Sunday, July 11, 2010

Broome - Thursday 17 June


Town Beach in Broome is starkly colourful knob of land between Roebuck Bay to the south and Cable Beach to the north, richly populated with groups of young women with sprogs, lots of sprogs. Broome is what Victorians would term a 'tidy town' which befits a joint earning much of its income from the tourist dollar.

Willie Farm Pearls gave us a history of the pearling industry which brought home the abysmal treatment of the indigenous people of the area. Pearling between 1850 and 1939 was a tough business for other than lugger masters. The pubs - owned by the masters - extracted any wage that divers had just earned from those masters.

Shellshocked (sorry!), our history lesson was followed by a gentle riffle through our credit cards for any extractable resource.


There is a heritage cemetery at Town Beach which seems to be for politicians and pearling masters. Further out, there is a Japanes, Chinese and General cemetery. We had a quick stop at the minimalist Japanese cemetery and I was torn between wanting to know more about individual memorials and having reverence for the departed. I am a bit of a cemetery tragic.


Broome is graced with the most delightful relic of social history. Without charge, I was welcome to mosey around this cinema to my heart's content. It was the highlight of the town, for mine. That and the mango smoothies in Shady Lane.


Heralding the colours that were to dominate the WA portion of our tour, we scrambled over the rock formations below the lighthouse on Gantheaume Point watched very carefully by the nesting osprey on the tower. I captured many many birds throughout the tour, indeed, it was one of the hightlights for me, the birdlife. Not sure how I will present them. Maybe just an additional post every few days.


For our final evening in Broome, before we hit the road in earnest, we dined at Zanders Restaurant atop Cable Beach. Prior to dining, we watched the sunset over the Indian Ocean, washed down with plenty of champers, and good things on crackers. Here is a post, prepared earlier, of the sunset.

5 comments:

freefalling said...

I like the gravestones.
Did you have a swim in the ocean?
Mmmm...mango smoothies, nearly as good as rockmelon ones.
My uncle who travelled around the country in the seventies, always said the girls in Broome were the most beautiful.

Bruce Caspersonn said...

A great set of pictures. I love all the details, especially the costings. Excellent!

Julie said...

The Japanese cemetery was particularly stirring.

No I did not swim in the ocean. Actually did not even think about it. I had been at 15C the previous day, and this day was about 34C but my brain had not made the connection.

Duh!

Thanks Bruce. I reckon the details are just as important as the images. What worked. What didn't. What I liked, what I didn't. It will be warts and all, within libel laws, of course.

diane b said...

The Sun theatre was a hit with Bill. I loved the colours at Gantheaume Point, especially the milky blue sea. It is interesting to compare how you see things through the lens to what i see. It is good to get different ideas. I felt the same way in the cemetery. We weren't impressed with the eatery at the resort one little bit. There was a great restaurant called the Zoo on the way to Cable Beach.

Joan Elizabeth said...

Did they have movie theatres with canvas seats like that when you were a kid? They did in our town but it was an indoor theatre not an outdoor one.