REMEMBERING THE KIMBERLEY

5 August 2026

People have asked if I’ve made new friends since moving to Perth and that has happened but what has been even better is spending more time with existing friends whom, in the past, one may have only seen once a year if that. Some of those friends go back to high school; some to university; some to 6UVS-FM (now 6RTR-FM); and some to connections built on holidays rather then through work or study.

In 2019 Susan and I did a land and sea tour through the Kimberley region. It’s a part of Western Australia that I had never explored and as someone who likes neither camping nor endless driving on straight or dirt roads, letting someone else take responsibility for the transport and accommodation seemed like a good idea. The tour itself was stunning with extraordinary vistas of caves and canyons, mountains and islands, nature and indigenous culture. And the people? We had the best and the worst. Our guide/driver was an Italian woman. Who would have thought? To start I was both surprised and ambivalent but she was brilliant. She’d come to Australia as a tourist, fallen in love with Indigenous art, gone back to Italy and done a Masters studying that art, then returned to live in Alice Springs working within the justice system. She knew more about indigenous art and culture than I did. However, this wasn’t to the taste of some of the guests. They made a formal complaint to the tour company’s headquarters claiming that she was spending too much time talking about the local indigenous people and their connection to country. 



Why on earth would you go on a tour to the north of Australia if you didn’t have at least some interest in the original owners of the land? 

So the complainants were a group we learnt very early on to ignore – although Susan threw prejudice aside when one of them had a medical episode just outside Darwin and helped to save him. 

However, the upside was that there were other wonderful people on the tour and we’ve kept in touch with them ever since. The reason that I’m reflecting on that Kimberley tour is that we had lunch with them this week. Colin and Ini had recently completed the Arnhem Land tour that Susan and I are undertaking later this month and so offered to brief us on what to expect. Ini takes great photos (much better than mine) and puts them together in holiday movies so we watched their recent holiday but also enjoyed memories watching the Kimberley video.One of the best photos of us from that trip was taken by Ini as we frolicked in Zebedee Springs:


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