If you vow to travel – vow to visit Honeymoon Bay
Isabel at Kalumburu
Honeymoon Bay is a little bit of heaven with a charming love story at end of the long, rough road to the top of The Kimberley.
Turn north on the Gibb River Road and it’s only 200km to Honeymoon Bay but the distance is deceptive: you slow to a crawl on some sections. Our destination is a lurching 35km past the indigenous community of Kalumburu.
Rugged and challenging sections of the road are both blessing and curse, testing vehicles yet nurturing the isolation that preserves a lifestyle as balmy as the weather.
Blissful as Honeymoon Bay is, however, traditional owner Les Davey was a little wary when a girl from the east appeared on a pearl boat near Kalumburu.
“I thought she was pretty nice,” he said.
“But I had a few things I had to sort out.”
Like: How would a girl like Joy from the east settle down to life with his family at isolated, idyllic Honeymoon Bay?
Hundreds of kilometres from Kununurra in the east and Derby in the west, the native title tract of land in the north Kimberley is cut off by road for almost half the year in the summer wet season. Access is only by plane or barge.
Les’ grandfather, Leslie French, as a traditional owner, was granted a lease for Honeymoon Bay, where he had a fishing camp business. It is run as a separate entity to Kalumburu, population 450.
“We don’t make much money from the camping,” said 32-year-old Les, “so most of my family works at other jobs.”
From the time he was eight he was taking campers out on fishing trips. “I wasn’t big enough to start the outboard so I would get one of the tourists to get it going for me. After we finished fishing I would get someone to start it for me again when we came back.”
He loves his life in the bay and, after stints in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney, has no desire to live anywhere else. Balmy weather, warm seas, fishing, crabs, magnificent oysters … the occasional croc patrolling the bay.
A friendly brolga wades in the Carson River
In the wet, when the temperatures rise on still days that turn the sea into a mill pond, Les wades among the mangroves calf-deep and happily spears mangrove jack about half a metre in length.
He has seen the city side of life. He studied at the Perth acting academy and from 1998 worked for seven years as an actor based in Sydney and Melbourne.
“That was a real culture shock. Sydney.” He shook his head. “So many people. The monorail. All the trains.”
He enjoyed the experiences of workingbehind cameras and on stage. “The people were good. Lots of good times.” Pause. Grin. “Lots of girls.”
It’s not hard to imagine a bit of a line-up at the stage door for the tall bloke from The Kimberley but whenever he could Les caught a plane back to Honeymoon Bay. “I’d work over there a bit then come back and work here a bit.”
When you have belonged to paradise, your soul needs replenishment. Eventually the call home was too strong for Les, also known as Lancho. He returned to Honeymoon and found enough work to hold him there all year.
Les and Joy - romance at the top of the Kimberley
Six years ago he was working at a Paspaley pearl farm near Kalumburu when he struck up a friendship with Joy, a foreman aboard one of the pearl chipping boats.
Zimbabwe-born Joy was from Brisbane. She had become frustrated at not finding permanent work in the city, working five jobs to try to build a nest egg.
“I wanted a job where I could put some money together. I heard about the pearl business but you had to be in Darwin to get a job, so I rode my motorbike up there and slept on the couch of friends of friends until I got the job.”
When two sets of hazel eyes met over the pearl shells, a relationship grew but Les was cautious about how Joy would fit into life at the top end of The Kimberley.
First she had to meet the family. “I wasn’t sure how they would get on but my grandfather picked us up from the beach when we were dropped off from the pearl farm. By the time I had everything ready and we were on our way into Kalumburu he and Joy were chatting away just fine like they had known each other for a long time.”
The now nosy brolga wanders into our camp
That was a relief – but Les had to talk Joy through another obstacle. “She was a vegetarian. I said okay, she didn’t have to eat meat, but if she was going to live here she would have to learn to eat fish.”
Joy nodded and tucked into fresh seafood banquets from the Davey doorstep. They were married last year and to their delight became parents in September. Little Oscar was born conveniently at the end of the busy tourist season and will be the centre of attention in the languid wet season.
Joy and Les now manage the Honeymoon Bay camp area. She has also been working at the Kalumburu School and is quite proud of the fact that she negotiated the floodways through the wet to get to work. “I knew what the road under the water was like because I had driven it in the dry so it wasn’t too bad. There was only one day when I said ‘Nope’ and turned back.”
Tony and I arrived at Honeymoon on a Sunday afternoon, setting up camp on the beach and wandering down 30m to the gently lapping water. As the sun set Tony threw in his toy line ($5 collapsible rod, $5 reel) and within three seconds was coaxing a 56cm golden trevally ashore.
We booked in for two nights, collected the biggest oysters we have ever shucked, admired the rudimentary shower and toilet and booked in for another two nights. We had almost made it to Kalumburu three times before: having finally made it we needed to relax and enjoy.
We did that and also managed to catch a swag of red saddletail snapper and mangrove jack. We found Ken and Shirley from Moama, on the Murray. They have stayed at Honeymoon for three months for each of the last 12 years. A family group from Orange also spend three months every winter at Honeymoon. “Why wouldn’t you? It’s snowing down there.”
It is easy to see why they stay for months and why Les is home at Honeymoon Bay for good. We broke the journey back with a peaceful campsite at the sparkling Carson River crossing, where wary wild horses came to drink and an unconcerned brolga wandered around the campsite before departing at sunset with an overhead farewell squawk.
We raised our glasses to the bird and decided Kalumburu is defi nitely on our ‘Do It Again’ bucket list.
Wild horses eye us while taking a drink
