OUT OF THE ORD
The Kimberley’s ORD VALLEY is as much an awe-inspiring SLICE OF NATURE as it is a frequency, something to tune into and LEAVE THE WORLD behind.
The oasis in the wilds of the Kimberley.
AN IRISHMAN, AN Australian woman and an Englishman walk into a pub. The establishment is the Hotel Kununurra and it’s talent night. Inside the redbrick walls of the 1960s low-rise building, the vinyl cushion stools, framed football jerseys and corrugated iron bar all add up to a no-frills atmosphere. Outside, away from the sports-tuned TVs, the garden crowd is swelling like the belly of a hardened beer drinker. “Next on stage we have Cheryl,” says Irish-born restaurateur Colin Fassnidge. What is a celebrity chef doing in Kununurra? Time will tell. “Take it away Cheryl.” On this especially lively night I share a drink with former resident of 10 years, Glen Chidlow, who works for Australia’s North West Tourism. Without a table to call our own, we slide onto the end of a bench. Before we’ve said ‘cheers’ an Aboriginal man approaches us, his hand outstretched, cradling a boab nut the size of a mango. “Would you like to buy this?” he asks. Turning it in my hand, an intricate scene of spinifex grass and boab trees unfolds before me like a story in a child’s picture book. Without the correct cash to buy it, I decline. After thanking me for looking, the man shuffles off and we start chatting to the chap across from us. Turns out he’s an English backpacker who’s been here for a month picking pumpkins, watermelons and rock melons. “The day after I got here my new career as a picker commenced,” Terry says. His glass empty, I ask him what he was drinking. “An Ord River Rum,” says the 23-year-old from Leeds. “Have you met Spike [who makes it]? He’s the Marlboro Man incarnate, minus the cigarettes and about 30 years older.” My curiosity piqued, I tell him I’ll track down Spike. “Thanks Cheryl, great song that one. Up next we have Matteo,” Colin says. Got to love the Kimberley, where surnames are redundant. The next morning, under a shorts-and-T-shirt blue sky, Dylan Lodge of Triple J Tours navigates the 55-kilometre section of the sun-kissed Ord River that stretches from Kununurra to Lake Argyle. We are on a cruise aboard a 50-passenger boat, exploring
the waterways that Dylan has fished and swum in since his parents moved to Kununurra when he was nine. Thanks to his superb spotting abilities, we are photographing the snouts of pointy-nosed freshwater crocodiles, ospreys sitting in their McMansion nests and white-bellied sea eagles soaring overhead. As we round a bend, the water ripples with archerfish, catfish and barramundi. “One problem we don’t have here is a lack of water,” Dylan says as he moors the boat ahead of prepping lunch, turning out delicious miracles from several eskies. “With black soil plains, warm weather and unlimited water, farmers can grow just about anything,” he says. “Quinoa, chia, pawpaw, chickpeas, cotton, rice and sandalwood.” Kimberley Durack was the man who first dreamt up the Ord River irrigation scheme. Standing in the middle of a flood plain in the 1940s he declared it a suitable place for a massive dam. He died at just 50 – only months before work on the main Ord River dam that created Australia’s largest man-made lake, Lake Argyle, began in 1969. How surprised he’d be to hear that the family’s Durack Homestead would be at the bottom of the lake if it hadn’t been relocated to higher ground in the early ’70s. And no doubt Kimberley would be intrigued to see oodles of excited tourists, like myself, climbing into light aircraft to get an eye-in-the-sky view of Lake Argyle.
TAKE TO THE SKIES
It is 6am and the air is cardigan-crisp. Pilot Derek Swiatek from Kingfisher Tours pushes the throttle forward, forcing our six-seat Cessna to taxi down the Kununurra runway like an albatross taking flight. Soon enough we are sailing in the air, our heads swivelling from one postcard-worthy vista to another, from Kununurra’s agricultural plains that look like a giant’s patchwork quilt, to Lake Argyle, with its
curvaceous islands that were once mountain peaks. As the sun becomes full and banana yellow, we enter the World Heritage-listed Purnululu National Park. Our pilot manoeuvres over the red and black domes known as the Bungle Bungles. We gasp as we pass over Piccaninny Gorge where the ochre escarpment abruptly ends, plunging hundreds of metres down to a lush green floor. “You can see why the Kimberley is one of those places that keeps calling you back,” he says. “The beauty and serenity, it clears your head,” adds the 23-year-old, who packed his Perth life into a van three years ago and moved to Kununurra. Twenty minutes later, our aircraft is casting a shadow over the tiered ridges of the Argyle Diamond Mine, home to one of the highest security operations in Australia. “One of our pilots had to land on the airstrip when he was bursting to go to the toilet on the way back from the Bungles,” Derek says. “The next week our manager got a bill for $300.”
