DAYS 39 & 40 : DERBY

6 & 7 May, 2010.   On the way to Derby we stopped for a break at this Boab tree.   These "bottle trees" are related to the boababs of Africa and Madagascar and one theory is that the seed pods floated across the ocean.  These trees live for hundreds of years and are hollow in the middle.  During the dry season they lose their leaves.

The following pic was taken through the opening in the front of the tree.....

The fiberous trunk is about 15-20 cms thick....

This tree was covered in grafitti.....

and Surprise! ...... one from Elvis!!

The main street of Derby has a magnificent row of boab trees......

Even though it's not the season, we were very fortunate to find one boab tree in flower (the cup of the flower is about as big as your hand).  They are supposed to have a lovely fragrance but on this day it was raining and we could not detect a scent.   Some of the older aboriginals fondly remember a drink they had as children made from the gel of the fruit mixed with wild honey.

Derby is also the home of an infamous "Prison Tree" which was supposedly used to lock up aboriginal "prisoners" overnight. Before this area was settled, young aboriginal men and women were forcibly taken as slaves to work on the pearling boats near Broome and were marched in chains overland to the coast.  The men who took them away were called Blackbirders a slang expression for killing "blackbirds" (aboriginals). 

Aboriginal men in chains.....  When the early settlers took their land, fouled their waterholes and disrespected their sacred places, the young men further rebelled.  The early pastoralists helped the blackbirders remove the young men in the belief that they would have more peaceful behaviour from the older ones left behind.  (Jandamarra, who died at Tunnel Creek, earned a high reputation as a stockman on a white man's station but at the time of his initiation he decided to join the fight to free the land.)

Here in Broome I've read  records of  truely awful court cases involving ship owners and pearling merchants who abused young aboriginal girls and men.   In one instance the British Navy caught a ship with more than 120 aboriginal slaves in its hold.

This is another famous boab tree in Derby.... the Dinner Tree.... it's situated near the water about a mile from the wharf and it's where the stockmen had their dinner the night before driving the cattle up the next morning to be loaded onto the ship.  Wolfgang and I spent the evening here eating fish and chips and enjoying the sunset.   (You can't buy Flake here... the battered fish is either Barramundi, Snapper or Threadfin - a type of salmon).

Throughout the north there are different kinds of termite mounds depending on the species of ant.  Here in this part of the Kimberley they often resemble melting icecream.  The aboriginal people treat them with respect and in former mortuary rituals the remains of a deceased person were placed inside an active mound.  In a very short time the ants resealed the opening.

Here is a pic of the Myall Bore.  The concrete trough was built in 1916/17 and can water 500 head of cattle at a time - the biggest in the world.   The drovers who brought the huge herds of cattle overland to Derby for shipment had to follow an orderly routine as to how they grazed and watered them and this was the last camp before they moved on to the Dinner Tree a few kilometres away.  While I was taking this photograph.....

Wolfgang was taking this one!!!!