Meteorologists on a Performance Bonus?

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COVID cases are continuing to climb at a slightly alarming rate back home, and lockdown restrictions now include a curfew. This doesn’t sound all that appealing so we decide to stay on up here for a few more days in the seemingly vain hope that things on the home front might soon improve, even if the weather doesn’t. Our not so salubrious accommodation has run out of rooms, so today we have to move. There seemed to be only one room left in the whole town that was available for us to move to. We hope it's slightly more salubrious than the one we've left; the price suggests we should be getting Buckingham Palace.

I take a quick look at the weather forecast. I’m not sure why; we’ve scarcely seen a cloud since we left home five weeks ago, and today, like yesterday, is all cloudless and blue. We thought we might have seen a cloud yesterday until we realised it was smoke. I remember taking a quick peek at the forecast yesterday, and noticing that it was suggesting that there was a five percent chance of rain. Huh? Today they think it’s ten percent. What? I’m pretty sure the guys that are making these predictions have never been here, or if they have they never bothered to go outside. I’m not a meteorologist, but there’s a snowflake's chance in hell of it raining here today, or yesterday, or any other days in the three months or so before that. I wonder if they might just be playing the odds and relying on stats, but a quick look at these puts paid to that theory. The average number of rainy days in Broome in August is zero, nil, cero, nada, and the average rainfall total for the entire month is a whole one millimetre. I hope for their sakes that the local meteorologists aren’t on some sort of performance bonus.

We’re temporarily homeless between accommodations so we head down to the port for yet more stunning displays of the seemingly endless supply of spectacular rock formations on offer around Broome's coast.

We decide to go on an art gallery crawl, which I guess is a slightly upmarket version of a pub crawl, with the added advantage that you don't end up with a hangover. First stop is the Black Stump Gallery. The works here are striking. Boab trees feature prominently, as do some unearthly looking lithe dark skinned female spirits by apparently well known artist Judy Prosser; they’re almost haunting. North Western Australia certainly provides a good supply of rich and inspirational material for those with an artistic bent. There are also some works here by local indigenous artists, most of which feature hundreds if not thousands of meticulously placed individual dots which must have required extraordinary patience to produce. Next cab off the rank is the Short Street Gallery which is in two parts. Their smaller gallery in a rickety shed in Chinatown features an exhibition by a local indigenous artist. We’re then directed to their larger site near the Town Beach. This seems more like a warehouse for works by indigenous artists than a gallery. The works are stacked against the wall in groups by geographic locations such as “East Kimberley” and others as far away as Central Australia. There are no prices on any of them, but we’re encouraged not to be “shy” if we’re interested in making a purchase. It seems a bit sad that they’re not displayed a bit better, or at all really. We hope the artists are at least getting some of the recognition they deserve.

We check into our accommodation, and are given a registration form to sign. I gave them my name, our email address, and my mobile number when I booked, and these are all on there. The only other item that’s been filled in is my supposed “place of birth” which is shown as Balzan. This just happens to be the tiny village in Malta where Issy took her first breath. Where could they possibly have got that information from? This is very spooky. As usual, I blame the Chinese. As I think I may have remarked previously, Issy's got a Huawei phone, so I’m pretty sure Premier Xi and his gangs of goons know more about us than we do. I’m not quite sure how we’re going to hide when the invasion comes. I don’t think we’ve got any hope unless Issy at least ditches her phone.

We head off down to the Town Beach to watch the “Staircase to the Moon”, which we've read a lot about. It‘s a natural phenomenon which occurs on two or three days each month when the full moon rises over Roebuck Bay at low tide, giving the appearance of a series of steps in the tidal flats leading up to the moon. It’s clearly very popular. There’s a large crowd assembled, and a market's been set up with food stalls and all the usual offerings of jewellery, art works, photography, clothing and other miscellaneous paraphernalia. A number of large sheets of torn cloth have been suspended on frames above the shoreline, and a moving collage of indigenous type art work with fish swimming through it is being projected onto it. It looks stunning blowing in the gentle breeze. The sky goes black as the local population of thousands of bats takes off to do whatever thousands of bats do when the sun goes down.

The crowd goes strangely silent as the moon makes its first appearance. It's a massive yellowy-red ball, and the steps effect is spooky. It feels spiritual…. well it did until the yobbos sitting behind us started hurling abuse at me for having the temerity to have set up a tripod in front of them. The tripod's been there for about an hour and a half in anticipation of the show, and they sat down behind it about five minutes ago, which perhaps suggests not a particularly high degree of intelligence on their part. I’m tempted to point this out, but there’s more of them than there are of us, and getting into fisticuffs with a large mob of drunken yahoos would probably put a slight damper on what's otherwise been a stunning evening….

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