Part Two – The East Kimberley

It’s getting late and I’m not supposed to use the company vehicle at night. It’s peddle to the metal time. Speed limit is 110 but you can get away with a way bit more out here. Who the hell is going to stop you anyway?

However, I don’t have a bulbar fitted to my vehicle and animals on the road are common obstacle in the outback. Cattle, wild horses and of course kangaroos. There are enough road kills littering the roadside to remind you of this often. Their completely levelled, but still fury remains, splattered by road trains.

I’d put myself in this position. I was desperate to not waste a day off and was determined to get to the Bungle Bungles before it closed for the low season. So I did. But it was a stressful undertaking and a big gamble as it turned out. The distance and the driving conditions make it all so perilous, especially when you’re on your own.

It was phenomenal being at bucket-list places within Purnululu National Park like the Domes Walk, Cathedral Gorge and Echidna Chasm and having them totally to myself. There was not another vehicle. No sounds other than what the natural surrounds emitted. Just myself, my camera and my thoughts. To experience such perfect isolation in such boggling settings was worth it. No let down at all. But it was all a hell of a reach.

The drive in and out of that national park is way rougher than I’d ever imagine an access road to a renowned destination to be. Churned up by coach tourism all high season long, the track left behind is a taxing monotony of jarring corrugations that shake all shit out of vehicle and driver the whole way in. Then you throw in three significant river crossings, all devoid of depth markers, and this adventure soon tipped my fear levels a fair way over where I’d prefer them to be.

At one point river water spilled over the front car bonnet and I was thinking I was getting in over my head for sure, in every sense. It was only 47 kms from the highway to the visitor center but when you’re only able to travel at 20 kms/h, that’s a long way.

So I took the experience coupled with the lesson. Next time I go in there, and I do hope I’m able to again, I won’t be alone. We’ll likely form convoy too. A few weeks later on I’d discover how much easier it is to see the Bungle Bungles from the air, looking out at it through the passenger window of a Cressna.

Since being in the East Kimberley there’s been a few naysaying types who have sometimes enquired as to why anyone would wish to live and work in a place where being exposed to extreme negatives is the norm. The oppressing heat, the alcoholism and crime and all that comes with that previously touched on back at Halls Creek, and the sheer remoteness. Sure, it weighs heavy at times.

But extremes in life tend to go the other way too. Especially when it comes to travelling. I promised a silver lining to my initial Kimberley living experience and I will endeavor to try and convey that.

Not long before the Halls Creek ‘welcome’ signage, I’m able to break just sufficiently enough to avoid slamming into the tiniest of the ‘roo’ specie. Probably not long out of pouch, bouncing across the highway, totally undeterred by my speed and course.

I reacted late as I was distracted. At about ten o’clock to the steering wheel, a zealous mob of emus broke my concentration on the horizon. It was unmissable.

They’d be only females at this time of year. Males are sitting on the unhatched eggs, at least that’s what I was told back in Perth a few months ago by someone who at least postured some semblence of knowledge.

There may have been six of them in total. Each kicking up puffs of dust by spinning and twirling as they threaded the gaps in between the spikey clumps of spinifex. Just distant dancing feather dusters, their crazy manic motions were silhouetted by the dusk sky-drop beginning to turn gold.

Ahh.. this place.

Everything is super sized in the Kimberley. That’s the first thing that really strikes you. Just how big it all is. Sure you read some tourist pitch somewhere that it’s three times the size of Great Britain, blah, blah. It’s only when you actually try and cover these ginormous areas with such limited infrastructure, that’s when those painstaking miles start to marry up with your mental cartography.

Roads, tracks and trails, they just seem to go forever. The sky lines seem so much bigger here, not abated by buildings and billboards, and never blurred with pollutants. The colours of each minute of the day are more truthful.

Spinifex termites don’t just throw mounds together in this part of the world, they construct monuments. Trilateral burnt-orange towers of cemented sand and other reposits, stretching from the Tanami Desert to the Mitchel Plateau. They are structurally solid enough to withstand the Kimberley’s extreme elements and they take years to build. Probably only for some indigenous juvenile car thief to bash down with a stolen Triton eventually. But that’s the Kimberley. That’s where we live.

The distances covered in these terrains do take a toll. There’s always lots of vehicle issues within our work crew. Car parts can take months to arrive, especially since Covid. No regrets at all not dragging the X5 to these remote outposts.

This is why these dirt trails, usually former cattle stock routes, are all kind of iconic in a way. That’s why they sell the T-shirts back in Kununurra that boast you survived them. Because they are so difficult to drive. Each an accomplishment in their own right.

