Veronika Wild

Guildford our Friendly Ghost, wishes you a HAPPY HALLOWEEN

A money free Festival- What an excellent idea! Great weather too Back in the Hills, it hasn’t taken long to feel as if Broome was just a mirage. However, I did have an unexpected pleasure on Saturday. Since my daughter was at home this weekend, she took the little girls and I to a small local event – The Festival of Forgotten Skills. Apparently it was to have been held in May, but the bad weather had led to its postponement.   Now the weather was perfect and it proved to be   a most enjoyable day. Held in the community garden, there were pizzas being baked in a big clay oven and you could watch all sorts of things being made - jewellery, rugs, mosaics, spinning and weaving. You could also try your hand at many of them including nature crafts, fabric painting, making lagerphones from bottle caps, fairy pendants and other things. Produce and seedlings were being given away to the musical accompaniment of a young girl playing an accordion. The atmosphere was that ...

Camels, lots of them!  When I woke up I realised with a start that my little holiday was almost over and there were lots of things still on my to do list. For a start, though it was overcast and muggy, I needed to pick up a little something for the man who was feeding the cat, so I called in at the Court House Market which is held in front of the former Cable House on Saturdays and Sundays. At the market - I never did find out what a frozen fruit thingy was. Shouldn't have had breakfast first! It’s only a small market but there were pearls and handcrafts on offer, homemade preserves, honey, liqueurs made from native fruit, a variety of food, some clothes and coffee. The naturally dyed cotton and silk garments made by an Aboriginal group were very beautiful but pricey, an indigenous man was carving the nutlike fruit of the boab and a digeridoo could be heard playing somewhere in the background. My dog -walking friend from Gaunthaume   Point (Helen?), h...

Getting too used to Broome Time I was really getting much too lazy. Here I was on my second last day in Broome and I hadn’t even seen it yet. Broome is a bit like that.   You settle in, slow down a bit and next thing you know, several years have gone by.   After an early morning swim and being savaged by sandflies* – it’s the little things that get you in the end, I set off to explore. Broome (permanent population around 14,776 and about 45,000 in tourist season), started out as a base for the pearling trade in the 1860’s.   Initially it was the Trepanger coming from Sulawesi, Timor and Kupang in search of beche de mer -sea slugs and sea cucumbers for Asian markets, who frequented these shores in large numbers at least as early as the C17th. While Abel Tasman had mapped the coastline on his way back from discovering Tasmania in 1642, it was English buccaneer, William Dampier, who is credited with being the first European to set foot in the area in 1688. He...