Aboriginal for a Week: Broome and the Kimberly

For this post I'm going waay back to the beginning of april; we had a mid semester break (i would call it spring break but its fall here!) during which our whole dorm (about 35 people) went on a field trip for our Australian History Course. On this trip we flew way up north to Broome and then drove out into the bush to stay on Aboriginal land for four nights.
Our flight out of Perth was delayed so it was dark once we arrived in Broome. It bears mentioning that as Australia is moving into fall, daylight savings time has ended so now it gets dark around 6... bummer. Anyways since it was dark we couldnt go tour around Broome, which is a former pearling center and currently popular tourist destination. we spent the night at the NDAU Broome campus and got to see an australian possum while we sat outside and watched tv. completely unlike the american opossum. brown with a hairy tail, it looked exactly like something we would see at the nocturnal house at the cincy zoo, which was awesome because i love the nocturnal house. i suggest googling it. at the crack of dawn we woke up to meet our trip guides, the aboriginal Morgan family. They run a tour group called Wundargoodie Aboriginal Safaris and have been working with NDAU leading these field trips for ten years. We piled into their 4 wheel drives and set off for the Kimberly. The Kimberly region is a large area stretching across the top of Western Australia and is roughly the size of California. It is one of the few parts of Australia that is still mostly inhabited by indigenous people, and the point of this trip was for us to be immersed in and learn about their culture. The roads were all dirt which made for a bumpy 3 or 4 hour drive. They said that in the rainy season the road gets so bad that the drive can take 10 hours. We stopped off for lunch at a friend of Morgan family's house, which truely seemed to be out in the middle of nowhere. She talked to us about all the mining going on in the area, as much the massive mining that is fueling Western Australia's economic boom goes on right in the Kimberly. It was our first experience hearing about the modern legal battles for land between natives and government. It is a sad fact that these and other indigenous people do not legally own the land where they have been living for over 50,000 years. In order to attain status as Traditional Land Owners they have to go to court and prove their continuous habitation and indigenous culture. Unfortunately many of the Aboriginals were sent to missions and driven off their land in other ways, only returning within the last 50 years. Also, their culture and language were suppressed in such a way that most can now only speak English and their children have to rely on special cultural days in school to learn about their heritage. All of this makes it extremely difficult to win legal rights to their land in court, opening the way to easy exploitation by mining companies and other whites. Fortunately, the Bardi-Jawi mob (tribe) which inhabit the Dampier peninsula we were driving to had won their case in the last and were finally legal owners of their land. Anyways after a lunch of sandwiches and damper, simple bread made of yeast and water cooked in the fire, we were back on our way. We stopped at the old Beagle Bay mission to see the old church. It was built entirely out of native materials and the inside was decorated beautifully with oyster shells, natural paints, and pearls. At some point during the drive we saw a frilled neck lizard run across the road, which was really cool. It runs on its hind legs and stood about a foot and a half tall with a big frill around its neck like the dinosaur that kills newman in jurassic park. Also, i forgot to mention that on our easter break trip to Exmouth a huge goanna crossed the road in front of our car. Goannas are the largest lizards in australia, kind of like a smaller komodo dragon. Anyways, after a little while longer we arrived at our camp site at Mudnunn, which was a small home site owned by friends of the Morgan Family who run small tours of their own. The rest of that night we set up our tents and went to bed after a dinner of beef stew. Its worth mentioning that the weather in the Kimberly was stifling. It was super hot during the day and never cooler than the 7os at night and very humid. It was difficult sleeping that first night in a cramped sweaty tent with 2 other guys and dawn could not come soon enough. we soon found out that what little relief the night brought in terms of heat was erased as soon as the sun rose, with it jumping back up into the 80s by 6:30 in the morning. The next three days-Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday-would start with us listening our main guide, Colin, talk about Aboriginal culture and his experiences being a native Australia. Unfortunately much of white australia is very racist still which is something we American students sometimes struggle with (something i'm sure Carrie can relate to). For instance it was only in February when we arrived when the central government formally apologized for the Stolen Generations (the decades when it was official policy to relieve native families of their children and attempt to "westernize" the kids. indeed it was a common belief that the whites could breed the aboriginal genes right out of the children by ... master race darwinism b.s.), and this simple apology is hugely controversial. It was refreshing to hear Colin's unbiased opinion on treating everyone equally. Later that sunday morning they took us to see something truly amazing. Out on some coastal rocks there are 11,000 year old human footprints. They are from men running out to hunt sea turtles and are followed by women's footprints which were visibly deeper due to the children they carried on their backs. It was so cool to see these prints, especially when you realize the pyramids are only 5,000 years old. These footprints are so much older than the pyramids and we saw boys walking along the same beach, hunting turtles with spears just as they used to. Granted the kids were wearing jean shorts and basketball jerseys, but still... It was interesting to learn that these footprints were vital pieces of evidence in the native title case, helping to prove the continuous habitation criterion. After lunch we went swimming while the aboriginals stayed on the beach to watch for salties, huge man eating crocodiles that live in the Kimberly. An interesting fact about aboriginal culture is how respectful they are; every speaks very quietly and have unassuming personalities. We were not allowed to swim until the local boss, Uncle Bundy, had officially welcomed us and given us his permission. The same went for pictures, we had to be officially welcomed to an area before we could take anything. In some instances we would be standing right by sacred ground and those were especially off limits for pictures.
