 |
| Greetings from Kakadu & Arnhem Land NT |
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Post 22 - Greetings From Northern Territory's (NT) Top End - Part 2 : Kakadu & Arnhem Land - Journal
Greetings from Kakadu and Arnhem Land in NT’s Top End!! We have loved Kakadu so much that we extended our stay! Overall we were here for 6 nights which means we have absolutely broken the statistics for how long people usually stay here! Of the 220,000 that visit Kakadu each year, the average length of stay for everybody is just 1.5 days! Staggeringly though, more than half of this number don’t even stay overnight - they are just on a day trip out of Darwin! For us that beggars belief - for how on earth can you really start to FEEL all of what Kakadu is, is if you are only on a day trip??! Even in our 6 days here we didn’t get to see it all - but then we had made a conscious decision about that. Our aim in visiting the Top End was never to “see it all” and so our agenda has definitely been to try and avoid the crowds as much as possible and to have as much of a wildlife and cultural experience as we could. This has meant avoiding some of the touristy gorges and swimming holes not only in southern Kakadu but also in the much touted Litchfield Park near Darwin, and Katherine Gorge further south of Darwin. Aside from wanting to avoid all the tourists though, our decision was also due to the fact we were feeling a bit “gorge-d” and “rockpool-ed” out. We also knew that, it being the Dry season, all the numerous waterfalls that the whole Top End is famous for, would not be running anyway. So, as well as continuing to explore and experience northern/central Kakadu, we were also thrilled to visit some of the Mary River region west of Kakadu, and some of the amazing western Arnhem Land over to its east. Mary River region is similar to Kakadu, with all its wetlands and billabongs – it’s just not as populated with tourists. As for Arnhem Land, well, that takes up the entire eastern half of the Top End and is about the size of Portugal! Like Kakadu, Arnhem Land is a place of breathtaking beauty and prehistoric landscapes, these being untouched for over 40,000 years. In many ways we found it to be much more beautiful – which is saying something as we found Kakadu to be stunning! Arnhem Land is aboriginal land where a fascinating mixture of traditional and living culture exists today amongst its 12000 aboriginal inhabitants. Like Kakadu, the aboriginal rock art forms some of the richest sources of it in the whole of Australia and the arts and crafts for sale amongst the most authentic and quality you can buy anywhere. Unlike Kakadu though, you can’t just simply visit here. The whole country is something of a “forbidden land” to the “white fella” and permits are required to travel anywhere inside of its border. (We got our permit via visiting with an aboriginal-owned and-operated day tour but we are most definitely planning to save up and do a much longer visit with guides again at another date. This will enable us to visit exclusive areas not permissible with just an individual permit to travel. Even in one day though, due to the excellent nature of that tour, we were really able to come away with a very good feel for Arnhem Land, and to appreciate some of what it is to be an aboriginal there.) All in all then and as you can imagine, we have had a blast once again in true Flash and Caz stylie and unique cultural and wildlife experiences have continued to abound, providing us with memories to last us a lifetime. The cultural experiences here have been a heady mix of fascinating, and at different times challenging, confronting, humbling and very thought provoking. Overall, we are thrilled to say this entire area of the Top End more than exceeded our expectations, being for us the complete jewels in the crown in terms of NT as a whole. We hope once again that through our stories and photographs, you will be able to understand why we fell in love with the region!
Animal Tracks Safari – a day in the life of two hunter-gatherers
“Hunting is a part of our lives. In Balanda* society instead of hunting you go shopping. We hunt for wildlife, our food, to keep the tradition going. Hunting is used as a calendar – fish time, file snakes time, lots of fruit coming up like yams, mussels. It’s a good feeling to go out and hunt because when you are out there and you get something, after you have eaten it you feel so happy that you worked for it. Hunting is hard work.”
Aboriginal Clan member – name not permitted (*Balanda means white man)
Well, what a rather unique and authentic experience this one was to add to the bag! Travelling in an open-sided safari vehicle, we once again avoided the crowds and joined a few other people on the only day tour that went to an exclusive-access and wildlife-rich 170km square area of land, right in the heart of Kakadu National Park. The day was to be about searching for wildlife and discovering things to do with aboriginal bush life - including bush foods, bush medicine, and fibres used for arts and crafts. We were lucky enough to be joined by two female aboriginal bush guides, Doreen and Sandra, both born in Kakadu and both not that used to being with the “white fella”. The day began by making our way to the Buffalo Farm “homestead”. (This farm was set up over 20 years ago, at a time when all the wild buffalo were culled in the park – the idea was for the farm to provide a local source of bushmeat for the aboriginal communities around Kakadu. It is able to still exist as a result of the sale of our tour tickets). En-route to the “homestead” we were able to spot some of these mighty black beasts, albeit from a distance – but judging by their size and their horns, the distance thing was a very good thing indeed! In the billabongs they were not always easy to spot in and of themselves but their giveaway were often the small white cattle-egret that perched on their backs or heads, a rather strange dual relationship to see!
The “homestead” was typical of other aboriginal stations that we have seen – dust everywhere, junk and debris piled all around the yard and buildings that looked like they fell into disrepair a lifetime ago. We were here to pick up the aboriginal ladies, to get a look at Kenny (a very ferocious 3.5m croc that had to be caught and penned up here in case it did any more killing!) and to grab a quick pose on a real-deal old “bull-dozer” – a mustering vehicle used to drive into wild bulls and buffalo in order to knock them down so that their legs can be tied and they can be caught for branding or loading onto a truck to be transported. The bull-dozer was a particular highlight for me as I have been itching to go bull-dozing for a while now. It didn’t matter that the vehicle was stationary as just sitting in its clapped out seats more than gave me a feel for just how nerve-wrecking it would have been, to have been sat in one of these with a wild horned-buffalo or bull directly in front of you as you push down on the accelerator and drive right into it! (by the way, it doesn’t hurt them, as their weight is the same weight as the car – it just stuns them off balance).
