Indigenous Cultural Livelihoods In Focus
Interviews by John Greatorex
Robert Sibosado: Livelihoods from Tourism
Sunday 7 August, Garma 2005
We are the Bardi people. There are 60 people living at Lombadina. We are all family. We created the tourist on our land, so that we can survive. We don't want to be millionaires, but doing this on our land is very important for the success of the business. It would be meaningless to go somewhere else and start a business. This is the land where we come from: the land is the base for our success. We did it ourselves. We did everything ourselves.
One of the things we wanted at Lombadino was to be able to just live there and enjoy our lives, and make a little bit of income at the same time. We don't want to ruin our own life by making dollars in a sense, I guess. We still want to be able to live how we live. We got CDEP back in the eighties. We were one of the first in Western Australia to go on CDEP, and then we actually used the CDEP program to set up businesses. Just about everything we have in Lombadina we set up as a business to support itself. We found that very hard to do because of seasonality [and the] number of people up there to support these businesses. But they're going alright you know.
All the businesses as a whole support the community. We're not self sufficient yet, I guess, but we're getting there. We can't expect to do it all in one step.
We only have twenty-four beds. Filling them up isn't really that hard. Some years we haven't filled it, but we've done alright still, and I guess, a good season for us is probably 1800 – 2000 people staying in our accommodation over five months, which is very small. Cable Beach resort, which is only 15 kilometres away from us, gets 25 000 people a year. We're just looking at 1800. Great numbers change a place instantly, if you want to put it that way. I saying 2000 max will do us. That will do us.
All we want to do now, we're at the stage of adding to our experience, so giving better quality, and changing with the time, rather than getting more numbers to support a larger community. We'll just change the product and increase the price. It costs $154 for a two-bedroom unit, you can sleep five or four. It's more a retreat than a resort. We advertise it's a place where you come to get away from big numbers and have a chance to relax. Like our beach: you gone down there, there's no one there. Its a great beach: it's lovely. I guess it depends on where you market - it's quite hard thing to sell.
That's one of our problems. We haven't marketed properly. We've got more business from word of mouth than anything else.
We offer different experiences. We take people to six or seven different places to get the crabs. We have 10 metre tides, so we have to decide which place to go each time.
It actually an eye opener for a lot of Australians, because all they see is the bullshit on TV. We welcome them, to come and stay with us. The accommodation is right in the middle of the town.
Our people across the board, we need these successes. You hear people say they want development. People say Aboriginal people are the unluckiest people in Australia. I don't believe that - in some ways maybe we are, but in others we are the luckiest people as well.