July 14

For the next 3 months I will be living in Kununurra, a small town in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia. I will be keeping my first ever blog here, so that you can follow some of my experiences.

I arrived in town a few days ago after an overnight stopover in Perth. In the flight from Perth to Kununurra I got a window seat and had three hours of uninterrupted views of desert plains.

From the sky it looked like there wasn’t very much down there.

We eventually reached “something”: Lark Argyle, an enormous artificial lake constructed as part of the Ord River Irrigation Scheme in the 1970's. Unlike Perth, the East Kimberley has a good supply of water. Happily for me, that means long showers. Happily for the state government, traditional landowners and a Chinese investor it means farmland for sugar, chia seeds and other crops. Alongside agriculture, this is mining country (90% of the world’s pink diamonds are produced here). It is also crocodile country: my secondment induction guide warns against swimming pretty much everywhere.

70km down the road from the lake we reached Kununnura. This is the dry season, with highs averaging 30–35 degrees (it climbs to 40 in December). The good weather brings the tourists, so the town is pumping right now. All the shops are open, the campsites are full and the queues at Coles checkout are long. The regular population of 7500 will double over the next few months.

My arrival coincided with the Agricultural Show coming to town. It was like an AMP show in NZ, but with more snakes and creepy clown-based fairground games.

After shelling out $20 to get in the door (nothing in Kununurra is cheap), I ensured I got my money’s worth by completing my debut watermelon race. This involved scooping out a hollow in two watermelons, wearing them as shoes, racing down a tarpaulin covered in washing liquid and throwing smaller melons into a big bin. Unluckily for me, a ringer (Australian word for cowboy, basically McLeods Daughters is a real thing) had clearly been training all year for this and won in a matter of minutes.

Like at the AMP show, most people at the Ag Show were white. Half of Kununurra’s population is Aboriginal, but to the new arrival the divide between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is already fairly visible. The local shops, businesses and agencies are full of non-Indigenous people working (ranging from German backpackers to Filipino immigrants to white Australians whose families have lived in the region for generations). The parks and roadsides, especially at night time, are dotted with Indigenous people not working. I will be based here with Wunan, a local Aboriginal organisation that aims to help indigenous people in the area succeed by creating opportunities in education, employment and housing.

After the Ag show, I moved into my accommodation at a local holiday park. If you want to feel like you’re always on holiday, my advice is to live at a holiday park.