Below is a near-verbatim account we heard from Robert Dann, known as Robbie, the owner of Broome Indigenous Tours, about Aboriginal foods, culture, and how the Australian government treated his people. As a result, part of the latter may be disturbing for some readers. However, I think it is important to understand the Aboriginal perspective, or at least as presented by one Aboriginal man. I cannot attest, though, to the veracity of all the information he presented as facts.
We didn't realize that when Robbie picked us up for the tour, we'd be treated to a private tour - lucky us! He explained that he belonged to a big family with 37 first cousins from 9 "aunties and uncles," and that he'd traveled to the United States three times, including the typical cities of LA and New York. Unlike any other foreigner that we've spoken with, he'd also visited Mobile, Alabama, because it was a sister city to Fremantle, outside of Perth in southern Western Australia.
Robbie proudly said he was considered a "grandfather" in Aboriginal terms, because it was normal for his nieces and nephews to calm him, "Grandpa." His daughter wasn't very pleased, however, and told them in no uncertain terms, "That's my Dad. You get your own Dad." His daughter, who has Irish and Italian blood, now has an English boyfriend. I think he meant a fellow from England rather than an Australian White man, as it was common to refer to all White men in Australia as Englishmen.
He showed us a photo of what Broome looked like in 1982, when it had a population of 3,000 to 4,000 people, compared to Broome's current population of 16,000 to 18,000 people.
According to Robbie, Broome is a melting pot of different nationalities and cultures. Some of his relatives had red hair and blue eyes. Before the interior Kimberley region was cattle country, it was known as sheep country. After learning that his great-grandmother had been raped by an English sheepherder, Robbie traced his ancestry to England and discovered a family crest.
Robbie then stopped to show us several native plants. The first was a Kakadu plum, which has the highest level of Vitamin C in the world. Grown in the Northern Territory, eating a Kakadu plum is akin to eating 100 oranges. It sells for AUD $35 a kilo, and pickers earn AUD $25 a kilo. According to Robbie, Mary Kay Cosmetics tried to patent it and told the Aboriginal people not to eat it, so there would be more available to sell.
Showing us a hibiscus plant, he said it represented the Stolen Generation, where many Aboriginal kids were removed from their parents at very young ages and sent to a station, i.e., a huge cattle ranch, to be raised and work. Though he said his mother had also been "stolen' from her parents, she was raised by nuns at the Broome Mission, so she at least had a good life.
Bobbie stated that the goal was to breed out the Aboriginal race and that his people were wiped out in Tasmania because of different (racial) policies. In addition, White Australian policy ensured that Indigenous people had no rights until 1967.
He noted there was lots of racism in Broome and it was everywhere. He said that when mainly Aboriginal people see his large tour van, they ask ”How did you do that?” His response is that he worked hard (to buy his own van and operate his own company).
When Broome's old Aboriginal reserve was closed down, its residents had to leave without any new housing provided. He readily admitted that many Aboriginal people “live” in Male Oval, aka Broome Park, which we noticed from the moment we arrived in the city, as we had to go through the park to reach Chinatown and other sights. Once alcohol was banned in the Kimberley region, Aboriginal people moved to where alcohol was available. The unstated segue was that his people moved to Broome because there was alcohol readily available.
After we'd driven for a bit, Robbie stopped where there was lots of different foliage, as he wanted to show us some food, or bush tucker, as he called it. This was a bunjurra plant, commonly used as a fish poison when the root is grabbed, water is added to make a paste, and then it is placed in the water and absorbed by fish.
A soapy wattle can be used as hand soap, as he demonstrated for us!
Bush mint was relatively new to Robbie, so he didn’t know its uses beyond bush tea.
Robbie then showed us a jiggle tree, aka boomerang tree. You just need to look for the "elbow" or the bend in the tree. It can also be considered a medicine tree because, after you trim the bark and infuse it with oils, you can use it as lip balm for sunburns, psoriasis, etc. Its nectar is like maple syrup. So many uses from one tree!
I didn’t like it much when he also called it a mother-in-law tree because it was two-faced!
Robbie was holding a nutmeg seed.
Like a lychee nut, dodder was used for fish nets and to make shoes. However, it was a parasite because it kills tree roots.
When he was a kid in the 1980s, this area was part of the Pearl Coast Zoo, but it closed in 1989. The English founded the zoo, which included an aviary. Even though Broome was small, the zoo area was huge. The land was sold to the shire, a term for a local government area.
He used to play here as a kid, but since he was 30, he has traveled the world with the didgeridoo, an Aboriginal wind instrument, played while using a special breathing technique called circular breathing, as his “ticket.”
