Interlude

To get to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island, you catch a plane from Perth on either Tuesday or Friday. The plane travels in one direction on Friday and the other on Tuesday, so you have a choice between staying a week at each, a few days at each, or some longer term. Since my cruise starts from Broome on Tuesday, I had to come back to Perth on Friday, and spend a couple of days in either Perth or Broome. As it’s the wet season, I thought it prudent to get to Broome on the first available plane. Anyway, Perth is having severe heat, so there isn’t much difference in the climate - it’s too hot in both places! I managed to visit Perth on the coldest night for several weeks, so the temperature was nice (it was 40C the previous day and the next one - Broome was 37C today, and is going to get one degree warmer each day).

The flight to Broome was uninteresting since there were clouds all the way.

As I saw a lot of Broome itself last time, I had decided to hire a car and visit Beagle Bay today. It’s a remote aboriginal community in the Dampier Peninsula (very close to the place where Dampier described aborigines as “the most miserable race in the world”). The church there, built by aborigines and a few monks, is one of the most beautiful in the world. The Catholic Trappist monks had a mission here from the late 1800s, but they were replaced with the Pallottines and St. John of God sisters also arrived after the mission started to receive children. Initially they served the local aboriginal community, but later the mission received children from the stolen generations. During the First World War, the monks (being German) were under house arrest. Until then, the church had been made from teatree and bamboo, and had been remade whenever it was destroyed by termites or cyclones. They decided to build a new church from mud bricks, then the aboriginal women decorated the inside including the altar with pearl shells (mother of pearl) and other shells that they collected from the beach. It was built between 1915 and 1918.

Originally the ceiling was decorated the same way, with aboriginal star constellations. They didn’t have proper mortar to build the church with, so they crushed shells and burnt them to make lime. Unfortunately, because it was weakened by cyclones and time, the bell tower collapsed in the early 2000s. The church has been restored, but the ceiling is no longer there. The stations of the cross were painted by a German artist and framed in mother of pearl.

After I came back, I went to Cable Beach to see the sunset. The northern part of Cable Beach is where you can drive on the sand and the camel trains walk along the beach.

Only people and dogs are allowed in the southern part.