A perfect beach, a pearlshell altar, and teeth-rattling roads

We left Gambanan near the top of the Dampier Peninsula reluctantly and travelled back south along the way we’d arrived.

First port of call was Lombadina, not only because it’s an interesting Aboriginal community, but also because it was a Monday, and the settlement’s bakery produces bread on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

We called at the community office to get our entry pass (this is normal for most of these communities) and discovered that the gorgeous girl manning the office was French-Swiss. She was delighted to know that we’d been to her home city of Lausanne and that we’d also been to  Montreux, just a little way along Lake Geneva.

Lombadina's church

There was just one loaf of fresh bread not pre-ordered at the general store, next to the bakery, so we were lucky to get it. We then visited the church, a lovely tropical place built in 1934 by the Catholic priests who ran the community and some of the locals, from mangrove trunks and paperbark for the roof. It was later roofed over with corrugated iron. At the local craft shop I bought a screen-printed sarong.

Lombadina is a delightful tree-filled village, with about 70 inhabitants, and unlike some Aboriginal communities we had visited, everyone works. We were told later that the priests who had run it as a mission, along with those at Beagle Bay, further south, had been in charge of children of mixed race taken by the government from their Aboriginal mothers  . . . the stolen generation.  

The original paperbark roof at Lombadina.

About 50km south we turned off the bitumen road onto a fairly bad, corrugated, sandy track that goes west to Middle Lagoon, a popular campground. We turned off it and kept following the signs to the Gnylmarung (pronounced nill-ma-rung) Retreat, right on the beach at Beagle Bay, run by Alphonse and his wife Delma, as an outstation of the main Beagle Bay Aboriginal community.

It has fairly basic camping facilities, but there are barbecues for most campsites, what are described as ‘water sinks’ . . . and they’re just that, with a double sink standing on a frame, with a tap and a hose, and water from the sinks just goes onto the ground.

The road into Gnylmarung.

There are banks of solar panels to run the water pumps and lights for the amenities block, and in the middle of the campground is a towering solar-powered block which is a satellite phone, offering free calls to any landline in Australia. There’s no mobile service unless campers have special aerials. Because the power is solar, there’s also a free laundry, instead of the usual $3 or $4 needed for caravan park machines.

And then there’s the beach! It is a perfect curve of white sand, turquoise water and dramatic rock formations on the headlands. Because of the huge tides in the area, most of the water in this little bay drains right away as the high tide drops up to nine metres to low tide level. We’ve walked the beaches, swam in the clear water, and marvelled at the reefs and rocks emerging at low tide.

Bushfires in the distance at Gynlmarung, at half tide.

The campground has free firewood available so we’ve had roaring fires most nights. This is only because a nice retired man from Melbourne spends six months here each year giving Alphonse and Delma a hand with their fairly new tourist enterprise. He and a mate go off each day and cut firewood which is then placed in a trailer in a central position, with wheelbarrows available for campers to distribute it to their campsites.

Low tide, with reefs and firm sand.

His wife flies up to Broome each year for the month of August and this year their daughter and son-in-law and three kids have called in on a three-month lap of Australia to spend time here also.

Other campers include three couples from Lake Macquarie, accompanied by boats and caravans; and a few other couples in camper trailers.

We’re starting to run out of food so will leave tomorrow, explore a couple more places on the peninsula, then tackle that vile dirt road on the way south, arriving back on the bitumen just north of Broome. From there we’ll head north to Derby where we can re-group, re-stock, and get ready for our next adventure . . . the 600km Gibb River Road, which we may take a couple of weeks to negotiate as there are lots of stations offering camping along the way, as well as lots of gorges and wilderness areas to visit.

Postscript:

The red cliffs of the Kimberley at Whalesong.

We left Gnylmarung as planned, calling at Middle Lagoon,  which was full of campers right on the cliffs, then had coffee at a little cafe called Whalesong.  It’s the home to an Aboriginal couple and their four children, but they move out in the tourist season and the building is turned into a popular cafe, run by a couple of Caucasian women. The one who served us comes from Sydney but is a friend of the owners and has a partner in Broome, so is almost an honorary West Australian.

After we had tackled the rough road out to the main road, we called into the settlement of Beagle Bay to see its beautiful church decorated with pearlshell, built by the German order of priests who ran it, while under house arrest in World War I. It’s a glorious piece of history and apparently built from a picture of a German country church one of the priests had. 

 

Beagle Bay's Sacred Heart church, decorated with pearlshell.

The locals and the priests made all the clay bricks and as there was no cement, used lime made burning shell as mortar. In 2001 the bell tower collapsed after surviving almost 90 years of cyclones and baking heat, with just that lime mortar, but it was rebuilt in 2002 and the little church looks fabulous in its white outer paint.

Not a German country church, but in
 remote Beagle Bay, WA.

Then we girded our loins, checked that all our back teeth were cemented in place and survived the  86km of rough red sandy corrugations before reaching bitumen again.

We had intended turning left when we reached the Great Northern Highway, just out of Broome, and heading towards Derby, but luckily decided to duck into Broome (only 10km) to get some of life’s essentials that we had run out of, such as chocolate, beer and wine.

When we returned to the truck after buying these, we found the electric steps didn’t work. John climbed in, and found that after a week of wonderful full power during our off-the-grid camping, we had absolutely none. Zilch, nada, nothing!

So back around to the auto electrician we drove, who could not believe his readings when he tested the ver-r-r-y expensive batteries we’d had to wait for a week to arrive from Sydney. One was fine but the other was so dead it was giving a negative reading.

Once again luck intervened, as he’d had another batch of those same deep cycle batteries delivered and had sold all but one, so he replaced the ailing one, all the time shaking his head and determined to get to the bottom of its non-performance. It had a three-year warranty, so there was no cost to us and he was determined to have strong words with the manufacturer.

By then it was late,  late afternoon so I phoned the caravan park we’d stayed in for two weeks and organised a spot for the night, with them leaving our gate pass on what they call the ‘late board’ as by the time we arrived, after collecting a cooked chicken and some salad, it was around 7pm.

To say it had been an eventful day was an understatement, and naturally we slept like logs, before getting underway today on a most uneventful 200km drive on bitumen all the way to Derby.