Nhulunbuy, NT

The World Traveller Series II ~ Events & Incidents ~ Episode 4

by Brett Hayhoe

There are destinations you choose, and there are destinations that simply become part of the rhythm of your life — so routine, so woven into the calendar, that for a long time you stop thinking of them as travel at all.

Nhulunbuy was one of those.

For more than a decade, once a month without much ceremony, a flight was boarded out of Cairns and the destination was the far north-east corner of the Northern Territory — a mining town on the Gove Peninsula, sitting at the edge of Arnhem Land, where the bauxite kept everyone employed and the Arnhem Club kept everyone sane.

The exact year it started is not entirely clear in the memory. The reasons for the first trip have gone slightly fuzzy around the edges. What has not gone fuzzy — not even slightly — are the friendships made there, the work done there, the personal life lived there, and one particular evening toward the end of those years that served as a reminder that you can spend a decade somewhere and still encounter something that stops you cold.

The Place — Gove, As Everyone Called It

Nhulunbuy — pronounced noo-lun-boy for the uninitiated, though the uninitiated were relatively few — sits on the Gove Peninsula in the far north of the Northern Territory. Founded in the late 1960s around a bauxite mine and a deep-water port, it is a private mining town on Aboriginal-owned land. The alumina refinery that defined the town’s economy for decades closed in May 2014, but for most of the years in question it was very much open and very much the reason the place existed.

The statistics are worth mentioning because they were genuinely impressive: the largest conveyor belt in the southern hemisphere, and enough bauxite beneath the red earth to sustain the operation for well over a hundred years. It was a serious industrial undertaking in one of the most remote settings Australia had to offer, which gave the whole place a particular character — the compact self-sufficiency of a community that knew it was a long way from anywhere and had organised itself accordingly.

The airport, it must be said, did not lean into grandeur. For most of those years it was, in practical terms, a tin shed with ambitions. The boys at Qantas found this amusing, and the regular joke — delivered with the particular affection that airline staff reserve for their most dependable Gold members — was that the Qantas Club lounge could be found outside near the third tree. It was not entirely inaccurate.

The flight from Cairns was short enough that jetlag was never a consideration. You landed, you collected your bag, and you were in the Top End. Simple.

Carmel and Cocka — The Heart of It

Some friendships take years to build. Some arrive almost immediately, as though they were simply waiting to be collected.

Carmel and Cocka were the latter.

Carmel is Irish — in every sense that phrase carries with it. A heart as large as the country she came from, with the warmth and directness and fierce loyalty that tends to come with that particular combination of heritage and character. She was kind, she was funny, she was the sort of person who makes a place feel like home before you have entirely worked out how that happened.

Cocka, her husband, was his own kind of wonderful.

The arrangement was simple and became quickly comfortable: the Arnhem Club for the karaoke nights, and Carmel and Cocka’s family home for everything else. Not a hotel room, not a serviced apartment — a home, with a kitchen and a dining table and the easy company of people who were genuinely pleased to see you arrive and genuinely sorry to see you go.

The pickup from the airport became a ritual of its own. Carmel and Cocka would collect the flight, and the first stop was the club for a couple of thirst quenchers before heading back to the house for whatever was coming out of Carmel’s kitchen. It was, by any measure, a significantly better arrangement than most business travel offers.

The karaoke nights at the Arnhem Club ran long. The hosting style has always been a straightforward philosophy: you start the show, and you stay there until the show is finished. In Nhulunbuy that meant five or six hours, which suited a mining town crowd that was not particularly interested in an early night. The miners worked hard and they played accordingly, and a good karaoke host was part of the social infrastructure.

The Cove — A Boat Trip Worth Having

On one occasion, Cocka arranged something rather special.

One of the mining boats was made available for the day, and the destination was the actual cove — the geographical feature that gave the peninsula part of its identity before the town name took over. What presented itself was a massive natural expanse of water, and arranged at equal distances around its perimeter were seven substantial homes. Seven mansions, equidistant, facing the water with the private ease of structures built by people who had both the means and the space to do exactly as they pleased.

The story behind those houses is one for another time — and it is quite a story. For now it is enough to say that the cove, seen from the water on a calm Top End morning, was the kind of thing you do not easily forget.

