Our fascination with boab trees, and Simon’s obsessive sketching of them, had begun in Broome. We were captivated by the diversity of their shapes and protrusions, and by the beauty of the young trees, slender and graceful with their gently bulbous trunks. In the garden of the courthouse in Broome, where we strolled around the weekly market, there was a perfect short, plump, young specimen with pod-heavy branches radiating out from a squat trunk. Others were ancient, their trunks gnarled, the wood hard as granite.
We were on the road again, and on the short drive to Derby, we stopped often to photograph boabs. Sometimes they were grotesque shapes, but we found even their ugliness appealing. There were twinned trees, trunks grafted together with two bodies of branches, foliage and pods ext
