Kununurra

I was here about 40 years ago and cannot equate today’s townsite with what I saw four decades ago. Sufficient to say Kununurra still does not have a copiousness about it. Streets and verges are neat—-nice for judging tidy towns competitions—-with the police station and local courthouse the two stand-out architectural pieces. There’s Coles (difficult to actually find) and the usual IGA, strangely called the tuckerbox, a very refined tropical paradise property housing the country club resort and all nestled in a Walter Burley Griffin type urban street design.
Setting out yesterday morning I felt largely ho-hum about this hydrological wonderland. And just like Cuba Gooding Jnr in that movie with Mr Roast Leg of Lamb (TC) kept repeating “show me the money; show me the money; show me the money” is exactly what I wanted from this East Kimberley locale.
It was then that we found Weaber Plains Road and ventured way out of town where we found “the money” or the essential substance of Kununurra.

Vast tracts of farming land with a healthy superabundance of sunflowers, quinoa, flowers, chia, melons, mangoes and over 6,000 hectares of sandalwood. The lifeblood without which there would not be a Kununurra.
Mountain ranges and geological fault lines frame the farming, with abundant irrigation water caressing the fertile plains with the occasional hawke circling lazily against a big blue sky.