the walls of jagged rock graze shy cattle. For miles no life is seen except kangaroos and myriads of birds. On the left-hand side of the track, through a haze of blackfellows’ smoke signals, the land can be made out rising to bold mountain ranges; to the right it falls away to “ pindan ” country, and then the desert of the interior. At last, when we sight the township of Hall’s Creek, beside the flood gums of a small waterway, it seems like a city in importance. Yet on investigation you find it contains only a police station, post office, hotel, and inland mission. But this lonely outpost was founded before Coolgardie on dreams of gold in 1886. FARTHEST NORTH Ahead the road leads on 100 miles
to the Territory border, and north nearly twice that distance to Wyndham, West Australia’s most northerly town. Hereabouts in the Ard River valley the country is more fertile, carrying only cattle, it being first selected in the early eighties by pioneers who overlanded from Queensland.
In 1885 one party of these overlanders, the Duracks, opened a store some 60 miles up the chocolate tideswirled waters of Cambridge Gulf. A year later John Forrest, as Government surveyor, pegged out the present township. To-day Wyndham is a one-street out-back town basking under a sun that is mostly a ball of fire. On one side the back yards of the meandering tin stores and latticed bungalows cling to the side of the Bastion, a 500-foot battlement of rock; on the other they are almost swept by the 36-foot rise of the spring tides. Opposite the wharf a large tow-storied hotel is the centre of life. A mile across a marsh are the meat works, where are found ice and electricity, and in the season the bustle of modern commerce. In the space of two minutes a bullock is treated from the noof to the hook.
In Wyndham the people tell you nothing ever happens—that is, nothing that they ever notice. Such episodes as crocodiles sleeping nightly on the post office steps or of bearded men arriving with wild cattle after months on the rough track from the Territory, or of heroic flights of a flying doctor, are to th'm all part of an ordinary day. Whenever 1 think of these cheerful, enthusiastic bushmen and their lonely
outpost with its vista of wild impressive hills, I reflect that if the Japanese land thereabouts the bushmen will rise to the occasion. Back in those ironstone mountains, where no tank or aeroplane can play its part, I can see them as “ Lawrences of Arabia ” 'among the aborigines, harassing the enemy with their bushcraft and home-made ammunition; and they will enjoy it, too, for these men do not mind dying Kimberley fashion—with their boots on.
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Bibliographic details
Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4561, 17 April 1942, Page 6
Word Count
1,653AUSTRALIAN OUTPOST Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4561, 17 April 1942, Page 6
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