Broome & Darwin

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WE HAD COME A LONG WAY for this moment. When the moon rises out to sea, climbs slowly over the horizon and casts a shaft of light over the rippling waves.

As it grows stronger and brighter you realise it is unlike any other reflection you have ever seen. It is dead straight, from the face of the moon, across the sea, almost to within touching distance.

This illusion happens only a few times a year, when the moonrise and the tides are in a certain pattern. We had arrived in Broome after a 10,000-mile journey, just in time.

We watched, entranced, as part of a hushed crowd. In the background, a didgeridoo droned hauntingly. We held hands. A tear actually came to Kathryn’s eyes. It was indeed a romantic moment on the other side of the world.

Then, the hush was broken by a familiar Yorkshire accent.

“Well, Richard Whiteley! You’ve just saved me two dollars. I was going to send you a postcard. Bryan and I have just been working out what we miss about Yorkshire. Number one was Marks & Spencer sausage rolls, and number two was Countdown. I was just going to write and tell you, and now you’re here. I can’t believe it.”

Thus was the spell well and truly broken. I love fans but there’s a moment for everything.

We had come to Broome in Western Australia on something of a pilgrimage. I had been here a year earlier filming for a TV holiday programme.

I had loved it and vowed to come back. To romantic old me, who had long had a love affair with small-town Australia, it was perfect. My idea was to take four weeks off, just to come to Broome and chill out.

It didn’t work out quite like that. Getting to Broome takes some doing and I went the slow way, making it a stop-off point on a round-the-world air ticket.

Having often visited the East Coast, I was conscious that very few of us Oz fans go to Western Australia. It’s the size of Europe with a population only slightly greater than that of Leeds. And most of those live in Perth.

Vast Continent

After a four-day stopover in Singapore it was off to Darwin. I feel sorry for Darwin. It tries so hard yet either gets totally ignored or just passed through. It’s a gem, at the top of the vast continent of Australia.

They are their own folk, these Top Enders as they are called. Not the easiest of Aussies, but why should they be? They’ve had it pretty hard.

They took almost all the enemy action against Australia in the Second World War, with Japanese planes coming out of a clear sky one morning and killing more than 200 civilians.

In 1974 Cyclone Tracey ravaged most of the town. Now, Darwin is a capital city with a frontier feel. White low-rise buildings form an alluring skyline against that oh so blue sky. A long grassy esplanade is the front garden for three or four modern hotels and the scent of the tropical flowers wafts over a beautifully tended area of green.

Lunch at Cullen Bay, a short taxi ride away, is a must. This modern marina, built around an impressive boardwalk, houses a variety of restaurants.

Sitting on the decking watching little boats come and go makes for an ideal lazy lunch. It’s no problem sticking it out till early evening, before departing on a wonderful sunset cruise.

Darwin is a good jumping-off point for the Kakadu National Park, or in our case, Kimberly and the Bungle Bungle.

At Kununurra, a two-hour flight to the south-west, the packed plane disgorged. Five minutes later we found ourselves alone with no one to meet us. A travelling dentist deposited us at the Mercure Inn on the main highway.

Kununurra is the smallest of small towns, the only sign of life the video store. But it was a veritable Las Vegas compared with where we went next.

The bungle bungle are in fact huge mounds of rock by the hundred, sticking out of the ground like giant beehives.

We flew over them on our way to Bellburn Camp, base for an examination of the prehistoric land called the Kimberly. To really appreciate the remote terrain, you have to walk it. Robert was our ranger, and met our party of four at the dirt airstrip. He’s smiling, rugged, tanned, wiry and bearded. He knows no fear - in the rainy season he escorts trippers up and down Sydney Harbour bridge.

He tells us we’ll be hot, tired and thirsty by the end of the day. After breakfast cooked in a tent by two cheerful girls who pretended not to know what we were in for, we boarded a bus and set out into the unknown.

obert drove us along red dirt roads, great red sandstone rocks always on the horizon.

It was a day of walking along dry riverbeds, entering huge gorges, lunching in cathedral-like grottoes and walking to spectacular viewpoints in 45 degrees of midday sun. For Yorkshire’s least athletic man, this could have been something of a challenge, but with a good pair of boots to master the rocky terrain, the trek was safe.

Back at the camp in the gathering gloom, we showered while the girls cooked. By 8.30pm the generators were switched off, and we slept like good ‘uns, totally at peace with the world.

Next day it was farewell to Bellburn Camp, after a helicopter trip over the Bungle Bungle.

To sit in a little helicopter with no doors, strapped in only by a lap belt as you swoop into mountain gorges and skim along the tops of deep chasms, demands some trust in the pilot. “Aw, yer won’t fall out mate - centrifugal force will see to that,” he cheerfully called through the headphones.

It was only after entrusting my life to this 26-year-old virtuoso of the air named Des that I discovered gorge swooping was not his real job. In the wet season he was a butcher in Sydney.

It was an exhilarated world traveller who finally arrived at Broome. This was like coming home. I booked in at the Seashells resort, a collection of apartments around a lovely pool and stunning gardens.

There is no restaurant, but the beguiling Zoo Cafe next door provides all meals. It’s not the poshest in town - that’s probably the Cable Beach Club, built originally by Lord McAlpine, who put Broome on the map 20 years ago by developing the hotel and a zoo.

Broome, 800 miles from Darwin, has an intriguing history and was the centre of the pearling industry for 50 years. At the turn of the 19th century it was a tough town of divers and ruthless bosses. The divers, mainly Japanese, worked in appalling conditions as greedy bosses forced them to dive deeper and deeper in search of the oysters. The graveyard is a moving witness to the hundreds who never surfaced alive.

Broome is not for everyone. With only four streets downtown, you quickly discover the little shops and pavement cafes. I liked sitting there watching the town go about its business, the stockmen coming in to buy weeks of supplies, the locals running their errands, tourists wandering up and down.

A bewitching evening

In the evenings the streets are lively, with revellers at the pubs and clubs. An evening at the pictures is a must. Sun Pictures is the oldest picture gardens in the world, dating from 1916. You sit on deckchairs under a corrugated iron awning or in the open air. Films and projection equipment are modern and, including the occasional lizard on the screen, it’s a bewitching evening.

Broome’s star attraction is its beach. Cable Beach is so called because a telegraphic link with the outside world was established there, a hook-up with Indonesia. If huge expanses of white sand are what you’re after then this will do for you. It just goes on and on, surely one of the world’s best-kept secrets.

This vast, empty historic and yet homely place is a joy, and I would go again and again. We flew back business class for about £2600, via Perth, Sydney and Los Angeles, completing the round-the-world British Airways ticket. But as I sauntered through those big cities, I couldn’t help thinking of the splendour of the terrain I had just seen and I felt, as I jostled with the human throng, a little bit superior.

I knew something these city dwellers didn’t. I had seen so much, marvelled at so many wonders of nature. And unlike the lady from Leeds, I didn’t miss those sausage rolls at all.