An Epic Day with Alligator Airways and the Barramundi Shuffle

         (actual bomb casings from the WWII Bombing)

We woke before the sun was up and chased it to bed – it was one of those Epic days – like three or four all rolled into one. We’d been asked by the Alligator Airways mob to be up and waiting by 5:15 AM for our ‘Works’ trip to King George Falls, the Kalumbra Mission, Mitchell’s Falls and home again. If the weather was right we intended to do an afternoon trip to the Bungle Bungles as well. The bus took its time coming for us but eventually did show and took us to the airstrip for our eagerly anticipated adventure. We essentially had our own plane – a Cessna 210 with a maximum ground speed of 300 kms/hr. As we became airborne I could tell it was going to be an incredible day of sight-seeing. The light was just coming up over the Ord River valley and the patchwork quilt of various plantations lay out before us beckonning us onward. We could spot crocs in the river and later, once out on the coast, hordes of sea turtles, dugongs and more crocs along the shoreline. Our first destination was the King George Falls – only viewable by boats or plane. Although it’s always nice to be able to venture in by vehicle or foot to these incredible natural formations, seeing it from the air was extravagant. We continued on to Kalumbra – an isolated aboriginal mission in the middle of nowhere. It sits inland from the coast about 40 kms and is populated by about 600 people – primarily of Aboriginal descent. To give some perspective – the Kimberley is about the size of Victoria (3 x the size of Spain) and has about 30,000 people total – in other words it is a massive landmass with virtually no people living in it due to its inaccessibility and essentially uninhabitable terrain. What it also means is there is a plentitude of untarnished, unadulterated natural surroundings – absolutely unbelievable to see – especially from the air. Initially we didn’t know what to expect of Kalumbra – we’d never heard of it and were primarily interested in viewing the various falls, coast and gorges. It was a fascinating place! The aboriginal community actually looks fairly functionable with tidy yards and more or less well cared for homes. The inner sanctum of the little village is immaculately manicured and holds the church and adjacent buildings where the Father of the mission lives and runs his own museum. He is a most affable and unassuming gentleman with an incredibly amusing guffaw that he tends to add to the end of the stories he recants – sort of a guttural ‘ha ha!’ peaking in pitch and sound towards the end of the last ‘ha’. The mission was actually bombed in WWII by the Japanese, killing one of the former priests and a number of the aboriginal civilians. Pieces of the bombs and carnage have been kept and put on display. They’ve rebuilt what was destroyed and retained a number of other artefacts from the war years which have been added to an immense collection of worldly treasures acquired by Father McPhee himself. Given his interest in ‘curating’ he eventually set up a museum in the village and has organized the various collections interspersed with Aboriginal artefacts to try to imbue a sense of pride amongst the local Aborigines – demonstrating that their culture and history is on par with the rest of the world. The church was intriguing as well with a definitive attempt to meld the Aboriginal world-view and conceptual history with that of the Catholic Church’s traditions. The cross is depicted over a background of aboriginal paintings and one wall has a mural with symbols of the church interspersed with those of the Aboriginal dreamtime stories and mythologies – amazing.



From Kalumbra we flew to Mitchell’s Falls, a massive two-tiered fall with immense cascades falling a good 60 to 100 metres to the water below. We circled it a few times just to take it all in and get a few good snaps. From there we were homeward bound and climbed through and above the clouds to enjoy the cooler air. A short snooze (the air gets quite thin up there) and rude awakening when we were about to land and we were back at the airstrip. We had a quick spell back at the caravan park for lunch and a swim, then ventured out for our afternoon trip to the Bungle Bungles – something we’ve been irking to see since coming to the area. Although we’d seen a few gorges and taken in a bit of the Gibb River Road, we didn’t feel we’d really done the Kimberley. The Bungle Bungles are an entirely unique rocky formation some 53kms in from the Great Northern Highway along a nefarious, and currently closed, 4WD track. The formations look like multi-coloured cylindrically stripped bee-hives and look perfectly rounded or moulded by the forces of erosion – absolutely out of this world sort of breath-taking. A renowned gorge also exists in the area called Cathedral Gorge and although our pilot attempted to give us a sense of its majesty, it’s just not one of those things you can experience from the air so regrettably we weren’t able to appreciate it in all its grandeur. The trip also took us over Lake Argyle – the largest ‘man’-made lake in the world as well as the Lake Argyle Diamond Mine – again – the largest of its kind in the world. If I heard over the head phones correctly, it was discovered rather incidentally and harbours a seam of diamonds that is 600 metres below the surface, about 1.5 kms in length and covers an expanse of 45 hectares – or something close to this. We were very impressed as it had those massive dump trucks with the wheels as big as houses (costing a good $100,000 plus to replace). As the sun was setting over the horizon we finally landed and made our way back to town. Our final adventure for the day was an Aboriginal night of entertainment entitled the Barramundi Concert held in conjunction with the week’s festivities of the Kununurra Muster. It was hosted inside at the local leisure centre due to the weather over the past week so wasn’t quite as nice as if it were outdoors. All in all, we thought it would be a bit more than it was. The acts/performers were average and surrounding chaos of kids running amok almost too much to handle. A fashion show was almost offensive not only in the way the ‘models’ chose to dress themselves – something akin to what you’d see in the red light district of any major city, but also in how the crowd seemed to react to them prancing up and down the stage – if the music was a bit more racy you almost would’ve expected them to start shedding their garb right then and there. Cole won himself a t-shirt in the melee – demonstrating his best modelling swagger for the cross-dressed and very cynical but sincere MC. Exhausted from the long day with over 140 photos on the card, we collected ourselves and trudged home to our sweaty caravan, ready for our next port of call – Katherine and beyond!