Progress bears down on Broome

Progress threatens to end the very thing it has bequeathed to Broome in Western Australia.

The state’s government has issued exploration rights to a more than 3750 square-kilometre area in the Kimberly, including most of Broome’s groundwater reserves.

Investigate
journalist, 
Melissa Fyfe.

What is now Broome, and is now and was then the traditional lands of the Yarwuru people, was first visited, it is mistakenly thought by explorer, William Dampier, who in fact explored the coast from Shark Bay to La Grange Bay, travelled north and then left the Australian coast.

Broome, named after WA Governor from 1883 to 1889, Sir Frederick Broome, evolved after it was suggested that the pearling industry could be served by a closer port in Roebuck Bay and Broome was chosen by John Forrest in 1883.

For decades after that, Broome was simply a pearling town to become a small, vibrant and insular town that reflected its remoteness from the rest of Australia.

Isolation preyed upon Broome heavily and little changed as the decades passed until the resources industry discovered Western Australia was rich in the goods it sought.

Subsequently what was once a remote, isolated and tiny village clinging to the edge of the Australia  continent, is now a thriving town of about 15 000 people,  frequently a chosen tourist destination for thousands.

Nearby Cable Beach, named as it was the place from which an undersea cable was laid in 1889 to Singapore, connecting Australia to England was for centuries a lonely beach frequented only by indigenous tribes, now has its own sumptuous Cable Beach Resort.

During the tourist season, the town grows to more than 45 000 people for months on end and with what was once only a dusty landing strip with few facilities, Broome now has an international airport.

Broome not only has an international
airport, it is also frequently visited
by cruise liners.

Progress has change Broome almost beyond recognition and again it is about feel the pressure of the tightening vice of change.

The exploration rights granted by the Western Government allows for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the search for gas and oil, a process that many question as being wholly inappropriate for such a dry continent as it uses huge quantities of water and has been shown to contaminate aquifers, the very thing upon which the progress of Broome hinges.

The situation is explored by investigative reporter, Melissa Fyfe, in The Age today (October 20, 2013) in a story headed: “Tourism mecca’s water supply on fracking alert”.