The ladies came on board in much the same fashion as they were to be with us all day – very quietly and with averted eyes. It was interesting how I felt we almost needed to establish eye contact as a way of trying to gain rapport with them but that in fact this was not the aboriginal way at all. As a “white fella” we have no “skin name” (e.g. “brother”, “uncle”, “aunt”) and without that, an aboriginal does not know how they should relate to us, for there are different rules on how to interact depending on your relationship to the other person’s skin name. Our white tour guide for example, has been given the name of “younger brother” and that is the only way that these women could then come on the bus with him. With that skin name in place, Doreen for example, knows that she can boss him around if she wants to as she has the name “older sister”. And with that skin name, our white tour guide knows what the rules are for how he has to interact with Doreen. If he wants to look at her, he cannot do that full on frontal but must stand a bit to the side and look at her from over his shoulder. It was one of many fascinating differences we were to experience between our cultures that day.
Our safari took us past billabongs, open plains and savannah woodlands that contained all sorts of trees and bushes used by the ladies for various things. It was intriguing to watch them, sitting as they were at the front of the bus looking out of the windows with a very keen and trained eye – spotting for anything that looked to be good tucker. They were literally “going to the supermarket” in a way that we have completely lost touch with! What they didn’t know about bushtucker and bush medicines wasn’t worth knowing. Doreen alone, has been walking the bush scouring for tucker for over 40 years now and, this, together with the fact that the first white fella she saw was just 30 years ago, made us feel quite humbled in their presence.
One stop at a particular apple tree literally proved “fruitless” as this “supermarket shelf” had literally “sold out” - other aboriginals had already been by before us to collect! As there were no more apples lying on the ground we had to move on – because as every aborigine will know, the ripest ones are the ones that have fallen and you don’t pick anything else off the tree. In this way the harvesting is sustainable and still leaves the unripened apples for others to collect in due course. Again it was another eye-opener for us to see how our own mass consumerism and lack of harmony with nature and each other, plays out from very different rules. Other stops proved equally intriguing. There was the one where we got to eat green tree ants, skillfully collected from the tree by Sandra and squashed between leaves to kill them – I say “skillfully” because they were climbing all up her hands and arms and trying to bite her! They were surprisingly sweet-tasting though I certainly didn’t feel the need to get addicted to them! Another stop had us searching for sugarbag – a wild and very sweet honey made by the small black native bees here. Doreen and Sandra were able to take us right up to the nest, located inside an open tree branch. Hilariously, all that was there to see was the honeycomb and all the bees, since both ladies had been by only yesterday, coming “shopping” to scrape out all the delicious honey for themselves! Even something as simple as sugarbag became for us a window into the complex world of aboriginal groups and laws. It was really interesting therefore to learn that the two main groups that all aboriginals are split into has very different rules about where it may “shop” for sugarbag – one group can come to the open tree branches like Doreen and Sandra and the other must only collect it from the base of termite nests and trees! It was a surreal thought to imagine this rule transposed onto “white fella” living – imagine a group of us only permitted by law to shop at Coles and a group solely at Woolworths! Another stop had us all bundling out of our safari vehicle onto a terrain of hard, cracked mud replete with big holes where vicious wild pigs had previously been turning up the soil, digging for the water chestnuts we were also about to dig for! I reckon it was harder work for us than it was for the pigs! Everyone was given a very heavy hammer and had to set to, bashing up the hard lumps of caked earth – the Holy Grail being a red water chestnut about the size of a pea located anywhere in amongst any one of those mud cakes. It must have taken us about 15 minutes to collect about 10 of them between us – which was pitiful when you consider our arms were aching and yet Sandra and Doreen will do this for a couple of hours or more to get what they need for their meal! Again, another huge eye-opener into the differences between our cultures!
Boarding the bus once again, we made our way on to our camp for the early evening, stopping en-route to watch Sandra and Doreen collecting the pandanus leaves used for their basketwork and to collect some pungent leaves that would add flavour to our food that night. Even though up until now we had experienced the most amazing afternoon, nothing was quite to prepare us for the sheer stunning location of our dinner camp – the amazing Gindjala wetland (Goose Camp). From late June-September you can witness a spectacular gathering of wetland birds and in particular, thousands of magpie geese. Kakadu is the main stronghold for magpie geese in Australia and indeed this gathering of birds in and of itself formed one of the largest bird gatherings in Australia as a whole. As we arrived at Goose Camp we could honestly say that we have never seen so many birds in one spot! THIS was the Kakadu we had imagined and seen on TV and we were so thrilled to be there! The sights and sounds of this massive gathering were absolutely unbelievable, magical and completely unforgettable. As far as the eye could see were birds on the water and birds flying over the water and the volume of honking was insane! As I stood still, completely marveling at the spectacle of Nature before me, I could absolutely feel the pulse and throb of the mob pulsing and throbbing right through my core and it felt like I was completely connected to it all! It was hard to tear myself away but I wanted to help out with getting dinner ready, so it was all hands on deck to offload the firewood and make the fire. While we and others were doing that, our ladies were busy digging out a ground oven (a hole in the ground) where we would cook our food for the night.
With the fire built and oven dug, Gordon and I put our hands up with a couple of others to get involved with the plucking and preparing of the magpie geese, which had been shot just the day before in readiness for our feast. What an experience that was! I haven’t plucked anything before and I have to say it’s one thing to handle a frozen packaged chicken out of the freezer in Coles – and another entirely to have to handle a frozen big bird with his neck, head, feet and feathers all still intact and just the vaguest or aromas! Urggggh! It was hard work ripping the feathers from its belly and not so nice having to handle the bird’s feet as you did so. It was even worse to be plucking the feathers of an initially fairly frozen bird only to find as you went on, that this bird’s body was softening as it “defrosted”! What feathers weren’t up my nose were littering the ground like confetti! By now Sandra and Doreen were feeling a tad more relaxed with us all and were having quite a giggle at how clumsy our plucks were and how long it was taking us versus them. I was glad that albeit through our rather dismal plucking efforts we were nevertheless connecting with these women in some way. Watching them both take the geese onto the fire to burn off the remaining soft down, then bring them back to their places so they could cut them up for cooking, was quite something. Finally, magpie geese, buffalo meat and a couple of big, fresh barramundi were all placed down in the camp oven, with the pungent leaves placed on them, stones put on top of that, followed by big sheets of paperbark placed over the whole (like a fully fitting lid) and dirt shoveled on top of the bark in order to prevent any air getting in.