WELCOME TO COUNTRY
Back on solid ground we experience Miriwoong Country with a true local, looking into Chris Griffiths’s eyes as he surveys the land for clues of water at Mirima National Park, just north of Kununurra. Chris, a guide at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, is from the Miriwoong and Ngaliwurru language groups. He knows these ancient escarpments, the animals and the songlines that crisscross this vast expanse. “The two rocks you drive through near where you cross from WA to the NT, that’s our border,” he says. A descendant of the Stolen Generation, Chris’s mother Peggy, at aged 10 or 11, was forcibly removed from her mother at Argyle Station and taken some 1150 kilometres away to the Beagle Bay Mission. His father, Alan Griffiths, “a half-caste kid”, is from Timber Creek in the Northern Territory and is one of Australia’s most celebrated living Indigenous artists. Waringarri’s Art Trail and Mirima Walk tour includes first jumping on a mini bus and visiting public art sites around town – a bush medicine themed mural outside Kununurra Medical, giant boabs cast in bronze in a park and the interiors of the recently built courthouse. “They asked us if we could be involved in the courthouse,” Chris says as we explore the building where his parents’ artworks adorn the walls. His dad’s painting of men fighting with nulla nullas (hunting sticks) prompts reflection on Aboriginal culture. “At first the artists
weren’t sure but we decided to do the artwork. We are not in the bush anymore; we have to work with the white fellas. Artists did this to show our people, who might be in court, that their culture will stand beside them and be there to help them.” Back in Mirima, sitting in camp chairs arranged in a circle, our understanding of Aboriginal history is enhanced by our long yarning session with Chris and his family. Standout moment? When Peggy performs a mantha (traditional welcome) by dipping eucalyptus leaves in water and splashing us from our head to feet, reciting in Miriwoong: “Respect our country and it will respect you in return.”
OLD TIMER
Raymond Dessert III (A.K.A. Spike) tries not to drink rum every day. It must be a constant test of willpower for a man whose hand-bottled amber liquid has graced the beverage list of Noma, the world’s best restaurant, and won champion rum at the Australian Distilled Spirits Awards four years in a row. Spike first arrived in Kununurra in 1972 to “get away from paying taxes”, he says light-heartedly. “My family went looking for a frost-free seed production area with a stable government, which happens to be the Ord – one of the very few [such] places in the world.” Twenty-two years ago when the sugar industry was booming in the Ord Valley, Spike, a third generation Californian farmer, built a distillery on his farm after the idea popped into his head at a South Australian winery. “I thought why don’t I build a cellar door winery in Kununurra? But two days later I realised we don’t have grapes. That’s the thing about the Ord… I decided we’d have a cellar door distillery instead.” His 50,000-bottles-a-year Hoochery Distillery doesn’t feature any fancy labels or gimmicks, he says, “just bloody good dinky-di Kimberley spirit”. Now with his wife Kae and three of four kids working in the business, he believes he’ll never be able to leave the Kimberley. “I’ve left twice and moved back three times.” But why would he want to leave? Nowhere else can offer regular folks the chance to try their hand at just about anything like the Ord Valley does, he says. “I mean our town baker had never baked before. People come here because they can do things, start-ups are easy. I came back for that excitement.” That night, under a liquid butterscotch sunset at the Durack Homestead I dine on whole barramundi with a punchy citrus and ginger broth. This is why Colin Fassnidge is in town. He’s here to host the Ord Valley Muster’s long table dinner. We conclude our magical feast with roasted local fruit, topped with a generous dollop of ginger crème fraiche. Colin’s freshly caught meal is a perfect reflection of the Ord Valley: no fancy labels, no gimmicks. As unrestrained as a crocodile and as resourceful as a bowerbird. Aware of what’s going on in the big smoke, but perfectly at home in this outback paradise.