Culturing Mermaids?

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Today we’ve booked a tour up to Cape Leveque which is on the Dampier Peninsula north of Broome.

We join a busload of fellow expeditioners. Most are grey nomads of the over 60s variety, all of whom are collected from hotels. The one exception is a twenty something backpacker couple, who we pick up from the Broome Pistol Club. Hmmm. Good to see that they don’t seem to have brought any obvious weapons with them.

Our guide for the day introduces himself as Garry, and whilst he assures us that he’s an Aussie he sounds like he just got off the boat from Belfast. The pick up route takes us from Cable Beach through the other half of town, old Broome, on the inland side of the peninsula.

We head out of town and turn off onto the Cape Leveque Road. We’d heard that this has a reputation for being more than a tad rough, and it’s well deserved. We hear that most of its 200 odd kilometres is now sealed, but the one exception seems to be the first bit, which is a close to impassable goat track. I’m not sure this makes a lot of sense. The road doesn’t connect through to anywhere. They’ve upgraded the rest of it so that ordinary cars can use it, but they‘ve then made it impossible for them to get to it. Engineering must have changed since I retired…. Garry shows us some pictures of what the road looks like in the wet; more like a drain than anything you might have any chance of driving on.

We take a brief break to stretch our legs under a tree. As we gaze upwards it’s hard not to notice that the local girls seem to have decided that this would be as good a place as any to deposit their surplus bras. “Why” is probably the question that most quickly comes to mind.

First stop for the day is the Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm, which seems to be quite an establishment, complete with restaurant, swimming pool and gift shop. We’re given a history of the local pearling industry by a young gent named Shae. The local indigenous people had been harvesting pearl shells here for thousands of years, and were masters of carving and painting them. Apparently only around one in ten thousand contained a natural pearl, and if they found one it was more of a nuisance than anything else so they just threw it away. We're told that the shells here can grow to the size of your average dinner plate. The first Europeans to settle in the area in the 1880s decided to get in on the act and harvested them to make buttons. It seems that Broome originally came into being primarily because the world needed buttons, and we're told that at one time around seventy percent of the planet's pearl shell buttons originated from around these parts. Japan's Mr Mikimoto threw a spanner in the works in the 1890s when he worked out how to culture pearls. The pearl shell button industry was then at risk of collapse, so much so that the Western Australian Government passed a law prohibiting pearl culturing. The next major issue was the advent of plastics in the late 1940s, which caused the market for pearl shell buttons to all but disappear. The Government then decided that perhaps they’d better repeal their earlier law, and work out a way of getting into the cultured pearl game. Mr Mikimoto was understandably fairly secretive about his process, and wasn't about to hand his recipe over to a bunch of red-neck Aussies half a world away. A gent by the name of Dean Brown founded Cygnet Pearls here in 1946, and led the local charge to work out the culturing process. He did this very successfully, and he and his team eventually managed to grow a 22 mm pearl, which it seems is absolutely massive by industry standards. In 2004 they were offered a million dollars for this monster. They turned it down primarily because they wanted to keep their prize in the family, but also because they wanted to wait to see if they could grow something even bigger. It seems, in hindsight, that this may not have been a great decision; apparently they’re still waiting. Next challenge was a mysterious virus which was killing ninety percent of the oysters. But the local researchers were again up to the challenge, and in the last year or so they've perfected a technique which makes the oysters resistant to the virus' ravages.

Shae shows us a couple of shells that have been cultured and then gets some members of our group to open them to see what’s inside. The cultured pearl in one of them doesn’t look anything special, but Shae then notices that there also seems to be a natural pearl in the same shell. He says that he’s been doing these tours for a while now and this is the first time that this has ever happened. It sounds like a good story, but the cynic in me can't help but wonder if he feeds the same line to all his tour groups.....

Next stop is a hatchery a bit further up the coast run by the local Ardyaloon Indigenous Community. Our guide introduces himself as Wazza. The hatchery is a series of a dozen or so large tanks filled with local sea life - fish, turtles and shellfish. We’re not entirely sure of the purpose of the exercise. It doesn't sound like it's conservation as Wazza assures us that there’s no shortage of what's on show here out in the ocean. Maybe it's just to give the tourists something to look at? Wazza seems like a bit of a character, although we hope this isn't because he's been raiding the medicine cabinet a bit too frequently. He tells us that he’s spent quite a bit of his time here trying to culture mermaids.....

Both the hatchery and the pearl farm are on the shores of King Sound, where the tide range is a staggering 11.8 metres - the second largest on the planet. The water does indeed seem to be charging past us at quite a pace, and we suspect that if you took a dip here you'd fairly quickly end up somewhere else.

Final stop for the day is Cape Leveque. The road down to the Cape from the "main road" makes the goat track from earlier in the day look like an eight lane super highway. It’s less than a single lane of deep soft sand. Perhaps more worrying is that there’s a runway that looks just like the track right next to it, and some of our number will apparently soon be taking off from there to fly back to Broome. I wonder what happens when a plane gets bogged while it’s trying to take off. I try not to wonder about this too much.

The Cape looks like a great spot for a bit of remote R&R - a campground, glamping tents and a small cafe. The beaches look spectacular and are overlooked by a large lighthouse. The west beach is backed by stunning red cliffs. We're told that swimming there might be a tad on the hazardous side, but we’re able to take a cooling dip from the beach on the east side.

Then it’s back in the bus for the long drive back to civilisation. It's been a long and tiring day, and we hope that Garry's still got his wits about him. It's getting dark, they don't seem to be into fences up here, and we can't help but notice a few very large brahman cows wandering around very close to the edge of the road. I suspect the day wouldn't end well for us, or for them either for that matter, if any of them suddenly decided to take a slight detour into the path of the bus…. ..and we thought all we had to worry about up here were snakes, spiders, sharks and crocs.....

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

On the road again.
This would be a great place to glamp.

[DaveandIssy]

Glamping
Would indeed be very relaxing!