By now the sun was beginning its setting and the honking geese had turned up the decibels rather incredibly! At one point something disturbed them and you have never seen so many birds leap out of the water and flap into flight – it was the most magnificent thing to see and hear! Also magnificent though, was just sitting there and, with the setting sun as a backdrop, watching numerous whistling kites circling and swooping down in front of us, to pick on the discarded raw goose meat and bones. Soon, fresh damper was brought up from the coals and we ate it before dinner, smeared with butter and drizzled with golden syrup – it was the best appetizer we think we have ever had! Some of us watched how Sandra made bush string from the fibres of the pandanus and how Doreen made a bush bracelet from those same leaves – I had a go but I was all fingers and thumbs and lacked the millennia of “bracelet-making-from-pandanus” expertise in my “white fella” DNA! Dinner was then served and we tucked in to more damper with wonderfully cooked barramundi, and chunks of tender goose and juicy buffalo meat. And, as the darkness began to set in, Gordon and I just had to duck out of clearing up duties and simply stand there arm in arm, looking out at the fading billabong scene and the expansive Kakadu starry sky.
As we finally drove out of Goose Camp the headlights from our bus lit up a hungry dingo which had moved in for our scraps and I was reminded of the wonderful symbiotic nature that living in this way allows. On the way home, as a red moon slowly rose, Sandra plucked up the courage to do her first ever speaking on a tour or in a microphone and it was to tell us all the names of her family. Shy and quietly spoken we all strained earnestly to hear her tiny words. It took her about 5 minutes to name them all! The vast list of members and how they all inter-relate, was a fascinating insight into the complex nature of aboriginal tribes and clans. It was indeed a fitting end to what had been an amazing and unforgettable journey of experiential discovery into aboriginal ways, culture and life!
Before this blog entry regarding our safari day can receive its final “full stop” however, there just remains for me to include below a poem, written by bush-poet Gordon and inspired by one very annoying woman on this trip – annoying because of her lack of photography etiquette, especially around aboriginals! We hope you enjoy!
The First Shot
The Bum waddles forth – gunna beat that lot
Arms thrust out to get the first shot
To be the first one there – that’s the game
Got the prey in sight – ready, steady, aim
Lens poked anywhere without a single thought
No bloody clue about permission sought
Not a single thought that they may intrude
Bloody camera hog, just plain bloody rude.
Western Arnhem Land – tasting the fruits of a “forbidden country”
Today, too many Balanda*. Some alright maybe, whitepella, whitepella, more and more, pushing blackfella out, maybe push him on the rock. It was blackfella country before. You cannot push him out with money, or bulldozer. This is Bininj** country. We have to stay here forever
Worgol Clan (* means white man/whitepella ; **means aboriginal)
As we reach the first lookout of our climb up Injalak Hill, the absolutely breathtaking vista of western Arnhem Land spreads out before us, quite different to anything we have seen in Kakadu. Dominating the skyline are two large sandstone monoliths. One of these is the hill that we are forbidden to photograph today. The reason for this is that there is an important and sacred initiation ceremony taking place there – “secret young-man’s business”. Of course, now we are here, we comply with this earlier request out of respect. In any case, no-one is interested in testing any bad karma that may come their way for flouting sacred business! We have only been stood here seconds - before Gary, our aboriginal guide for the day, sits himself down ahead of us all on the huge ledge of rock that looks as if it is precariously perched off all the others around. For a good few minutes he has his back to us and is silent, jutting out into the ancient landscape that he is immediately at one with. There is something about the silence and about the way that he sits, that humbles us and makes us all feel like we shouldn’t move or talk either. He is commanding the most amazing presence and the hairs on my arm are tingling with his energy. And then he speaks. His voice is so quiet and we have to strain in order to understand the pigeon Aboriginal-English that he uses. He talks about the white fella and how he came barging in on the black fella, not wanting to listen to what the black fella knew or had to say. About the white fella stealing the land, stealing a generation, wanting to dominate and to conquer, to impose white fella values and strip the black fella of his. There is no malice or attack in his voice - just a simple statement of the wrongs we have done. It is a powerful moment and I am humbled further.
I look back out across the landscape, to the small aboriginal township of Gunbalanya (Oenpelli) that lies close to the border of Kakadu and the mighty East Alligator River. About 12,000 aboriginal people live in this town and its outstations - including skilled traditional painters, bark painters, basket weavers, and screen printers. They are surrounded by the vast floodplain and permanent billabong full of wildlife that I am gazing upon now. Most of these aboriginals combine traditional practices with modern ones – this means that they might go out for a hunt but be back to watch the 6pm news! What I am looking out onto is an entire area not openly available to the white fella. You need a permit to come here at all, unless like us, you are on an authentic, cultural tour owned and run by the Traditional Owners. It really is like a mystical “forbidden” land that has been little disturbed for over 40,000 years.
All of a sudden Gary gets up and says we have to leave this lookout now. He tells me as we make to go, that he has just seen a sign coming from across the sacred hill forbidden to our cameras – a mirror being reflected off the sun to alert him to move us on. It is incredible to think that while we were all there looking out at the scene unawares, that this exchange was taking place between him and other aborigines. I don’t know it yet but it’s just one of the episodes today where, in the midst of another culture, I am in the “not knowing”. We continue on with our climb up Injalak.
Injalak is famous for some of the best rock art examples in Western Arnhem Land and maybe even in Australia. Being on the tour we get to visit and experience sites such as this one that are usually off limits to others. In just a few minutes of walking we arrive at a large rock shelter with a big overhanging “ceiling”. On that ceiling is rock art even more amazing than what I have been seeing at Kakadu. Unlike Kakadu though, I am allowed to get up close to the paintings by lying down on my back on the cool, raised, stone floor and gazing up at the gallery of art laid out for me, while Gary starts to explain some if what we are seeing. I am compelled to be still within myself as I feel the energy of this place and, as I rest here, different layers of paintings from over the centuries start to emerge from out of the stone.
We continue clambering up, across and over the rocks, narrow chasms and shelters of Injalak Hill. There is a coolness bouncing off the sheltered stone that is a welcome reprieve from the hot sun. As we stoop down, squeeze through and generally rock hop I know I am walking and treading paths that aborigines have used here for hundreds of thousands of years before I even existed. Here, walls keep in secrets that rock art does not reveal and for me, the energy of ancestors is all around - in the breeze that cuts through a chasm, in the paintings, in a burial cave, or on a dimpled rock once used for grinding seeds or ochre for painting. At one point it is amazing to actually see a shelter that up until about ten years ago, Gary and his own family had been using in the Wet season for sleeping, cooking, and teaching. As I stand there and look at it, I am struck by how sad it is that Aboriginals don’t paint on actual rocks anymore, now that they rarely live in rock shelters like these now. That, whether it’s a good thing or bad thing, after more than 20 or 30,000 years of rock shelter living, it’s been the contact with the white fella that has resulted in rock art falling by the wayside.
