Broome Guide: Kira Fong

Although Kira Fong grew up in Perth and spent much of her late teens and 20s travelling the world as a model, it wasn’t until she moved back to her home town of Broome at 30 that she felt she’d found her niche.

“I spent a long time overseas and away from home, and Broome just felt like home,” she says.

Kira’s family has strong ties to Broome and her school holidays were spent there visiting her grandparents, who ran L.L. Tack’s general store in Chinatown.

“All my memories are of running around the old shop in Carnarvon Street, and the old bakery there, and the old fish and chip shop, and us kids walking down to Streeter’s Jetty,” she says. “So for me, when I think about being home, that’s where I think about.”

Since moving to Broome, Kira has worked for Goolarri Media, where she started the Kimberley Girl competition, which aims to build the confidence of young Aboriginal women. The company is also behind A Taste of Broome, a series of events that, Kira says, offers one of the best ways to learn about the Broome of old.

“A Taste of Broome really encapsulates what Broome means to the old locals and when I talk about the old locals it’s the indigenous people — it’s their land — but it’s also the Chinese people who came over here, the Filipinos, the Malays and the Indonesians, and it’s the combination of those cultures put together,” Kira explains.

The event brings together traditional and contemporary dance, food stalls, storytelling and a performance combining music with archival images and footage to tell the history of Broome from early European settlement to the peak of the pearling industry, World Wars I and II and the tourism era.

“It’s really quite special and people walk away, saying ‘Wow, nowhere else could I have experienced that’.”

A Taste of Broome is on once a month from April-September. goolarri.com/atob.