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

Today dawned sunny yet again, but promising even hotter and more humid conditions than the preceding days. We had slept with the fan purring away all night and switched it over to air-conditioner on rising. I spotted a wisp of cloud through the park’s shade trees and panicked about tomorrow; this is the day we have been waiting. Given the cost, I do insist upon perfect weather conditions, although I suspect there are no refunds offered for anything less. Checking the weather forecast on line, it seems that the temperatures will be no better tomorrow, in fact the humidity is forecasted to be even higher.  Apart from the news of the increasing humidity, I am relieved. One less stress in my life!!

After a leisurely breakfast we drove into town to the weekend market and spent all of fifteen minutes wandering about checking it out. Alas it was a case of “same old, same old”, but then as I said to Chris afterwards, years ago when I was in the market to accumulate possessions, there would have been plenty there to catch my fancy. These days we buy only what we need, rather than what we want, except for the very occasional bottle of wine, a book, a DVD, a flight over the Horizontal Waterfall……

The market is held in the Courthouse grounds and it was not far from there to the Museum which is still only opening the off-season hours of 10 am to 1 pm. We were there outside the door as the volunteer opened the padlocks and were pleased to see over a dozen or more folks wander in during the subsequent hour. Like all such small regional museums, locals contribute enormous resources, both of time and finance, and it is always heartening to see these operations well patronised. It is an excellent little museum with certain facets of the area’s history highlighted in well illustrated exhibitions.

There is quite a large section on the pearling industry as you would expect. We have read bits and pieces and learned heaps more here. It was interesting to consider the population mix of this very cosmopolitan town in respect of the White Australia policy. As we have learned during our travels and I have no doubt repeated here before, the new Commonwealth Government of Australia in 1901 enacted the Immigration Restriction Act which would form the basis of that White Australia policy.

In that year there were 1,358 Asians working in the pearling industry and only 132 Europeans. The Broome Pearling Masters lobbied hard to gain an exemption from this Act arguing that Asians were better able to find pearl shell on the ocean floor, Truth be told, the whites were too lazy, too frightened and not willing to work for peanuts as were the immigrant divers.

That lobby group also pointed out that export earnings from the shell that year had totalled 104,000 pounds sterling  The following year, the Commonwealth Government reluctantly agreed to temporarily exclude Asians working in the pearling industry from the dictation test. (This test was part of the rigmarole required for the aspiring immigrants where the bureaucrat would dictate a passage in whatever language they picked out of a hat or perversely decided on, so that, say a Japanese person who had been diligently studying English, might be required to listen and write a passage in German or French. The system was designed to fail the aspirant.)

Anyway, back to the pearlers, a condition of this exemption was that the Asians were not to live on shore, but this was never rigorously applied. When in port, the Asians were confined to foreshore camps and today one can wander through Chinatown and see the Malay camp, the  Japanese camp, the Chinese camp, et cetera.

In 1910, the Commonwealth Government gave the Pearling Masters three years to remove the Asians, but a trial of white divers was discontinued after only a year due to the English divers suffering death and disability. One can only assume that the Asians just got on with life rather than moan and groan like their round eyed counter parts.

Here I also learned something which surprised me, and I guess I tend to be rather swayed by the fact that I spent seven years in cyclone prone Vanuatu, since seen the devastation of cyclone damage on the Queensland coast, along with having lived in Australasia most of my life and always knowing about the wild weather in one part or another; I was not aware that this part of the coastline is considered to be among the world’s most cyclone prone.

Over the years there have been some particularly devastating events:

• In 1887 a massive storm slammed into the pearling fleets and over 140 men were drowned. Since 1910 there have been twenty two cyclones that have caused gale force winds in Broome.
• In 1910, in winds estimated to be about 175 km per hour destroyed twenty homes, seriously damaged another twenty and another fifty less so. Forty lives were lost. Of the 300 licenced pearling boats, sixty seven were blow ashore and thirty four were sunk or destroyed.
• In 1926, there was extensive damage to the town, a commercial garage totally demolished and a hotel seriously damaged. Fortunately the pearling boats were saved. 
• In 1935, the cyclone passed to the north devastating the pearling fleet and causing the loss of about 140 lives. In Broome only one house was destroyed however there was still excessive storm damage to be cleaned up. The winds had reached about 130 kilometres per hour. 
• In 1957, two people were killed and four injured by a collapsing house. Many buildings were destroyed and damage was estimated at 80,000 pounds. Winds had reached 161 kilometres per hour. 
• In 2000, winds of 153 kilometres per hour wrecked damage on the town however no lives were lost.

Perhaps Broome is not a place to settle in after all?

In the museum there was also an excellent exhibition around the bombing of the flying boats by the Japanese Zeros in 1942, all carrying evacuees from the Dutch East Indies, mostly civilian families. There is an excellent DVD playing that covers the archaeological expedition undertaken in about 2000 and includes interviews with some of the crew who survived. At least eighty eight people were killed in the raid although the numbers were never decisive.

And in all museums, there is a collection kindly donated by a boutique collector of their entire oddball treasure; this one, of shells. It was over the shells that a little seven year old girl with whom I had exchanged words regarding a treasure hunt type exercise she was undertaking in the museum to give her mother some respite, attached herself to me. She was a dear little thing who told me all about the pretty shells she had found at Busselton and all about her cousins and so much more, but alas I am a little deaf, and my ears and understanding only caught a fraction of her dear little voice. She was obviously taken with me, a funny old lady in a straw hat, shorts and sandals, and distracted me from the last area of the museum I may have also found interesting. In the end we could only detach ourselves from our little limpet by saying it was time to go, and so we did.

The afternoon has been spent as yesterday however bedtime will be much earlier than last night. We have to be out on the road to meet our bus at 5.30 am. Oh, how I hate alarm clocks these days!