After our swim we were driven to One Arm Point where we listened to an old lady named Auntie Irene talk to us about her experiences at the Sunday Island mission on an island across the bay. I never realized how many islands there were off the coast of Australia... there are thousands just in the north west where we were. She told all sorts of yarns, which is Aussie slang for stories, including many about her and other old timers' efforts to re-teach their culture to the younger generations who were deprived of it. It was also here that we first learned about the tides in the area... the area is home to the second highest tide in the world and as we stood there the water was rushing past-back out to sea-like a river which was amazing. We learned that the area is also a huge producer of trocha shells which along with tourism form the main money makers for the locals. We also heard about the problems with poaching, as Indonesians boat down and illegally take trochas, shark fins and sea cucumbers. Apparently it is a big, big problem... I didnt realize how close Indonesia is to Australia.
Every night after dinner we would all sit around the fire and play word games, which were fun. On monday after our usual talk with Colin we got to learn how to make a boomerang. A local aboriginal named Brian with the cool long white hair and beard started making a boomerang with hand tools and we all got to have a try at forming it with the hatchet. After we all had a whack he used power tools to save time and finish it off. After that Uncle Bundy showed us how to make spears out of long 8 foot sticks. You have to heat them in a fire to be able to peel off the bark and make it easy to bend and therefore straighten. After that we all got to try throwing the boomerang and our spears at a target. The boomerang was pretty hard to get right, and no they don't come back that's just a myth. They do, however curve through the air. They are traditionally used not for hunting but for settling disputes. When two men had a dispute they would go out into the outback and throw boomerangs until one was hit, then it would be over and they would drink tea together (albeit one with a broken leg or arm!)... The curving path of the boomerang made it tricky to dodge. it was in this way that conflicts were settled and there was no war between tribes. The spears were more fun to throw. The four guys had a big spear throwing distance contest and I ended up getting second. Later I speared the target from about twenty yards away on my first try which was awesome. That afternoon we went swimming again. That night one of Colin's sons, Robert, put on a didgeredoo demonstration. While people in the West Kimberly didnt traditionally play it, he had picked it up and of course we were eager to learn. After some brief instructions he passed around 2 of them so we could try our luck at it. After a lot of experimentation i was able to get it... Dan was really good and able to even do the dingo and other animal calls on it like Robert whereas all i could get was the base standard sound but still we were the only two that got it down. Then Colin told us creepy ghost stories around the camp fire, which would have been corny but it was about about the spirits he has seen and other creepy things experiences students have had with spirits on prior trips. Again, like the surfing trip the stars were amazing with the milky way in full sight. My favorite thing about this night besides the didg playing was when he showed us a massive emu in the sky. Not a constellation, it was rather a massive dark spot in the sky that formed an emu with one star as its eye that stretched across almost half the sky. Later after everyone had gone to bed, myself, Greg (guy from Iona) and Dan stayed out by the fire letting ourselves be transfixed by the stars which led to a great conversation about the meaning of life and other such deep topics.
Our last full day, Tuesday, started with a 6am wakeup to go crabbing. We drove out to a massive coastal plane, mud as far as the eye could see. We divided up into groups with one Aboriginal per group as a guide and went hunting for crabs. It was really neat to be walking on the ocean floor as with the massive tides, the area we were walking in would be under 30 feet of water in a few hours. We got to see depressions where stingrays had sat and even got to see croc tracks where it had walked along the ocean floor. The many rock outcroppings were where the crabs hit when the tide went out. We used long metal hooks to pull them out and wooden spears with metal rod tips to spear them once we got 'em out. We walked for hours in mud sometimes sinking up to our calves or knees but it was so worth it; i got to battle with and finally hook a crab and got to spear another one. As you can see in the picture these were the real deal: mud crabs sometimes two feet across. We also learned about a plant that the natives use to catch fish. Called fish poison, they mash it up into a paste and drop it into tidal pools where it deoxidizes the water, knocking out fish so they can just grab them with their hands.
After crabbing we went for our standard afternoon swim, our saltwater showers as greg, dan, and myself called it. Haha we chose not to shower the whole trip, 6 days! Needless to say everyone stayed away from our tent...
Tuesday afternoon we went to the Lombardina-Djarindjin community to visit the school. originally one settlement, it is now a divided community with a Catholic side and a secular side. The school was surreal, it reminded me of my friend Christina's pictures of African schools... there's really no other way to describe it. The the little kids were so cute, i wish i could have taken pictures but its frowned upon as the scars of the Stolen Generation and kidnapped kids still run deep. It was kind of sad to see the class sized dwindle as we visited older kids; we were told it gets difficult to keep older kids in school as they start to see no point in education... suicide and alcoholism are a huge problems in aboriginal communities. On a lighter note we gave gifts of sporting equipment, games, and coloring books to the kids and they sang us a song which was so cute. That night, our last night in the bush, all the local men who had been our guides throughout the week brought their kids to the campfire and we had a big thank you barbecue. I was able to sit down with Colin and talk with him and his family one on one for awhile that night. We talked about funny stuff like sleepwalking, yes Carrie i told them all about your adventures, but then switched to the more serious issues i was wondering about. It was really nice to talk to them and see what their thoughts were on all the aussie race-relation problems after hearing only white opinions for months. That night i was awakened by dingos howling which was terrifying at first but then cool when i realized what i was hearing... we saw their tracks on the road the next morning.
Wednesday i put on a clean shirt (haha) and we drove back to the Broome airport and flew home to perth.

PICS (click to maximize)
...somewhat out of order...


dirt road, made for fun 4 hour drive

beagle bay church
beagle bay
our ride
colin and i

djarin catholic school

playing the didg
huge mud crab
ancient 11,000 yr old footprint
one arm point, rushing tide
gum trees
homemade boomerang
spear i made, target i nailed
coastal plane where we crabbed