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FEBRUARY 2013 PAGE 27
DESTINATION AUSTRALIA
Sunset camel trek on Cable beach
B
roome, rather app r o p r i a t e l y, sweeps a visitor off their feet. As befits the top westernmost corner town of Australia, nearer to Singapore than to Sydney, it has a strong sense of its own identity, a small town always aware of its precious place in a big world. Precious is not an overstatement, because Broome is a town built on pearls. The most expensive pearls in the world still come from here. Pearl shops line Dampier Terrace, selling their
wares, Linney’s, Kaili’s, Paspalay. The pearling masters who lived here were amongst the richest people in Australia in their time, utilising migrant Japanese and virtually enslaved aborigines for diving duties - pregnant women were preferred because they had extra oxygen in their blood stream. They included Patrick Percy, who committed a murder in Cork as Patrick O’Sullivan before fleeing to the new world and becoming, of all things, a policeman.
Drive a couple of hours in either direction, and you will find more beautiful and even more remote coastland.
Y
ou can smell the silkiness of the ocean” says Edwina Kelsch as we approach Eco beach resort. Eco is an aboriginal word although it might have been dreamed up as part of a modern marketing campaign. The name may have been the inspiration for entrepreneur Karl Plunkett who set up his highend resort here, twice,
after it was blown down by a 300kph cyclone in April 2000. They pride themselves on being eco-friendly down to the shampoo and soap. “You can tell from the smell from the sewerage system when people have brought their own soap in for a big event like a wedding,” Simon Murray, our host tells us. An owl comes to sit on the balcony with a doomed mouse dangling from his beak, the sounds of the waves beyond. Later I float on my back for a long time in the dark bay looking up at the
Southern Cross and the milkspill of unfamiliar stars.
P
aula O'Brien from Leighlinbridge welcomes us to Cygnet bay Oyster farm. She guides tourists through the facilities and brings them on boat rides across the azure bay. It is an astonishing place where the tide can run at 18 knots as a body of water four times the size of Sydney harbour piles in and out of the bay twice a day. There is just one main road in and out of here,
and 2,600 islands to be explored in one of the emptiest places on the planet. Cable Beach resort lodges have the design and feel of a traditional pearling master quarters with the room in the middle of house to keep cool in summer. From the ocean bar we watch the camels returning from their sunset trek. How do people get here? Fly from Perth or Sydney. They are campaigning to get direct flights from Singapore. Not a moment too soon.