Gary leads us on, stopping now and again to explain rock art. He smells of sweat and yet it’s a good smell, almost earthy. He speaks in a soft voice most of the time, using words sparingly. I have noticed this before with aboriginals and I think they are just more comfortable than us, with saying less. Sometimes there is humour and enthusiastic encouragement – “Did you make the photo? Please, make the photo!” Even though I have taken enough photos, I don’t wish to offend so I duly click the camera at paintings so high up on a ceiling or rock face, that I am more than inclined to believe Gary’s adamant story that they were painted by the first spirit beings before the creation of man. After all, how on earth could any human have got up that high to do it?!
It is striking to me how Gary knows his way around intimately and yet to me it all appears as a maze! I watch him as he walks ahead of us, nimble and sure footed, a well-worn plastic drink bottle hanging off the back of his head, secured at his forehead by some bush string. He is gently singing something to himself and it sounds like all the songs of all his ancestors before him. I feel the singing has some significance, that it means something - but I cannot understand the words and again I am forced to “not know”.
After about two fantastic hours on Injalak Hill, we climb back down, say goodbye to Gary and make our way across to the Injalak Arts and Crafts Centre. Here displays of some obviously top quality, beautiful and authentic aboriginal artworks are available for us to buy and it kills me that I have no house to put anything in – I love everything I am seeing! Still, I buy a necklace that doesn’t take up any space in our already crammed 4WD and feel good that at least the sale of this goes towards directly benefiting the community. (unbeknownst to me, Gordon has bought a beautiful piece of sculpture for my birthday, and instructed them to post to his mum for safekeeping in Sydney. It is a piece I was particulary in love with - a carved and painted wooden Magpie Goose! Stunning!)
Lunch for the day takes place on an exclusive boat cruise on Inkiju billabong, a billabong more beautiful than anything else I have seen in Kakadu - even Yellow Waters! It is a completely idyllic scene, serene and lush, the waters liberally covered with pale lilies and lined on one side with rocky, low escarpments. As we eat our lunch watching the crocs lazily half submerged and lurking, an interesting and thought provoking discussion starts up between us and our guide, about the destructive things happening in aboriginal communities both here in Arnhem Land today and elsewhere – about the problems with alcohol and easy welfare money that continue to contribute to the potential future demise of these people and their culture – and in short, how the white fella has kind of stuffed it all up. It is a sad situation with no clear-cut solution and we talk it through some more later on as we access Hawk Dreaming back in Kakadu, another restricted and exclusive area with more wonderful views.
As we get dropped off back at our car, there is much food for thought from yet another unforgettable experience in the NT and we have been touched by it all forever.
(Note: For any of you interested in reading a current book on the plight of aboriginals, I can thoroughly recommend “Balanda – My year in Arnhem Land” by Mary Ellen Jordan. It is described as “a quietly gripping, very personal take on Australia’s deepest dilemma” and is one of several books on the subject that I have devoured since being in the NT. For anyone with more of a mind for historical perspectives,, then also the brilliant book “An Intruders Guide to East Arnhem Land” by Andrew McMillan, comes with the thumbs up from me!)
Animal Tracks Safari – a day in the life of two hunter-gatherers
“Hunting is a part of our lives. In Balanda* society instead of hunting you go shopping. We hunt for wildlife, our food, to keep the tradition going. Hunting is used as a calendar – fish time, file snakes time, lots of fruit coming up like yams, mussels. It’s a good feeling to go out and hunt because when you are out there and you get something, after you have eaten it you feel so happy that you worked for it. Hunting is hard work.”
Aboriginal Clan member – name not permitted (*Balanda means white man)
Well, what a rather unique and authentic experience this one was to add to the bag! Travelling in an open-sided safari vehicle, we once again avoided the crowds and joined a few other people on the only day tour that went to an exclusive-access and wildlife-rich 170km square area of land, right in the heart of Kakadu National Park. The day was to be about searching for wildlife and discovering things to do with aboriginal bush life - including bush foods, bush medicine, and fibres used for arts and crafts. We were lucky enough to be joined by two female aboriginal bush guides, Doreen and Sandra, both born in Kakadu and both not that used to being with the “white fella”. The day began by making our way to the Buffalo Farm “homestead”. (This farm was set up over 20 years ago, at a time when all the wild buffalo were culled in the park – the idea was for the farm to provide a local source of bushmeat for the aboriginal communities around Kakadu. It is able to still exist as a result of the sale of our tour tickets). En-route to the “homestead” we were able to spot some of these mighty black beasts, albeit from a distance – but judging by their size and their horns, the distance thing was a very good thing indeed! In the billabongs they were not always easy to spot in and of themselves but their giveaway were often the small white cattle-egret that perched on their backs or heads, a rather strange dual relationship to see!
The “homestead” was typical of other aboriginal stations that we have seen – dust everywhere, junk and debris piled all around the yard and buildings that looked like they fell into disrepair a lifetime ago. We were here to pick up the aboriginal ladies, to get a look at Kenny (a very ferocious 3.5m croc that had to be caught and penned up here in case it did any more killing!) and to grab a quick pose on a real-deal old “bull-dozer” – a mustering vehicle used to drive into wild bulls and buffalo in order to knock them down so that their legs can be tied and they can be caught for branding or loading onto a truck to be transported. The bull-dozer was a particular highlight for me as I have been itching to go bull-dozing for a while now. It didn’t matter that the vehicle was stationary as just sitting in its clapped out seats more than gave me a feel for just how nerve-wrecking it would have been, to have been sat in one of these with a wild horned-buffalo or bull directly in front of you as you push down on the accelerator and drive right into it! (by the way, it doesn’t hurt them, as their weight is the same weight as the car – it just stuns them off balance).
The ladies came on board in much the same fashion as they were to be with us all day – very quietly and with averted eyes. It was interesting how I felt we almost needed to establish eye contact as a way of trying to gain rapport with them but that in fact this was not the aboriginal way at all. As a “white fella” we have no “skin name” (e.g. “brother”, “uncle”, “aunt”) and without that, an aboriginal does not know how they should relate to us, for there are different rules on how to interact depending on your relationship to the other person’s skin name. Our white tour guide for example, has been given the name of “younger brother” and that is the only way that these women could then come on the bus with him. With that skin name in place, Doreen for example, knows that she can boss him around if she wants to as she has the name “older sister”. And with that skin name, our white tour guide knows what the rules are for how he has to interact with Doreen. If he wants to look at her, he cannot do that full on frontal but must stand a bit to the side and look at her from over his shoulder. It was one of many fascinating differences we were to experience between our cultures that day.
Our safari took us past billabongs, open plains and savannah woodlands that contained all sorts of trees and bushes used by the ladies for various things. It was intriguing to watch them, sitting as they were at the front of the bus looking out of the windows with a very keen and trained eye – spotting for anything that looked to be good tucker. They were literally “going to the supermarket” in a way that we have completely lost touch with! What they didn’t know about bushtucker and bush medicines wasn’t worth knowing. Doreen alone, has been walking the bush scouring for tucker for over 40 years now and, this, together with the fact that the first white fella she saw was just 30 years ago, made us feel quite humbled in their presence.
One stop at a particular apple tree literally proved “fruitless” as this “supermarket shelf” had literally “sold out” - other aboriginals had already been by before us to collect! As there were no more apples lying on the ground we had to move on – because as every aborigine will know, the ripest ones are the ones that have fallen and you don’t pick anything else off the tree. In this way the harvesting is sustainable and still leaves the unripened apples for others to collect in due course. Again it was another eye-opener for us to see how our own mass consumerism and lack of harmony with nature and each other, plays out from very different rules. Other stops proved equally intriguing. There was the one where we got to eat green tree ants, skillfully collected from the tree by Sandra and squashed between leaves to kill them – I say “skillfully” because they were climbing all up her hands and arms and trying to bite her! They were surprisingly sweet-tasting though I certainly didn’t feel the need to get addicted to them! Another stop had us searching for sugarbag – a wild and very sweet honey made by the small black native bees here. Doreen and Sandra were able to take us right up to the nest, located inside an open tree branch. Hilariously, all that was there to see was the honeycomb and all the bees, since both ladies had been by only yesterday, coming “shopping” to scrape out all the delicious honey for themselves! Even something as simple as sugarbag became for us a window into the complex world of aboriginal groups and laws. It was really interesting therefore to learn that the two main groups that all aboriginals are split into has very different rules about where it may “shop” for sugarbag – one group can come to the open tree branches like Doreen and Sandra and the other must only collect it from the base of termite nests and trees! It was a surreal thought to imagine this rule transposed onto “white fella” living – imagine a group of us only permitted by law to shop at Coles and a group solely at Woolworths! Another stop had us all bundling out of our safari vehicle onto a terrain of hard, cracked mud replete with big holes where vicious wild pigs had previously been turning up the soil, digging for the water chestnuts we were also about to dig for! I reckon it was harder work for us than it was for the pigs! Everyone was given a very heavy hammer and had to set to, bashing up the hard lumps of caked earth – the Holy Grail being a red water chestnut about the size of a pea located anywhere in amongst any one of those mud cakes. It must have taken us about 15 minutes to collect about 10 of them between us – which was pitiful when you consider our arms were aching and yet Sandra and Doreen will do this for a couple of hours or more to get what they need for their meal! Again, another huge eye-opener into the differences between our cultures!
Boarding the bus once again, we made our way on to our camp for the early evening, stopping en-route to watch Sandra and Doreen collecting the pandanus leaves used for their basketwork and to collect some pungent leaves that would add flavour to our food that night. Even though up until now we had experienced the most amazing afternoon, nothing was quite to prepare us for the sheer stunning location of our dinner camp – the amazing Gindjala wetland (Goose Camp). From late June-September you can witness a spectacular gathering of wetland birds and in particular, thousands of magpie geese. Kakadu is the main stronghold for magpie geese in Australia and indeed this gathering of birds in and of itself formed one of the largest bird gatherings in Australia as a whole. As we arrived at Goose Camp we could honestly say that we have never seen so many birds in one spot! THIS was the Kakadu we had imagined and seen on TV and we were so thrilled to be there! The sights and sounds of this massive gathering were absolutely unbelievable, magical and completely unforgettable. As far as the eye could see were birds on the water and birds flying over the water and the volume of honking was insane! As I stood still, completely marveling at the spectacle of Nature before me, I could absolutely feel the pulse and throb of the mob pulsing and throbbing right through my core and it felt like I was completely connected to it all! It was hard to tear myself away but I wanted to help out with getting dinner ready, so it was all hands on deck to offload the firewood and make the fire. While we and others were doing that, our ladies were busy digging out a ground oven (a hole in the ground) where we would cook our food for the night.
With the fire built and oven dug, Gordon and I put our hands up with a couple of others to get involved with the plucking and preparing of the magpie geese, which had been shot just the day before in readiness for our feast. What an experience that was! I haven’t plucked anything before and I have to say it’s one thing to handle a frozen packaged chicken out of the freezer in Coles – and another entirely to have to handle a frozen big bird with his neck, head, feet and feathers all still intact and just the vaguest or aromas! Urggggh! It was hard work ripping the feathers from its belly and not so nice having to handle the bird’s feet as you did so. It was even worse to be plucking the feathers of an initially fairly frozen bird only to find as you went on, that this bird’s body was softening as it “defrosted”! What feathers weren’t up my nose were littering the ground like confetti! By now Sandra and Doreen were feeling a tad more relaxed with us all and were having quite a giggle at how clumsy our plucks were and how long it was taking us versus them. I was glad that albeit through our rather dismal plucking efforts we were nevertheless connecting with these women in some way. Watching them both take the geese onto the fire to burn off the remaining soft down, then bring them back to their places so they could cut them up for cooking, was quite something. Finally, magpie geese, buffalo meat and a couple of big, fresh barramundi were all placed down in the camp oven, with the pungent leaves placed on them, stones put on top of that, followed by big sheets of paperbark placed over the whole (like a fully fitting lid) and dirt shoveled on top of the bark in order to prevent any air getting in.
By now the sun was beginning its setting and the honking geese had turned up the decibels rather incredibly! At one point something disturbed them and you have never seen so many birds leap out of the water and flap into flight – it was the most magnificent thing to see and hear! Also magnificent though, was just sitting there and, with the setting sun as a backdrop, watching numerous whistling kites circling and swooping down in front of us, to pick on the discarded raw goose meat and bones. Soon, fresh damper was brought up from the coals and we ate it before dinner, smeared with butter and drizzled with golden syrup – it was the best appetizer we think we have ever had! Some of us watched how Sandra made bush string from the fibres of the pandanus and how Doreen made a bush bracelet from those same leaves – I had a go but I was all fingers and thumbs and lacked the millennia of “bracelet-making-from-pandanus” expertise in my “white fella” DNA! Dinner was then served and we tucked in to more damper with wonderfully cooked barramundi, and chunks of tender goose and juicy buffalo meat. And, as the darkness began to set in, Gordon and I just had to duck out of clearing up duties and simply stand there arm in arm, looking out at the fading billabong scene and the expansive Kakadu starry sky.
As we finally drove out of Goose Camp the headlights from our bus lit up a hungry dingo which had moved in for our scraps and I was reminded of the wonderful symbiotic nature that living in this way allows. On the way home, as a red moon slowly rose, Sandra plucked up the courage to do her first ever speaking on a tour or in a microphone and it was to tell us all the names of her family. Shy and quietly spoken we all strained earnestly to hear her tiny words. It took her about 5 minutes to name them all! The vast list of members and how they all inter-relate, was a fascinating insight into the complex nature of aboriginal tribes and clans. It was indeed a fitting end to what had been an amazing and unforgettable journey of experiential discovery into aboriginal ways, culture and life!
Before this blog entry regarding our safari day can receive its final “full stop” however, there just remains for me to include below a poem, written by bush-poet Gordon and inspired by one very annoying woman on this trip – annoying because of her lack of photography etiquette, especially around aboriginals! We hope you enjoy!
The First Shot
The Bum waddles forth – gunna beat that lot
Arms thrust out to get the first shot
To be the first one there – that’s the game
Got the prey in sight – ready, steady, aim
Lens poked anywhere without a single thought
No bloody clue about permission sought
Not a single thought that they may intrude
Bloody camera hog, just plain bloody rude.
Western Arnhem Land – tasting the fruits of a “forbidden country”
Today, too many Balanda*. Some alright maybe, whitepella, whitepella, more and more, pushing blackfella out, maybe push him on the rock. It was blackfella country before. You cannot push him out with money, or bulldozer. This is Bininj** country. We have to stay here forever
Worgol Clan (* means white man/whitepella ; **means aboriginal)
As we reach the first lookout of our climb up Injalak Hill, the absolutely breathtaking vista of western Arnhem Land spreads out before us, quite different to anything we have seen in Kakadu. Dominating the skyline are two large sandstone monoliths. One of these is the hill that we are forbidden to photograph today. The reason for this is that there is an important and sacred initiation ceremony taking place there – “secret young-man’s business”. Of course, now we are here, we comply with this earlier request out of respect. In any case, no-one is interested in testing any bad karma that may come their way for flouting sacred business! We have only been stood here seconds - before Gary, our aboriginal guide for the day, sits himself down ahead of us all on the huge ledge of rock that looks as if it is precariously perched off all the others around. For a good few minutes he has his back to us and is silent, jutting out into the ancient landscape that he is immediately at one with. There is something about the silence and about the way that he sits, that humbles us and makes us all feel like we shouldn’t move or talk either. He is commanding the most amazing presence and the hairs on my arm are tingling with his energy. And then he speaks. His voice is so quiet and we have to strain in order to understand the pigeon Aboriginal-English that he uses. He talks about the white fella and how he came barging in on the black fella, not wanting to listen to what the black fella knew or had to say. About the white fella stealing the land, stealing a generation, wanting to dominate and to conquer, to impose white fella values and strip the black fella of his. There is no malice or attack in his voice - just a simple statement of the wrongs we have done. It is a powerful moment and I am humbled further.
I look back out across the landscape, to the small aboriginal township of Gunbalanya (Oenpelli) that lies close to the border of Kakadu and the mighty East Alligator River. About 12,000 aboriginal people live in this town and its outstations - including skilled traditional painters, bark painters, basket weavers, and screen printers. They are surrounded by the vast floodplain and permanent billabong full of wildlife that I am gazing upon now. Most of these aboriginals combine traditional practices with modern ones – this means that they might go out for a hunt but be back to watch the 6pm news! What I am looking out onto is an entire area not openly available to the white fella. You need a permit to come here at all, unless like us, you are on an authentic, cultural tour owned and run by the Traditional Owners. It really is like a mystical “forbidden” land that has been little disturbed for over 40,000 years.
All of a sudden Gary gets up and says we have to leave this lookout now. He tells me as we make to go, that he has just seen a sign coming from across the sacred hill forbidden to our cameras – a mirror being reflected off the sun to alert him to move us on. It is incredible to think that while we were all there looking out at the scene unawares, that this exchange was taking place between him and other aborigines. I don’t know it yet but it’s just one of the episodes today where, in the midst of another culture, I am in the “not knowing”. We continue on with our climb up Injalak.
Injalak is famous for some of the best rock art examples in Western Arnhem Land and maybe even in Australia. Being on the tour we get to visit and experience sites such as this one that are usually off limits to others. In just a few minutes of walking we arrive at a large rock shelter with a big overhanging “ceiling”. On that ceiling is rock art even more amazing than what I have been seeing at Kakadu. Unlike Kakadu though, I am allowed to get up close to the paintings by lying down on my back on the cool, raised, stone floor and gazing up at the gallery of art laid out for me, while Gary starts to explain some if what we are seeing. I am compelled to be still within myself as I feel the energy of this place and, as I rest here, different layers of paintings from over the centuries start to emerge from out of the stone.
We continue clambering up, across and over the rocks, narrow chasms and shelters of Injalak Hill. There is a coolness bouncing off the sheltered stone that is a welcome reprieve from the hot sun. As we stoop down, squeeze through and generally rock hop I know I am walking and treading paths that aborigines have used here for hundreds of thousands of years before I even existed. Here, walls keep in secrets that rock art does not reveal and for me, the energy of ancestors is all around - in the breeze that cuts through a chasm, in the paintings, in a burial cave, or on a dimpled rock once used for grinding seeds or ochre for painting. At one point it is amazing to actually see a shelter that up until about ten years ago, Gary and his own family had been using in the Wet season for sleeping, cooking, and teaching. As I stand there and look at it, I am struck by how sad it is that Aboriginals don’t paint on actual rocks anymore, now that they rarely live in rock shelters like these now. That, whether it’s a good thing or bad thing, after more than 20 or 30,000 years of rock shelter living, it’s been the contact with the white fella that has resulted in rock art falling by the wayside.
Gary leads us on, stopping now and again to explain rock art. He smells of sweat and yet it’s a good smell, almost earthy. He speaks in a soft voice most of the time, using words sparingly. I have noticed this before with aboriginals and I think they are just more comfortable than us, with saying less. Sometimes there is humour and enthusiastic encouragement – “Did you make the photo? Please, make the photo!” Even though I have taken enough photos, I don’t wish to offend so I duly click the camera at paintings so high up on a ceiling or rock face, that I am more than inclined to believe Gary’s adamant story that they were painted by the first spirit beings before the creation of man. After all, how on earth could any human have got up that high to do it?!
It is striking to me how Gary knows his way around intimately and yet to me it all appears as a maze! I watch him as he walks ahead of us, nimble and sure footed, a well-worn plastic drink bottle hanging off the back of his head, secured at his forehead by some bush string. He is gently singing something to himself and it sounds like all the songs of all his ancestors before him. I feel the singing has some significance, that it means something - but I cannot understand the words and again I am forced to “not know”.
After about two fantastic hours on Injalak Hill, we climb back down, say goodbye to Gary and make our way across to the Injalak Arts and Crafts Centre. Here displays of some obviously top quality, beautiful and authentic aboriginal artworks are available for us to buy and it kills me that I have no house to put anything in – I love everything I am seeing! Still, I buy a necklace that doesn’t take up any space in our already crammed 4WD and feel good that at least the sale of this goes towards directly benefiting the community. (unbeknownst to me, Gordon has bought a beautiful piece of sculpture for my birthday, and instructed them to post to his mum for safekeeping in Sydney. It is a piece I was particulary in love with - a carved and painted wooden Magpie Goose! Stunning!)
Lunch for the day takes place on an exclusive boat cruise on Inkiju billabong, a billabong more beautiful than anything else I have seen in Kakadu - even Yellow Waters! It is a completely idyllic scene, serene and lush, the waters liberally covered with pale lilies and lined on one side with rocky, low escarpments. As we eat our lunch watching the crocs lazily half submerged and lurking, an interesting and thought provoking discussion starts up between us and our guide, about the destructive things happening in aboriginal communities both here in Arnhem Land today and elsewhere – about the problems with alcohol and easy welfare money that continue to contribute to the potential future demise of these people and their culture – and in short, how the white fella has kind of stuffed it all up. It is a sad situation with no clear-cut solution and we talk it through some more later on as we access Hawk Dreaming back in Kakadu, another restricted and exclusive area with more wonderful views.
As we get dropped off back at our car, there is much food for thought from yet another unforgettable experience in the NT and we have been touched by it all forever.
(Note: For any of you interested in reading a current book on the plight of aboriginals, I can thoroughly recommend “Balanda – My year in Arnhem Land” by Mary Ellen Jordan. It is described as “a quietly gripping, very personal take on Australia’s deepest dilemma” and is one of several books on the subject that I have devoured since being in the NT. For anyone with more of a mind for historical perspectives,, then also the brilliant book “An Intruders Guide to East Arnhem Land” by Andrew McMillan, comes with the thumbs up from me!)
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Post 21 - Greetings From Northern Territory's (NT) Top End - Part 1 : Kakadu - Journal
Greetings from Kakadu in the Northern Territory (NT) – part 1 of a 2-part series! I cannot believe we have gone past blog post 20 – and look at where we are up to! Since selling and leaving our home over 7 months ago, we have driven 27,000km (15,000 miles) and have visited just 3 of Australia’s 7 states in that time, including Australia’s BIGGEST state, which was W.A – and we didn’t even see everything that there was to see! Whilst we are completely on schedule, it should give all you Poms back in the UK a sense of the vast size of this country that we are traversing! We have now returned to the NT, crossing over the border from W.A - this time to visit what they call the Top End of it, having visited the bottom half albeit briefly back in April. Our first port of call was its capital city, Darwin, where we lingered for 6 nights and then had to revisit on two separate occasions later in the itinerary (once to pick up our repaired freezer and once to get a doctor to see to my foot wound which got infected….on this occasion, traveling 4 hours to get to Darwin because where we were didn’t have a doctor that could see me for days!). No matter how many visits we had to Darwin though, we didn’t fall in love with it like we did Broome. For us, there wasn’t much to recommend it at all, and getting eaten alive by sandflies and mosquitos, as well as having to suffer the insane itching for days afterwards, didn’t do it any favours in the thumbs-up department. That said though, we did enjoy some stunning sunsets (the sun is so much bigger and closer here!) and a fabulous time at the infamous Mindl Night Markets, soaking up the atmosphere of great Asian food smells and tastes and some fantastic, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck didge playing. From Darwin it was on to Kakadu - where this blog shall be speaking to you from! We loved it so much here that we ended up extending our stay! For the Poms back in the UK who may not know about Kakadu, it is Australia’s largest National Park, World Heritage listed and where the movie “Crocodile Dundee” was filmed. It is Heritage listed because it happens to be on Aboriginal land and still has an active aboriginal culture. Kakadu is one of Australia’s richest sources of aboriginal rock art and there are reputed to be over 5000 sites covering the parks caves and sheltered outcrops, dating from 20,000 years ago to 10 years ago! Most of these are off limits but some are made available for visitors to view and many are still of spiritual significance to the remaining groups living in Kakadu. The park is also World Heritage listed because of its natural environment. In terms of wildlife, it has a few jazzy statistics – being home to over 1,000 plant species, 10,000 insect species, 25 species of frog, 120 types of reptiles, over 60 types of mammals (including crocs, snakes, frill-necked lizards and 5 out of the 7 turtles in the world), and one third of all Australian bats. Its wetlands are of international significance, with over 40 species of migratory birds arriving after traveling from as far as Russia, China and Japan and a third of all Australian birds living here! Perhaps already then, you can start to get an idea for the blast we have had here! So now we invite you to go and make a coffee if you haven’t already done so, put your feet up and come on a two-part sensational wildlife and cultural safari with us – while we regale you with stories and photos that surely will have you wanting to come here and try it all for yourselves!
Kakadu by Night – hunting for a pair of red eyes!
Just as the stars are starting to twinkle in the Kakadu night sky, I step gingerly off the bank of a billabong and onto a small 20 seater boat that’s been specially designed for our night’s activity. The boat is without a canopy so that we can marvel at the nighttime skies above us while we cruise. It wobbles with my weight and as I take my place right up the front of the vessel, it immediately occurs to me just how low to the water we really are and how small really this little boat actually is – that there actually isn’t much between me and any hungry croc we may encounter tonight!
I am about to embark on a night wildlife safari, cruising Djarradjin Billabong while spotlighting for all the wildlife that comes alive after dark. This is to include not only any number of the “day” birds roosting on the billabong, but “hopefully” also any of the 11 known crocs that inhabit this very 2km stretch of water, detected by their glowing red eyes in the dark! So it’s a sobering thought as we embark, to be told that the dominant croc here tonight (‘The Boss”), is a 5m saltie! I am still far from reassured when our guide insists “but he rarely surfaces when the boat is around”. Before I can reconsider though, the boat is pushed away from the bank and our guide Fred jumps onboard, getting the skipper to switch on the engine. It instantly whirrs into life so that I can feel its mild vibration coursing through me and, with the boat in darkness save for the natural light of the stars above us and the big spotlight that’s now switched on in Fred’s hand, we motor away from the bank and the safari begins!
By now there is a distinct coolness and chill to the air despite the corking hot day we have all suffered. It is a coolness that becomes much more noticeable once we were moving and it’s hard to even know whether I am actually cold or shivering with a bit of nerves and apprehension! Fred is up ahead of everyone, standing at the helm of the boat and leaning against the rail as he scans the waters, trees and banks for any signs of life. He is a local, born and bred aboriginal who also happens to be a Kakadu Park Ranger involved in the management of saltwater crocs, so I figure he ought to know what he is doing and that I ought to be safe with him. My elbow rests on the bars of my side of the boat and it’s close enough to the water to catch the brunt of cool spray that the boat creates as it slips its way forward. As I look up at all the stars so beautifully spread out above our canopy, it strikes me that I feel almost as close to them as I do to the water I’m nearly touching and, nerves or no nerves, it’s fantastic to seem so connected to it all in this way. There is a peacefulness but whilst it is quiet and in some ways serene, it doesn’t quite feel relaxing – given where we are and what we are here to do!
It’s not until the spotlight reveals it, that I see our first bend just up ahead and as we navigate the narrow way, I clock one of those white Styrofoam balls Fred had told us about back at camp. It was suspended from a tree and dangling tantalizingly low near the waters surface. From his talk earlier in the night, I now knew that they use these balls as a way to determine what sort of crocs and how many there are in this billabong. Crocs are by nature inquisitive and they bite anything they see in order to find out what it actually is! Small puncture holes, we were told, denote harmless freshwater crocs - but “you don’t want to see half the ball gone – ‘cos that denotes a salty!” We pass this ball in seconds and I have enough time to notice that it has BOTH kinds of holes! Immediately it feels like the scare-factor for the night has just shot through the roof! It’s not helped along, when the guide says “Ever seen that movie “Rogue”? – ‘bout a tour boat that kept getting attacked by a huge rogue salty? Well….THIS boat was the one they used for the movie – and that’s a fact! We charged ‘em big bucks for the use of it and that’s how we got our business up and running!” Suddenly I’m acutely aware of the fact that my elbow is hanging out the side gap of the boat and I pull it in like a shot and inch closer to Gordy, away from the side rails! But before any further uneasiness can set in we have our first wildlife sighting and, as if the Universe is trying to break us in gently for the night, it turns our to be the very harmless and beautiful orange and blue Azure Kingfisher, fast asleep on a small branch, its sharp bill tucked right in under its wing and pointing down past its feathers to its tail. I feel like I am intruding on its slumber with our bright light but I am so happy to have seen him. Next up are two huge White-Bellied Sea-Eagles high up in the trees – we stop for a moment to observe one of them twisting his head around a lot and stamping his foot in a bid to be rid of all the mozzies. It’s starting to become clear what an amazingly unique birding and wildlife experience this is going to be tonight!
We continue on, all the while scanning for the pair of red eyes that would denote….a croc! Almost immediately we are rewarded with a sighting alongside the boat and there’s just enough time to see the eyes and face of one before it sinks way too fast down below the surface – lost to all the myriad of cameras pointed at it, with fingers ready to click! It’s like something out of an arcade game and in a way quite surreal. What follows though, takes that “surreal” a step further. The boat engine is deliberately cut, the spotlight turned off and we are left to just sit on the water in relative darkness – letting a few moments pass in the hope that during this time the croc will resurface. It is quite eerie just sitting and waiting like this! I hear some splash to my right and go “whattheshitwazthat???!!!”, jumping to the conclusion it’s the croc when in actual fact its just a barramundi jumping…and my heart can quieten down again. In my head though, I can hear the theme music to Jaws and I wonder why no-one has ever created a piece of music with the same intensity for a croc! After a while, Fred switches the spotlight back on and scans the water, not knowing where the croc will have actually resurfaced, if it has at all. It is a pattern that is to be repeated a few times during the rest of the night but on this occasion the croc is more patient (or less interested) than we are, and we set off again on our travels.
Though there is the unease always present, it’s still fantastic to be traveling along in the dark in a small boat like this, watching the spotlight illuminate trees and reveal their tortuous root systems, exposed by the previous Wet season floods – roots that slide down into the water to meet whatever is below with less trepidation than I would have! There are some beautiful reflections on the water too, not to mention sightings of groups of Whistling Plumed Ducks and Radjah Shellducks under the trees and a few Rufous Night Herons, hunched over like old men in overcoats, trying to hide from us but failing miserably. Now and again a “fishy” smell alerts us to the fact that a croc is nearby and I realize just how creepy a smell can actually be! