Day 49 - Fitzroy Crossing

Saturday, 17 July 2021

In 2015, I recorded in this blog what a nice town I thought Fitzroy Crossing was. Compared to other outback towns, dishevelled and unappealing, the Fitz had something sweet about it. I wonder now whether I was under a delusion, projecting an experience I was hoping to have, or just wrong.

We fuel up in Fitzroy Crossing along with half a dozen other travellers. While we wait in the queue, I go into the roadhouse shop to use the toilet. The women’s is “closed for cleaning” and locked. I open the door of the disabled unisex toilet and see a young Aboriginal girl squatting on the toilet, completely in the buff. The toilet’s a mess, dirty sink, tissue and junk all over the floor. I close the door quickly. She starts calling out and her father, just paying for something at the register, comes running.

The shop is disorganized and grungy. I yank out the bandana from my pocket and use it to push open the front door, covered in grime and fingerprints. We head across the street to the Visitor Centre where there surely is a toilet, but the front door is barred and looking as grungy as the roadhouse. “Temporarily Closed” says the sign on the door.

We head to the local IGA for some fruit. Squads of Aboriginal people are sitting in the parking lot, barefoot and drinking Coke. Others shuffle around in their usual slow gait. An old man with a heavy jacket and backpack walks by himself, seeming lost.

The whole scene of the town is sour and unkempt. Bitter, like the Aborigines who inhabit it. Not even an effort to clean the place up for the hoards of tourists that will pass through during these dry season winter months. Most visitors stay in their cars or hurry out of town as quick as they can.

Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek are the only towns in the long 1000 km stretch across the popular Kimberley region between Broome and Kununurra. Those towns at least make an effort to cater for the tourist industry. As a white person pulling my temporary home around the top end of Australia, I feel like I’m in a foreign country, observing the “natives” through my protective glass enclosure as much as they sit and watch the privileged whites towing a wealth of possessions as they pass through their land.

How do we connect? We seem worlds apart, in language, values, lifestyles, culture. You can spout the usual “we are all one, with the same loves and losses, fears and joys that all humans have.” But it doesn’t bridge the gap. They’re wary of us; we’re wary of them. You could say that’s true on both sides of the fence. Do they even want us to reach out?

But there’s also something right about it. The spectacle of an Aboriginal outback town is a chaste reminder for all white Australians, most of whom are urban, on the coast and in the southern parts of the country. It’s a reminder of who’s land this was before the English arrived and took it from the people who occupied the continent for 40,000 years -- and what has happened to them, a few generations later. The wreckage of that imperialism walk around aimlessly in towns that were completely unsuited to their ancestors’ nomadic ways. They have nothing to do. Nowhere to go. They look sad and lost.

And still, I would like to know what their world is like. Whether happiness exists there. Whether their community life provides enough source of contentment and identity to get them through a day. Or whether they sit in their anger and confusion, like it looks, raging at these stupid white people who continue to see them as invisible, even when they’re so blatantly visible on the streets of a place like Fitzroy Crossing.

I wonder if any of us caravan-toting, 4WD-driving white tourists can enter a town like this and not feel uncomfortable, guilty, responsible, sorry, sad, curious?

We drive on. Our last outback adventure takes us up the Leopold Downs gravel road that passes through Tunnel Creek and Windjana Gorge before connecting up with the Gibbs River Rd, 50kms outside of Derby, the western end of the Gibbs River outback trek. As we enter the Devonian Reef Conservation Park we eye a track just before a creek crossing. It winds along the creek bed a ways before ending at an open area with a fire pit. Great camping spot.

If, in the end, reincarnation should prove to be true, I have no doubt that Johan will come back as a geologist. Back in Alice Springs, he bought a $100 full colour, 3-inch thick book on Australian geology that weighs a tonne. As we drive and explore, he’s been making his way through this tome, educating himself on one of his life passions. This area, he tells me, used to be an ancient coral reef, 350 million years ago, on the edge of the Kimberly plain. He goes exploring up the creek while I take a bush bath and returns with a gleam in his eye. He shows me pictures he’s taken of obvious sea fossils embedded in the rock. Also lovely sweet water pools with fish and thankfully no crocodiles.