The Duncan, the Tanami, the Canning. High risk, high reward. All of these are unsealed roads featuring plenty of rusted stripped old car bodies left behind. This is as bigger tell-tale as any to the stress placed on vehicle and driver in order to cover the ground here.

Hundreds of dust covered kilometres that one must negotiate without internet or roadside assistance. There’s no google maps where we go on our days off. That’s why maybe it’s so much more rewarding when you reach some outlying oasis and get to swim in the spoils.

Since my initial hasty, gung-ho solo days here in the Kimberley I’ve been teaming up with others big time. Wrapping adventure in layers of additional safety and contingency. Packing parachutes as well as beers.

There’s the Canadians, not surprisingly, a couple of kindred kids on an endless working holiday. I seem to gravitate to anyone from Ontario wherever I end up. Similar ethos I guess. As soon as Amber spoke I knew she was from thereabouts. Her partner Brandon is an ultra-chilled, proud Saskatchewan who drinks like a V8 motor. Getting along with him is no problem either.

Then there is Zanny and the IGA crew of staff. A starkly out of place Vietnamese micro community in the outback. They remind me of Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin’s characters in The Piano movie… fragile foreign objects clinging to each other a long way from home, amid some of the most severe environs on Earth.

They all work in the super market full-time but some of them pull extra hours in the bars to boost their weekly pay packet. Total troopers too.

“Bo tok” (Vietnamese for tribe) as I tend to tag them, seem to have no idea where in the world they are geographically, they are terrified of over exposure to the Sun, cannot swim, generally don’t consume much liquor and prioritise Tik Tok posting ahead of survival planning.

However, they are as cute as buttons, always high spirited and glad to be on some random adventure as long as they are tucked away behind heavily tinted glass en route. A collective of transportable adorable ignorance for certain but positive energy is all there is to feel with them.

They are chauffeured by Diego. He is an intrepid Peruvian who recently purchased a 4WD from Perth and is determined to get a visa to stay in this country for some unknown reason. He is also hell-bent on testing his new acquisition against the Kimberley’s off-road guts-rough elements. Engage 4D-low sometime soon my Spanish speaking friend.

We regularly add to this troupe whomever else has a day off and is feeling some escapism. And of course a dog called Bruno.

Sure, it’s a motley bunch of misfits but who cares. Somehow it all just works.

These far reaching quests, venturing out to some faintly mapped watering hole which may or may not exist, are without doubt my favourite days in the East Kimberley. They are all about idyllic shady swim spots, blasting tunes and car fridges rammed with ice cold cans.

Palm Springs, Mary Pool, Leycester’s Rest, Lake Camatapila and so on. These aren’t major attractions, sure. None of these are listed in the brochures. They are generally places ‘off Broadway’ that high season tourists either don’t know about or have not the time to reach. Just small cracks in the quartz reef where some gold dust has deposited.

Sometimes a price comes with these adventures. Broken down cars, yeah we’ve been there. Attacked by a mother of a snake, most likely defending it’s tranquil nesting place, check. Vietnamese girls forgetting to mention their inability to swim before testing the depths of the heftiest of dark plunge pools. Confrontation from a sozzled mob of prickly indigenous locals upon arrival at destination, much like a surf gang defending a local break they’d fight to protect, to preserve it against outside contaminators. Sure, I get it. Some things are worth fighting for.

But I’m not a tourist here anymore. I can see the light of recognition staring back at me even a hundred clicks from home now.

“Eh.. that the bloke from the pub. He alright”. An unofficial right of passage I suppose.

We’ve encountered all these speed bumps while the sapping Kimberley conditions torched us all the while. I like to think we improvise and overcome as best we can.

Ultimately even the hottest East Kimberley day relents. The sun drops down and sets the top edge of the terracotta horizon ablaze with an incendiary flying saucer-like orb of fiery ambers and magentas. The whole shape quivers, dissipates and then disappears. The temperature drops to somewhere comfortable in the mid-twenties and as everything darkens, a glittering blanket of galaxy smothers the outlook across the hemispheric ceiling.

This place hits magical heights at nights. I’m talking, you don’t want to go to bed even if Ariana Grande is waiting for you. You just want to drink wine and look up.

Recently I got a random text message from a friend who spent six years working just north of here in the now defunct diamond mines at Lake Argyle. One line in that message hit me right between the eyes.

“The Kimberley cannot be explained, only experienced”.

One hundred percent.

I guess there was no need to write 2000 words across two articles to try and summarise my experience here so far after all, but I did anyway.

Thanks for reading it.

Matt Hayman