No Gas Hub in the Kimberley

We started cooking the traditional Sunday breakfast before 8am but by the time we were finished and got going to the market it was 10am. A quick market stop got me another fruit thingy and Ilse purchased a couple of things for friends and relatives.

From the market we went to the jetty for a bit of fishing. We fished over the high tide but as we have experienced before, the flow under the jetty remains strong even on top of the tide where one would normally expect slack water. Very strange how the water flows in a circle at Roebuck bay.

We finished fishing around lunch time (no fish) and made our way into town to buy bread. We bumped into Jan and Nancy, a couple from Canberra, which we first met at Fraser Range station in May and few times since.

By the time we got back to the caravan and had a bite to eat we had to leave for Cable beach. Whilst I'm not a great fan of Cable beach, today was a beach concert in support of the Broome communities effort to keep Woodside Petroleum out of James Price Point. As this is a fairly controversial topic which has caused large police contingents to come to the area, the concert was not advertised as an anti gas hub event but ran under the banner "We love Broome - Families, Culture, Country".

The band (The Pigram Brothers) played on the aft deck of a very large sailing catamaran, called "Karma IV", anchored just beyond the low tide line, with the stern facing the beach where thousands of people had congregated. I have never seen anything like this concert. People were dancing in water, swimming between the catamaran and the shore and on smaller boats surrounding the catamaran. The atmosphere was great and the crowd was made up of all cultural sections from the community.

As the tide went out the crowd got closer to the catamaran and by the end of the concert the cat was fairly close in shore. At the end of the concert we signed a petition to protect not only the Kimberley but the unique life style of Broome residents which would be destroyed if oil and mining business was to move in.

Back from the concert for a brief rest and then off to see the famous "Staircase to the Moon" at town beach where they also hold a Staircase market. Tonights dinner came from the market and to my great delight I could also buy a fruit thingy for desert. The staircase was a non-event due to cloud cover on the Eastern horizon so we were back at the caravan by 8:30pm, very tired and ready for good night's rest.