Qualla: Broome

Broome: Introduction

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nine hundred headstones stand in Broome's Japanese Cemetery, marking young men who drowned, suffocated, or were crippled by decompression sickness while diving for pearl shell in the waters off Western Australia's Kimberley coast. Beside them lie Chinese, Malay, Afghan, Aboriginal, and Jewish sections -- a graveyard that tells the story of a town built on the fortunes and misfortunes of people drawn from across the Indian Ocean world. The Yawuru people, whose country this is, called the place Rubibi. The Europeans who arrived in the 1880s renamed it for the governor of Western Australia, Sir Frederick Napier Broome, and set about extracting wealth from the sea in ways that would fill those graves for decades.

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Broome: Pearls and Their Price

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Yawuru lived along this coast for thousands of years, fishing the sea and creeks and naming their seasons for the changing catch. Europeans probed the shoreline from the 17th century but saw no reason to stay -- no natural harbours, no obvious resources, and a punishing dista...

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Broome: Cable, Camels, and Transformation

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1889, a telegraph cable was laid from Cable Beach to Java, connecting Australia to mainland Asia, Europe, and North America. The beach that gave its name to this undersea link would later give Broome its second life. For most of the 20th century, the town remained a small, swe...

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Broome: Tides, Moonlight, and Deep Time

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Broome sits at about 18 degrees south latitude, on the edge of the tropical cyclone belt, 1,680 kilometres from Perth in a straight line -- closer to Bali than to the Western Australian capital. The tides here are enormous, and they reveal wonders. At Gantheaume Point, seven kilo...

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Broome: Fruit Bats at Dusk

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At the end of Short Street near the shore, fruit bats roost in dense colonies during the day. At dusk, thousands of them erupt into the air in noisy, chattering swarms, wheeling out over the town toward their feeding grounds -- one of Broome's great free spectacles. The town's cu...

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