The Star: October 05, 2017
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<strong>The</strong> <strong>Star</strong> Latest Christchurch news at www.star.kiwi<br />
Thursday <strong>October</strong> 5 <strong>2017</strong> 41<br />
Travel<br />
Diverse nature of Australia’s Outback<br />
• By Mike Yardley<br />
IT’S MAJESTIC, unforgettable,<br />
awe-inspiring and formidably<br />
remote.<br />
Book-ended by Broome and<br />
Kununurra, the Kimberley region<br />
is one of the most sparsely populated<br />
regions in the world, home<br />
to just 25,000 residents, most of<br />
whom are Aboriginal.<br />
Over the course of eleven days,<br />
my guided holiday with AAT<br />
Kings clocked up over 3000km,<br />
traversing the Kimberley from<br />
Broome to Darwin, on remote<br />
highways and dusty tracks.<br />
<strong>The</strong> unfolding landscape is<br />
surprisingly diverse and everchanging,<br />
where arid tracts of flat<br />
baked-earth and its red pindan<br />
soil yield to verdant savannah<br />
woodland and tropical grassland;<br />
there’s oasis-like wetlands, aflutter<br />
with stunning birdlife, sprawling<br />
cattle stations, and towering<br />
sandstone ranges sliced and diced<br />
by gorges, where rivers rage in the<br />
wet season, flooding everything<br />
in its path.<br />
Loosely sectioned into two subregions,<br />
West Kimberley unfurls<br />
its manifold glories on an eastward<br />
track from Broome to Halls<br />
Creek. After a rustic morning tea<br />
break at the Willare Roadhouse,<br />
where the rusty-red sandy soil<br />
HIGHLIGHT: <strong>The</strong> blazing grandeur of Geike Gorge, at sundown and in daylight.<br />
fanned across the forecourt, and<br />
82-tyred, 50m road trains pulled<br />
in to refuel, we soaked up the eyepopping<br />
sights of Derby.<br />
Pinned to the edge of the<br />
Northwest Continental Shelf, at<br />
the base of King Sound, Derby<br />
has one the world’s highest tidal<br />
ranges, where water levels rise<br />
and fall by a colossal 11.5m.<br />
We ogled this marvel of nature<br />
at the Derby jetty, a sweeping<br />
circular-shaped pier, constructed<br />
on extremely high stilts. Kimberley’s<br />
trademark tree, the boab, is<br />
an infatuating, ever-present sight.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y can live for 1500 years,<br />
making them Australia’s oldest<br />
living being. Every tree seems to<br />
assume its own quirky character<br />
and their crazily-shaped twisting<br />
branches spawn fat boab nuts, the<br />
size of duck eggs.<br />
Seven kilometres out of Derby,<br />
we were transfixed by the boab<br />
prison tree, a monumental, supersized<br />
specimen, dated at over<br />
1000-years-old.<br />
With a circumference of over<br />
14m, it was shockingly used as a<br />
“prison cell” in the 1890s by police,<br />
as they transported Aboriginals<br />
from across the Kimberley to<br />
the main jail in Derby.<br />
Our AAT Kings travel director,<br />
Delma, previously worked<br />
as a nurse in the Kimberley and<br />
provided some up-front, sobering<br />
insights into the appalling plight<br />
of the local Aboriginal people<br />
today.<br />
•Turn to page 42<br />
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