It’s rather hot!

Yesterday evening, I flew to Melbourne and then on to Perth. My plane arrived in Perth about an hour earlier than I expected, so I got to bed before midnight (there’s currently a two hour time difference, so it was more like 2am to me).

This morning I arrived at the airport at 5:30am. Every other time I’ve arrived at an airport that early, there’s barely anyone there. But this is Western Australia, the home of one of the world’s biggest mining booms, and fly in - fly out (FIFO) workers, and it was Monday morning. The place was buzzing. The queues were enormous. The next Kalgoorlie/Bolder flight was boarding, and every queue was pulling these people forward so they didn’t miss the flight. At least half of the passengers milling in the airport were wearing hivis, most with their name and their company’s logo on them. All the shops were open. Planes were taking off as quickly as they could load to all the different mining towns. And they all had really long boarding queues, so I suspect they were all fully loaded.

After the third plane load to Kalgoorlie/Bolder had departed (and several others to Newman…), our flight to Broome boarded. It was lightly loaded, and there were only a couple of hivis workers on board.

Western Australia is mainly desert. There’s only a small corner of the state that’s green.

When you’ve gone north for half an hour, you’re looking down at red dirt, and you can count every tree, even though you’re a long way up. Of course, it helps that you’re quite a bit inland.

I hadn’t travelled as far as Broome before, and Broome is definitely tropical, the land gets a bit more rain, and it’s a bit too far north for iron ore mining, so I was expecting the desert to disappear well before we got there, but it was still red desert as we were taxiing in to land. And then we saw the coast. And the mangroves. And the tide was out a bit.

And cable beach.

And then we landed to 35C heat (it was -3 in the morning when we last walked)! I was very hot and tired, but just before sunset, I managed to walk to the Japanese cemetery.

In the late 1890s, Broome became the centre of the Australian pearl industry (I’m not sure that it had any competition). The Japanese came here and dived from boats. When I was at school we were told that they were mainly women who dived, and that most of the divers died of the bends. This cemetery seems to be full of Japanese male divers. There’s also a big cairn to the Japanese who lost their lives in the three cyclones that smashed Broome in the early 1900s. 140 divers died in each of the smaller two.