Meeting the legends

We got a lift back from the school camp with some aboriginal tour operators who were coming to the camp for a meeting. All the aboriginal tour operators from along the river had teamed up to create an association to promote the area and cooperate with marketing.

Around the table were some of the area’s local legends. One was considered “the father of Kimberley tourism”. He was one of the “stolen generation” and was taken from his aboriginal family when he was three years old. He spent his youth working as a cowboy on one of the large cattle stations before starting a tour business that took people into the remote areas on the Kimberley long before there was anything but a few dirt tracks.

Around the table he told tales of taking one of the aboriginal elders back into his childhood homeland. The indigenous people stopped living their traditional lifestyle many years ago, but this fellow was old enough to remember his youth living the traditional hunting and gathering life. He was able to explain the mysterious squares made out of stones that were presumed to be fireplaces, but were actually the foundations for the traditional bark huts. He had also shown them gallery after enormous gallery of untouched rock paintings. Huge areas where everywhere you turned was a rock painting. Areas that are so remote and untouched now, that they are rarely (if ever) seen.

It was really an honor to sit at the table and listen to his tales of the Kimberely.  He now has an OBE.  I found that out when I googled him after he left.   Such a sweet guy and happy to talk to a lilly-white new-comer like me and answer all my odd questions.