Nineteenth Century Astronauts?

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We awake to a text message from our beloved Qantas telling us that our flight home next week has been delayed. We’ve had these messages before; they usually tell us that the flight’s been delayed by five minutes which then leaves us wondering why they bothered sending it in the first place. We decide to check this one just to be sure. It seems that they probably should have bothered; it’s been delayed by four days. Hmmm. No sooner have we seen this than we find out that there’s been another COVID outbreak back home, so they’re about to go into lockdown yet again. This leaves us to suspect that our flight‘s been “delayed” (I think “cancelled” was the word they were looking for) because no one's really all that keen on swapping the sun drenched beaches of Broome for weeks of staring out from the confines of their homes at the cold and gloom of a Melbourne winter.

We start checking to see whether we can find anywhere to sleep here for the extra four days. Hmmm. This is not looking promising. I guess we could always lay our heads down on Cable Beach. That might be quite nice....well except I guess for the possibility of getting eaten by a croc, or sucked out to sea as an eight metre tide sweeps in. Maybe not. It seems that one hotel is prepared to let us sleep in one of its ”smaller” rooms (read broom cupboard) for the first two nights and then put us in a proper room. That doesn’t sound overly appealing either. A few clicks later and we find somewhere that can take us for all four night in a proper room, well at least it looks like a proper room on their website. Disaster possibly averted.

We head into Chinatown for some lunch and then on to the Broome Museum. The main items of interest here cover the World War 2 air raids and the pearling industry.

It seems that there were four air raids on Broome, and these were the most southerly such incursions into our homeland in the entire conflict. The 76 Dutch nationals for whom we saw a memorial yesterday were mostly refugees from the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) who were transiting through Broome on their way to other more southerly Oz destinations. A lot of them were killed on ships and the dead included many women and children.

We heard a lot about the early days of pearling up at Cygnet Bay a few days ago, but perhaps not as much as we should have about some of the not so good things that happened back then. The local aborigines had been diving for pearl shells here for 20,000 odd years before the first white people came along and decided to try to get their own share of the action. The whites weren’t particularly adept divers themselves so they pressed the indigenous folk into service to do their dirty work. Some of the dive masters treated the local people appallingly. Many of them drowned. If they got injured they were often just dumped on shore in the middle of nowhere to fare for themselves, which we suspect would not usually have ended well. The next big step was so-called hard hat diving which required the divers to deck themselves out in heavy suits. These included lead boots and heavy bulbous metal hats with windows in them that made them look like nineteenth century astronauts. They were fed oxygen through tubes from the boats, and their lives were then totally dependent on the guys manning the air tubes not getting distracted. This method was apparently just as dangerous as the previous one, but hey, it was more efficient, so what did the guys who weren’t doing the diving care. It seems that Europeans weren’t much chop at hard hat diving either, so most of the divers were Asians - Javanese, Chinese, East Timorese and Malays - and they outnumbered the European divers by about ten to one. That all seemed to go OK until the government decided they wanted a White Australia Policy. Hmmm.… bit inconvenient. The industry managed to get an exemption, but only if the Asians didn’t sleep on shore. Yeah, great. It seems that that directive was largely ignored, and the divers were instead jammed into bunkhouses in what was to become known as Broome’s Chinatown. Well there goes my theory about this Chinatown being another recent Premier Xi invasion beachhead. Ooops. That’s another mark against my name in his little black book; that’s three in the last week. Execution will definitely be too good for me; it'll probably more likely be water torture, bamboo under the fingernails, and then a bullet…..

We’ve booked a full day tour tomorrow to Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek out in the remote Kimberley. We’re keen to see Tunnel Creek which is a nearly kilometre long reach of stream in a tunnel through the rock. We were warned that we’d need to wade through it in near pitch darkness, with crocs for company. We get a call from the tour company. It seems that Tunnel Creek is now off the agenda. Apparently there’s been a rockfall. Hmmm. Millions of years of geological history and it’s decided to fall in the day before were due to see it.… Ah well, we decide we should look on the bright side. It’s probably better that it collapsed today rather than tomorrow.

We head off for dinner to the slightly curiously named Sydney Cove Oyster Bar. The menu tells us that it relocated to Broome only relatively recently along with all its staff. It had been operating very successfully in Sydney Cove for 33 years until the building’s owners suddenly decided not to renew its lease. The proprietors got together a petition with 15,000 signatures and presented it to Premier Gladys to try to get the decision changed, but all to no avail and with no reason given. Perhaps Gladys isn’t a seafood fan. I reckon the proprietors might be quite pleased they’re not back in locked down Sydney right now; in Broome they’re allowed to feed actual customers.

We’re seated next to a rowdy group on what seems to be a girls night out. As they leave a couple of them stop and apologise to us for the noise. We ask what the occasion is. It seems that they’ve been watching the final of the Olympic men's hockey. One of the two ladies then quickly adds that the other one is the coach’s wife. Wow!! Issy says she’s got goosebumps. Unfortunately the team lost in one of those cruel penalty shootouts, but their view is quite rightly that a silver medal is still well worth celebrating.

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