Love, Loss And Diamonds

She lost first her homeland, then her husband and finally her son, but Frauke Bolten-Boshammer rebuilt her life from a patch of barren red earth. Sue Smethurst meets the inspiring diamond queen of Kununurra.

Within minutes of landing in Kununurra, Frauke Bolten had made up her mind – by sunset she’d be on a plane back home to Germany. It was 1981 and Kununurra was a dusty frontier town, perishingly hot with little more than salty scrub bush as far as the eye could see. The rugged Australian outback was a world away from the rolling green hills of her European home, but with rich soil and endless sunshine, her husband Friedrich thought it was the perfect place to build a dream farm for his wife and their three children.

As their plane bounced along Kununurra’s red dirt airstrip, Frauke didn’t quite share his vision. “It was so remote and so isolated,” she recalls, “I honestly thought no intelligent soul could live here.”

The nightmare continued when they discovered that their “oasis” farmland was in fact hundreds of hectares of concrete-hard earth, covered in backbreaking weeds. Friedrich worked around the clock for weeks ploughing and reploughing their fields just so they could plant something.

“We sowed mung beans first,” says Frauke. “Friedrich would walk over the paddock at 6 am checking if they’d germinated. It was so hot that by the time he got back to the car, half an hour later, he had blisters all over his feet.”

Despite the punishing conditions and debilitating homesickness, the Boltens would not be beaten. Frauke adapted to the searing heat and harsh climate and learnt to live with the crocodiles that called her Ord River backyard home.

Then, just three years after they arrived, Friedrich took his own life, leaving her with a debt-ridden farm and by then, four young children to feed. It would have been easy for Frauke to pack her bags and head back home, but the Kimberley had begun to weave its magic.