A Decade of Change

When the monthly trips to Nhulunbuy began, life looked a certain way. A marriage. A settled identity. A version of things that made sense at the time and was, in its own terms, a genuine life.

Over the years that followed, things changed. The marriage ended. The process of coming out began — slowly, then not so slowly, the way these things tend to go once the momentum builds. A whole renegotiation of who you are and how you move through the world.

Through all of it: Carmel and Cocka. Not a single thing changed in how they received their monthly guest. Not a word of anything other than warmth and support. Carmel especially — an Irish woman who had probably seen enough of the world to know that love has more important things to do than concern itself with the particulars of who it is directed toward — was present throughout in exactly the way a good friend is present: without fuss, without condition, and entirely reliably.

There are people who represent the best of what friendship can be, and they do not always arrive in the places you might expect. Nhulunbuy produced two of them.

The Night Something Was Wrong

The instincts that develop over years of travel to a place are not always explicable. They are simply there — a calibration built from enough visits to know what the atmosphere feels like when it is sitting normally, and to notice when it is not.

On one of the later trips, the flight landed and something felt off. Not dramatically, not in any way that could be immediately named. Just the particular quality of the air in a small community when something has happened and everyone knows it.

A high school friend was at the bar that night — a man Brett had known for years, half white and half Aboriginal, someone who understood both sides of the particular world that Nhulunbuy inhabited. The question was put to him, quietly and without making a production of it: has something happened?

His answer was brief, and it was not a comfortable one.

“You’ve been coming here a long time, Brett. Long enough to be a local. You’re right. A local black man did something naughty to a young white boy. He’s being flown to Darwin in the morning for his court hearing.”

Then, without particular drama: “He’ll be flying. But he’ll be in a body bag. There are tribal rules he has to answer first. And they are not pleasant.”

That was all. The conversation moved on, as conversations do, and the evening continued. The karaoke ran its usual five or six hours. The crowd was what it was.

But the words stayed. They stay still.

Nhulunbuy existed in two worlds simultaneously — the world of the mine and the club and the monthly flights from Cairns, and the world of Arnhem Land that stretched away beyond it, ancient and governed by its own law, older than anything the mining company had built and entirely indifferent to the timelines of alumina production. Most of the time those two worlds ran alongside each other without direct collision. Most of the time.

That night was a reminder that most of the time has edges to it.

The Limits of the Guest

There are things a white visitor to that part of the world cannot do, and places that cannot be entered without invitation or permission — and often not at all. Arnhem Land is not a tourist destination. It is home. The land beyond the mine’s boundaries belongs to its traditional custodians in a sense that goes considerably deeper than the legal title suggests.

Carmel and Cocka were good guides to what was accessible and what was not. They made sure that what could be seen was seen, and they managed the limits without making them feel like deprivation. The time there was full and rich and interesting, and if its boundaries were somewhat different from those of a conventional tourist visit, that was simply the nature of where it was.

Cairns eventually gave way to a move elsewhere, and when that happened, the monthly rhythm stopped. No more tin shed airport. No more first-tree lounge. No more five-hour nights at the Arnhem Club, no more home-cooked dinners, no more boat trips to the cove.

Life, as it does, gave lemons. There was nothing to do but get on with it.

Conclusion

Nhulunbuy will not feature on most Australian travel lists. It does not have a marketing campaign. It has a mine — which had its own story — and it has Arnhem Land behind it, and it has a community that built something real in one of the most remote corners of a country that has plenty of remote corners to choose from.

What it had, for one particular monthly visitor across more than a decade, was more than any of that.

It had Carmel and Cocka. It had the Arnhem Club and five-hour nights and the particular satisfaction of a crowd that came to have a good time and mostly did. It had a boat on still blue water, a cove ringed with inexplicable mansions, and an old high school friend who delivered a piece of news one evening in a sentence or two, without drama, because some things are simply said plainly.

It had the years in which a life changed, and the two people who met those changes without blinking.

The lemons arrived eventually. But for a long time before that, the fruit in season was considerably sweeter.

The World Traveller Series is written and produced by Brett Hayhoe — publisher, editor and administrator of Q Magazine. Read more at Q Magazine Blogs — Ask Brett Podcasts — Ask Brett Podcasts | Hayhoe YouTube Channel

Next: Coming out ~ a very personal story