Just got back to
Perth after our annual winter trip to Norwest WA including 2 months fishing at Pt Smith – 150ks south of
Broome.
I won’t
bore you with the whole trip but one of the highlights was a side trip to
Cape Leveque.
10th June -
Cape Leveque for a week.
On Sunday, after days of record rains, the
Broome to
Cape Leveque road re-opened - a 100ks of bitumen plus a 100ks of red mud roads and water filled potholes – 3 hours easy going with a 4WD.
On Monday; half way up The Cape the wife and I called into The
Beagle Bay Mission aboriginal community. It was an uninviting place with signs prohibiting visitors from their beaches and lots of mangy looking dogs roaming around. Drab public housing, their front yards full of litter and derelict cars with flat tyres and broken windscreens, plus the town’s petrol bowser padlocked in a heavy steel cage, and the dogs put me off. By contrast the mission’s church stood out, being clean and freshly painted - we made sure the car was locked (something that I didn’t feel the need to do later at
Cape Leveque) and toured the church.
Monday afternoon we arrived at
Cape Leveque – what a contrast - no junk, dogs or car wrecks.
A very professionally run aboriginal holiday resort and camping ground – it runs rings most other non-aboriginal camping grounds and caravan parks I seen in my travels around Australia. It was originally the
Cape Leveque Light House keeper’s
home, sheds and grounds - given back to the Bardi people in the 80’s.
We pitched our tent at a bush
shelter beside the ocean. The tent was our bedroom and the bush
shelter our daytime living area, which had a cold (warm actually) shower in one corner. The sea’s warm all year round too – ideal for an afternoon swim at beer o’clock. With an Engel full of beer – what more could one ask for?
On our first day, whilst away fishing, our
shelter was raided by a mob of crows. These birds have developed a technique where one or two of them lift the cover of a food container whilst another dives under it to pirate the goods.
A large beach towel over the groceries fools them, as they hadn’t yet figured out how to drag a large floppy cover – whereas lifting a rigid cover such as rubbish bin lid, piecing individual eggs through the top of a closed carton or opening a packet of biscuits doesn’t cause them a problem.
During the day, whilst reading or resting in the
shelter, one got the eerie feeling of being watched – you would look up and find a beady black eye staring at you through a slit in the
shelter – a crow casing the joint - a bit like a scene from the Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds.
The wife and I didn’t fish much at The Cape - we swam, read books and generally slacked off and also visited One Arm Point’s trochus shell hatchery
The One Arm Point community replenish their reef from this hatchery and harvest 15 tonnes of shell a year, for jewellery making and for sale - a
well organised and self-funded aboriginal operation.
I was most impressed with what the aboriginals are doing at
Cape Leveque and One Arm Point, including allowing visitors the simple pleasure of being able to fish and swim from their beaches.
16th June -
Port Smith for a week
This is our 6th week here and on the 24th we head south to
Perth, arriving early July.
The other day, whilst the wife and I were flicking lures from waist deep water at False Cape Creek’s inlet, a six foot shark leapt completely out of the waves, as it chased fish through the breakers not far from our lures – we quickly backed off to shallower water.
A couple of days prior, I was with a friend who fishes here regularly, when we came across another shark in the same spot. He says they’re not man eaters, as they are
well fed on fish, and he has encountered them often. The wife and I also spotted a couple of other
sharks, whilst beach fishing, at the front of the
Port Smith Lagoon. It sure makes the heart pump and the legs backpedal when a shark rockets out of the waves in front of you.
Thursday night –
Port Smith’s fish and chip night.
The park’s staff catch crabs and fish for the night which costs $5 for the first meal and $2 for seconds. Piggy me had a second meal of cod. It’s all donated to the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Including the snapper and mud crab raffles; I estimate they donate over a $1000 for the night
The Bidyadanga Mob, an aboriginal family band (father, daughter and three sons) drives across from the old La Grange Mission (renamed Bidyadanga) to play country and
rock music – they do a real good job. That night they offered to play Slim Dusty but the audience declined and requested more popular American stuff, Johny Cash, Kristofferson etc – there’s just no accounting for taste.
By providing the entertainment, The Bidyadanga Mob and their family get a free meal plus they get to pass a plastic bucket around – assuming most of the audience chip in, they would collect $500 or better for the night.