WHEN BARDI JAWI Woman Rosanna Angus looks across the world’s largest tropical tides, here in north-west Western Australia where they teem past 2-billion-year-old rocky islands, she sees things most others don’t. Rosanna is the Dampier Peninsula’s first Indigenous woman owner-operator guide. And as she gazes across millennia, she pictures her forebears clinging to rafts fashioned from mangroves and spears, deftly manoeuvring the churning ocean in King Sound, about 190km north-east of Broome.
Until as recently as the early 1900s, those traditional tide drifters were navigating the whirlpools here, riding over giant bubble-pop boils and whooshing past hamster-wheel waves kicked up by submerged rocks. They harnessed those monstrous currents to travel, trade and forage in one of the most remote places on earth. Yet their saltwater story is only just being told to a modern audience – over the sound of twin-propeller engines labouring against those same powerful currents like a four-wheel-drive churning through sand. Dressed in a bright turquoise shirt that matches the colour of the water, Rosanna retraces the aquatic journeys of her ancestors and invites the curious onto Sunday Island. She knows it as Ewuny, a boulder-stacked place where three clans once lived – a place that can now only be accessed with a Traditional Owner (TO). En route, Rosanna hands me a binder folder bloated with plastic slips. I leaf through black-and-white photographs of people wearing hair belts threaded with riji (carved pearl shells), of rectangular, round-edged grass huts, and of the mission established after first contact in 1899. Nature and storytelling act as a bridge across time.
Access to such other-worldly stories is not what Broome and its surrounding baked red lands are known for. The bustling holiday town’s image is one of lustrous pearls, “flop-and-drop” poolside escapes and camel trains on Cable Beach. Yet more than 40,000 years’ worth of history is in Broome’s palm and at its ochre fingertips. Although hordes of jetsetters and cruise travellers swoop in on Kimberley bucket-list sites, comparatively few venture beyond the town’s sandy perimeter and even fewer onto traditional
