Broome – Australia’s pearl on the Indian Ocean
Cable Beach
Most Sri Lankan visitors to Australia end up seeing Melbourne and/or Sydney – with perhaps a side trip to visit the amazing Great Barrier Reef or the magnificent Uluru-Katajuta National park in the country’s red centre.
But if you have the time, a diversion to the north-western Indian Ocean coastal town of Broome is well worth your while – not just because it has beautiful wide beaches and breathtaking scenery, but also because it is the gateway to the magical wilderness of the Kimberley region where mighty rivers, ancient gorges and sights such as the Bungle Bungle ranges in Kurnululu National park await you.
The sparsely settled Kimberley is famous for its large swaths of wilderness – a world of vast horizons, weird rock formations and welcoming isolated rock pools. A four and a half hour, 350 km drive inland in a 4WD vehicle takes you through the heart of the Kimberley to Windjana Gorge with its towering limestone cliff walls and pools full of fresh water crocodiles.
Another three hour drive out of Broome takes you northwards along the Dampier Peninsula – a spectacular coastal stretch dotted with small Aboriginal communities – to Cape Leveque, a remote natural paradise where you can swim, snorkel or fish and stay in an Aboriginal-owned wilderness camp.
But the tropical town of Broome, with its streets lined by coconut, frangipani and bougainvillea trees, is itself a fascinating place. Today it is the centre of Australia’s cultured pearl industry; originally it was a pearling station during the times when pearls were harvested by the dangerous method of diving (without masks, snorkels and oxygen tanks) for oysters on the sea bed. This hazardous work attracted pearl divers from Japan to Australia – and the Japanese cemetery with over 700 gravestones bears testimony to the many divers from overseas who lost their lives working in the pearl fisheries here. Broome’s Chinatown is another reminder of the town’s early multi-cultural mix of people. Originally the commercial centre of Broome and a bustling hub of pearl sheds, billiard saloons, entertainment houses and Chinese eating houses, Chinatown today has – along with a variety of retail outlets – several showrooms for what are arguably some of the world’s finest cultured pearls
The Staircase to the Moon
Broome’s Cable Beach (so called because it was from here that the original telegraphic cable to Java, which connected Australia to the world, was laid) is a 22 kilometre stretch of fine sandy beach set against a backdrop of red ochre cliffs. At the southern end of Cable Beach is Gantheaume Point where you can not only watch for dolphins in season but at low tide you can see 130-million-year-old dinosaur footprints.
A must see if you are in Broome at the correct time during March to October is the phenomenon that the locals call the ‘Staircase to the Moon’. During the two or three full moon days of these months, when the full moon rises over the exposed mudflats of Roebuck Bay at extremely low tides, it creates a beautiful optical illusion almost like a shining staircase reaching to the moon.
With so many things to do and see in Broome and its surroundings, one problem the visitor will have is to decide what to do next – with the temptation to stay here even longer!
Beehive Rock formations in Purnuluu National Park