Goombaragin

my shell collection

with a hermit crab

We’ve had a very relaxing couple of days here at Goombaragin. We’ve had a couple of trips to the beach, I had a brief swim in the afternoon but unfortunately the water still a bit murky even at high tide, apparently it’s not normally like that. It’s interesting that the rockpools are quite different up here to those that we’re used to from the NSW south coast. Not surprising I guess, being so much higher up, but I noticed that I haven’t seen a sea anemone for ages, and even the seaweed in the pools is different. There’s also heaps and heaps of amazing shells around here – ones that seem very exotic to me, but it looks like they’re a dime a dozen here. I collected a whole lot and took a photo I was so excited by them. I’m going to ask if I can take two home with me. The kids enjoy the beach, building castles, forts, damming rockpools etc, and yesterday afternoon connected with the son of the owner and his older cousin and have made lego guns to run around with. I’m not sure how old they are, maybe 8 and 12 or something like that but they seem to be getting on well. We’re enjoying the slower pace so decided to stay a third night, before heading up to Gambarun at the top of the peninsula in search of mud crabbing tours. The woman who runs this place took her campsite hosts out fishing in a nearby creek today, I think to give them an example of a tour she can do for guests (she’s indigenous) and apparently was reeling them in, so has very generously given us one for dinner. She called it a mud skipjack, and her partner said it’s also called a red snapper. We’ve got it marinating at the moment and will be frying it up soon.

We also went to a nearby café for a late lunch, it’s called the whalesong café, run by a couple who look like they’ve kind of checked out of the rat race and moved up here. They had lots of information about the current protest about building a gas processing plant at the bottom of the Dampier Peninsula. They made nice, if expensive pizzas and juices/smoothies, and were pretty busy. It’s a kind of strange place to have a café, on the edge of an indigenous community which feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere, and you wonder how people hear about it because it’s not signposted off the main road, which is really just a dirt track (and it’s a good 20 minute drive on sandy roads from there) but I think it’s been around for quite a while and I guess it’s just word of mouth. The kids have been hanging out for pizza anyway so it was a nice treat. I think quite a few people must come up from Broome on a day trip.