20 April 2013 - Palm Grove Tourist Village, Cable Beach, Broome, Western Australia

Today was earmarked for a trip up the south western coast of the Dampier Peninsula, to see for ourselves the centre of such dissent here in Broome and across the State.

About a week ago, Woodside Petroleum finally decided to pull the plug on the $34 billion James Price Point gas project. Research into the feasability of the project has been going on over the past couple of years and there has been political rumble boiling around the edge of it all.

A group of economic terrorists, modern Greenie hippies, have been camped up at James Point Price for most of that time and today it looked like they have decided to set up a permanent community, now the stress and drama of protest is over. They are also supported by a large sector of the Broome community, including one white woman who seems to be more Luddite than Green. The other half of the Broome population is grieving for the lost opportunity and the lucrative financial deals promised as compensation.

Just yesterday, plans to pour between $10 - $20 million into extending the local international  airport were abandoned  The facility which was just months away from being built would have seen a significant increase in commercial servicing of the Kimberley and was designed to open up the region to the international market. With tourist numbers having fallen by 15% - to 20% in recent times, this was all seen as an absolute boon to the area.

Today, standing out on the deep red cliffs of the Point, looking out to sea, I could see how one could argue against the industrial development which would, in all fairness to the Greenies, be an eyesore in an otherwise untouched landscape. However looking at their protest camp today, it would seem that they don’t get too hung up about eyesores.

And yet, how can society in the Kimberley move forward without real income.

I am glad that I had no part in the decision or protest or voting this way or that. The reality is that Woodside decided not to go ahead, a decision that had everything to do with the viability of the operation and not the politics of it all. In the wake, is left bitterness and a divided community.

James Price Point is about seventy five kilometres out of Broome by road, most just red dirt. This would have been sealed had the project gone ahead, something that would have pleased the many campers and fishermen heading up the road today as we returned.

Point Coulomb

We drove right to the end of the road, to Point Coulomb on the southern corner of a Nature Reserve of the same name. Below us just above the tide mark we saw a couple of camper trailers set up for the duration, generators purring away polluting the peace and a dog who came up to check us out. We left the dog and his owners who seemed to be up the beach on a quad bike, and started back down the road, calling into Quandong Point and Barred Creek on the way. These are lovely spots although we personally would not bother camping here. Fresh water and shade are essentials to us, but obviously not to many others.

I have learned a new word, one to be totally confused with: pindan. I first came across it at the Derby museum where there was a story of a small aircraft carrying three women, a couple of children and an assortment of men, that crashed landed in the “pindan scrub”. A quick search in our small (and annoyingly incomplete) Macquarie Pocket Dictionary defined this as originating from the aboriginal Bardi language and meaning “thin, scrubby vegetation, growing in arid country”. I was satisfied with this and understood it to the type of countryside rather than a geological term.

Travelling west to Broome and being particularly fascinated with the deep orange of the soil hereabouts, I was interested to see the word used again when we were out at Gantheaume Point yesterday.

Here the area was described as follows:

“Overlying the sandstone is about one metre of cobbles and pebbles, which are exposed along the coast around Munyirr – Gantheaume Point. A layer of red pindan soil (earthy sands) two to six metres deep provides an undulating surface that covers most of the Broome area”.

I could not have said it better myself, but it does add to the vaguaries of the word and so, with that proviso, I shall say that both Chris and I were most taken with the area travelled through today, truly a pindan landscape.

We were back in town soon after midday and took our lunch to the Town Beach where we sat as we had the other day, this time watching dozens of children having a hilarious time in the water park. Kids are all the same, no matter what colour or creed, and they were all having such fun.

We came on home and spent a quiet afternoon reading and in the pool, relaxed and more in tune with the heat and humidity of Broome in April. I fear we are in danger of becoming like our neighbours here at the park; inert with nothing to do but plough through the great piles of books beneath our bed and to dabble in the imagined intrigues of those we encounter in the swimming pool.