Beyond the blue
Wharton Beach near Esperance
There’s more than meets the eye in Esperance.
A familiar scent invades my nostrils as I rub the needle-like leaves between my fingers and breathe in their aroma – sweet, yet medicinal, citrus and grass. “You know it,” senior elder Aunty Annie laughs as I struggle to place the fragrance, rifling through the meagre inventory of botanical knowledge in my brain. “It’s just like citronella,” she offers when I fail to guess. “When Aboriginal people look at plants or trees, they look at it and see what they can get from it. We burn this one to keep the mozzies away.”
I’m standing on top of Taananeditj/Dempster Head on Wudjari Nyungar Country looking out “where the waters lie like a boomerang” – the translation of Kepa Kurl/ Esperance – and nature’s supermarket and pharmacy is opening up to me through Aunty Annie’s words.
Her stories begin in the retina-piercing hue below us – the Nyungar story of why the waters in Esperance are so blue (as a non-Indigenous person, I’m not permitted to share, so you’ll have to come on tour to find out). And though we don’t wander far, through coastal scrub that at first seems nondescript, I fill a mental notebook with native plants and their uses. There’s the praying mantis- looking vine that can be boiled and the liquid imbibed for energy, its seeds used to temporarily stun fish and make for an easy catch, and the pink flowers that can be used like aloe vera – or pickled, as Annie likes to do.
This relatively new tour with the 100 per cent Aboriginal-owned-and-operated Dabungool Cultural Experiences provides a grounding insight to a coastal frontier I’ve quickly realised offers so much more than meets the eye.
A blip on Australia’s wild southern coastline, where sheep and cattle farms bleed into the cerulean sea, Esperance is a place of vastness, wild beauty and small-town heart. The population in this West Australian town may have gone backwards in the last census but, from a tourism perspective, it’s booming.
>This story first appeared in Escape 26 November 2023. Continue reading on the PDF or online here.