None of this suburban area existed when Robbie was growing up in Broome. Until the 1967 referendum (to remove discriminatory clauses against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from the Australian Constitution), Aboriginal people weren’t allowed in town. If they entered, they were jailed for six months. If they were drunk after 6pm, they were jailed for 12 months! This was all part of the White Australia policy. However, because the Japanese were needed in the pearling industry, they were exempt from that policy and lived in shanty shacks.
Wattle trees provided the green and gold colors for Australia in the Olympics. As we approached the Australian winter, different wattles bloomed at the end of the season.
Robbie told us that One Mile Aboriginal Reserve was an enclave for Aboriginal people until 2009. Their homes were then torn down because even though the lands were owned by the Aboriginal Land Trust, they could be used for development. Though fifty to sixty families lived here with their own park, many families lived outside in the yards.
Some gave up their Aboriginal status to receive citizenship, but they then couldn’t acknowledge their parents if they were walking on the other side of the road, or they would have lost their Australian citizenship. Sadly, there has been no public recognition of what transpired to the Aboriginal people in this part of Broome.
As we headed toward downtown Broome, Robbie noted that the tide was often so high here by the Visitors Centre, that Aboriginal people bought spears to kill fish here.
When an old DC-3 overshot the runway, it became the town's first Visitors Centre. It looked like an airplane with wings!
Male Oval, the park we crossed innumerable times in Broome, is used for cricket, but it’s hard like concrete underneath.
Until World War II, Chinatown was called Japtown (because so many Japanese pearl divers lived there). The statue in the roundabout, which we’d seen several times, represented China and Aboriginal culture.
The first shop in Japtown sold noodles for AUD $150, about one US dollar now, when he was a kid.
He provided photos showing Broome flooding extensively in the 1950s, but since major changes were made, it no longer floods regularly.
When he was growing up, Chinatown consisted of only four or five stores. Now, it is several blocks long.
He and his young friends played games where the pearling luggers maintained their boats in the sheds. Before the sheds could be built, though, they had to dynamite the mangroves to clear the way, as four hundred luggers needed access to the shore
Robbie spoke about the horrific Aboriginal experiences with regard to pearl diving. Even though we'd heard about it, and I've written about it in previous posts, it bears repeating briefly here, because of his different perspective or voice.
According to Robbie, the first divers were Aboriginal women, some of whom had been kidnapped from inland parts of Australia and had never seen water before. The women were hit with a paddle across the head if they failed to come up with a shell or grains of sand to prove they had reached the bottom of the sea. Many were raped on board the pearl luggers. Many Aboriginal men were also forced to dive for pearls even though they too had often never swum before.
We knew from other sources that conditions improved for Aboriginal people regarding diving decades ago, although Robbie stated that only "everything changed in the 1970s." This was the Japanese camp, i.e., where the Japanese workers lived. Robbie said that if he or his friends made mischief there, the Japanese workers had the right to smack them, as did their parents. The boys quickly learned not to tell their parents that they had gotten into mischief at the camp!
The images theoretically showed the jetty in its heyday, when pearling luggers used it after dynamite removed the mangrove trees. However, Robbie said the second photo was not taken in Broome! The luggers had no toilets or showers when the crew and divers were out for two weeks at a time diving for oyster pearl shells.
The picture showed a shed at the jetty piled high with shells.
The jetty used to be regularly affected by 11 m-high tides. Tides continue to cover the jetty and the road once a year at very high tides.
When kids were sick with the flu, these shells were collected and cooked to pull out the snails.
Not only were these the same buildings from the 1970s photo he'd shown us earlier, but they were still owned by the same people, mostly Europeans, who had been the pearling masters.
By the jetty was another sculpture on the Broome Cultural Trail I described in an earlier post. The boomerang in The Start of the Pearling Story represented the Aboriginal Yawuru country, culture, and people, while the oyster shell represented their connection to Guwan, or pearling.
The shell depicted four skin groups and kangaroo tracks. Robbie said Aboriginal people were not allowed to marry anyone within a dozen skin groups because of concerns about inbreeding. Thinking about it now, I wish I had confirmed that was a law imposed by the government, not by the people.
After the 1967 referendum, Aboriginal people were told to come into town and were provided houses here on Kennedy Hill, named after a pearling master. However, following Covid-19, the homes were destroyed when new residents across the street didn't want to look at the homes (occupied by Aboriginal people). Carbon dating confirmed that people lived in this spot 40,000 years ago. Sadly, nothing remains to remind people in the future of the long, rich history on Kennedy Hill, as, according to Robbie, (White) locals don't want to acknowledge his people's history there.
Aboriginal people wrapped fish in the bark of a paperbark tree and cooked them underground. There are 200 species of paperbark trees throughout Australia, including 120 species on the Dampier Peninsula alone.
We watched as Robbie peeled the layers like an onion! Each layer was so smooth it was used as toilet paper and as a painting surface.
Across the street in Kennedy Hill was a boab tree that was perfect, he joked, if you wanted to piss off your sister by rubbing the fruit on the inside of her shirt and having her itch all day long! On the positive side, it has potassium, zinc, and Vitamin C. These fruits would be ripe in two more weeks.
Another tree was a tamarind, which would have come via trade with China.
He picked up pieces of yellow ochre from the ground around the tree and showed us that they could be used as sunblock. Ochre, which also comes in red and white, was traded with other Aboriginal tribes. I'm getting way ahead of myself, but I'm looking forward to discovering more ochre in southern France in a few weeks!
You can imagine how Robbie caught us off guard when he asked, in all seriousness, while standing in front of another tree, "Do you want to kill a bird?"
He said it was a mir mir tree, which is how one of the most common and prominent forest giants native to Western Australia is often referenced, but the official name is a Marri tree. This was the bird he'd frightened us about! He encouraged me to taste it, but in my opinion, it lacked flavor.
It was fascinating, however, to see the leaves open and close as he touched them.
Robbie then drove to nearby Roebuck Bay, where he said English explorer and privateer William Dampier landed on Buccaneer Rock near present-day Broome in 1688.
We stopped briefly at the Holy Child Orphanage, also known as the Sisters of St. John of God and the Broomer Mission, now part of the Broome Heritage Center. His mother was raised there by Irish nuns after she was taken from her parents at the age of two. Though the nuns were great, he said, the male German missionaries were very strict, and some sexually abused the children. He was concerned that the nuns, who were given lots of money to raise the children, are now some of the biggest landowners in town, because the money was diverted from helping the children as intended.
He commented that his mother "met" her mother a dozen years later on the home's cement verandah. I can't imagine the psychological effects on both mother and daughter, let alone Robbie and his siblings, of that upbringing. He was raised Catholic and attended Catholic school, but no longer considers himself one.
I'd forgotten until now his recommendation to watch the documentary Sisters, Pearls and Mission Girls, which tells the story of Irish nuns who worked with Aboriginal people. We'll have to see it when we return home in December from our current trip.
We ended our tour at a local park where we had "bush tea," courtesy of Bushell's Tea, a historic Australian tea and coffee brand founded in 1883. He showed us his very light galbinya, or shield, made from the bark of a stinkywood or cork tree. It could also be used as a plate.
He showed us a boomerang, made 80 to 90 years (?) ago by his father from a banksia tree with a stone axe and sharkskin.
The punishment spear is still used by Aboriginal people, but it is frowned upon by the government.
Robbie then played some haunting music on his didgeridoo, through circular breathing, in from his nose and out from his mouth at the same time. He mentioned that he busks when traveling overseas and was able to earn €350 for just 30 minutes of playing in St. Peter's
We ended our tour at a local park where we had "bush tea," courtesy of Bushell's Tea, a historic Australian tea and coffee brand founded in 1883. He showed us his very light galbinya, or shield, made from the bark of a stinkywood or cork tree. It could also be used as a plate.
He showed us a boomerang, made 80 to 90 years (?) ago by his father from a banksia tree with a stone axe and sharkskin.
The punishment spear is still used by Aboriginal people, but it is frowned upon by the government.
One of his brothers played a joke on him when Robbie ordered a pearl shell to cover his private parts for the ceremony when an Aboriginal boy becomes a man. Obviously, it was far too small! In his left hand was a hairbelt.
Robbie then played some haunting music on his didgeridoo, through circular breathing, in from his nose and out from his mouth at the same time. He mentioned that he busks when traveling overseas and was able to earn €350 for just 30 minutes of playing in St. Peter's
Square in Rome. Not a bad gig!
After hearing for several days about the White man's perspective on how Aboriginal people were treated historically and how they fare in current-day Broome, it was fascinating to hear Robbie talk about his very personal experiences growing up Aboriginal in Broome. I hope you found it worthwhile too.
Next post: The Broome Historical Museum, Pioneer Cemetery, and the Sisters of St. John of God Convent.
Posted on September 20th, 2026, on our second and last night in San Sebastian in Spain's Basque Country, before moving on in the morning to visit good friends just over the border in France's Basque Country. Please take care of yourself and your loved ones.
