Saturday’s open-air market in Kununurra is fun and friendly. Just after breakfast, locals have come to grab melons and fresh greens from the surrounding well-irrigated farms. Tourists are marveling at the inventive lotions, potions and sauces stall holders have concocted from the remote region’s boab trees. Also for sale are indigenous art and craft and the handiwork of local women. A handful of people have gathered around a young woman displaying a laundry gizmo. Slim, tanned and cheerful, Sheree O’Brien, 34, is spruiking The Amazing Handiwash, a plastic agitator that cleans dirty clothes in a bucket.
Pegged to the washing line slung between trees behind her are a T shirt, blue jeans and shorts. “If you buy a Handiwash today,” she tells a retired couple, “you can have it for the special low price of $30. It usually sells for $45.”
O’Brien, who comes from Victoria, has been traveling through central and Western Australia with partner Simon Wagstaffe in a four-wheel-drive vehicle towing a camper trailer. Escapees from city office jobs, for six months they’ve carted around wares (Wagstaffe peddles a flame-ignition kit called Light My Fire) to markets, trade shows and country fairs. “We wanted to see the country and find an affordable place to buy property and settle down,” O’Brien says. “Instead of drawing on our savings, we thought it would be a way of paying our own way.” The hawker’s life has brought them in contact with all kinds of people, she adds. Some of the least well-off have turned out to be the happiest, proudest and most resilient.
The couple’s journey will soon come to an end in Darwin, where they plan to split up. “The trip hasn’t been a financial success,” O’Brien says. “But life on the road has been a great learning experience. Australians care. We go out of our way to help people in need. In that regard, we’ve got it so right.”
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