Derby and Windjana Gorge

Prison Boab tree

Set for Jandamarra play

Windjana Gorge

Yesterday was a bit of a driving day. We were a bit slow leaving Broome, and made it to Derby for a late lunch after stopping briefly to see the huge old Prison Boab tree (which is estimated to be 1000 years old!). We didn’t find anything there much to hang around for, and wanted to press on to get to Windjana Gorge for the night. We were a bit stuck when we got to the turnoff from the Gibb River Road for Windjana Gorge, to see a sign saying that it’s closed to the public for the next week, as there’s a theatre production, Jandamarra, being put on at the actual gorge. It was in Broome last week when we were there (a sell out apparently) and we didn’t pay attention to the fact that it was going to the gorge next. The sign said that unless you had tickets to the play, you couldn’t even camp at the gorge. We saw the sign at 5pm and it’s a long way from nowhere, so it left us a bit stuck. We drove down the road anyway thinking we would just had to camp on the roadside, went back and forth a bit but saw other people doing it, so we ended up plonking down in the carpark at the old Lillimoloola Station ruins. There was a lovely sunset reflected in the walls of the gorge behind us, and we already had one of nick’s thermal cooker dinners ready and waiting for us so it was actually a pretty easy night – thank you again Bron for suggesting we get our own loo as it makes it so much easier to be self-sufficient!

We thought we’d be up and out of there before any tourists came to have a look this morning, unaware that some people would come at 7.30am! it wasn’t a problem anyway, since we were packed up soon afterwards and came to Windjana Gorge down the road to see it for the day (which you were allowed to do). It’s a lovely walk through the gorge where we saw 9 freshwater crocodiles, our first in the wild, doing nothing more than sitting and pretending to be logs. We also saw lots of archer fish at the edges of the river pools, which apparently hang around at the edges or underneath overhanging branches waiting for insects to fly over, and when they’re close enough the fish shoots out a jet of water to knock out the insect, then gobbles it up. The Lennard River flows through the gorge during the Wet, and it obviously goes quite high up the sides then by the looks of it, but now it’s reduced to large sandy river bed parts and some nice cool looking pools, which you’re not supposed to swim in because of the crocs. As we were driving out after lunch Nick decided to ask if there were tickets left for the show and how much they were, and lo and behold we ended up staying to see it. They were selling them at the door and kids were free so it seemed too good an opportunity to miss, this being one of the places mentioned in the story. Jandamarra was a Bunuba man born at the end of the 19^th century in the Kimberley, when Europeans were just moving in here, and when they started taking over huge tracts of land for stations. He was moved with his mum to one of the stations where he grew up and became an expert stockman, marksman and stationhand, and spoke good English. When he was 14 and time for him to go through initiation he decided not to go back to working on the station, and instead stayed in the mountains with those of his people who were killing the station sheep, trying to get the Europeans off their land. At this time I think he was also banished from his own tribe because he wasn’t so good at following indigenous law either. He was caught by the police but offered the chance to work with the police as a tracker near Derby, which he did for a couple of years, becoming good friends with Bill Richardson who he worked with, and before being brought back here to help catch the sheep spearers. He helped catch a lot of his own people and was taking them in chains to jail when they basically talked him out of it in their own language, and he ended up killing Bill Richardson in order to set them free. Once word of this got out he was a marked man, and he and his gang went into hiding, ambushing cattle drovers and killing lots of animals and I think people, and stealing weapons – he had worked out early that in order to fight the Europeans they needed guns, not spears. There was a big battle in Windjana Gorge (where we’re staying) and word goes that he stood on the top of the gorge yelling down at the Europeans making fun of them not being able to catch him. Even though he was shot he escaped into the caves, and walked all the way to Tunnel Creek where he hid for months, getting better. The police even tracked him down there and waited outside the entrance for ages, not realising that it was a tunnel and Jandamarra just walked out the other side, and did another raid on a station for weapons. By this time the police really felt like he was making fun of them and got serious, enlisting a ‘magic man’ tracker from the Pilbara, there were more battles when Jandamarra was wounded again and escaped, dripping blood, and tried more raids to free the aboriginies that the police had chained up, but eventually they tracked him down near Tunnel Creek and shot him dead. It was a great production, interesting story of an indigenous man being stuck between two cultures even way back then, the cast a mixture of NIDA and WADA graduates and a few local people who were talent spotted, and the backdrop of the actual gorge where it all happened couldn’t have been better. A lot of it was in the Bunuba language, with some in jokes for the local people which weren’t translated, but most was translated onto a big screen in subtitles, and the rest spoken in English. The kids even enjoyed it, I was very impressed that they sat through two 1 hour halves, going quite late, asking lots of questions as they went but there were lots of kids around so it didn’t really matter.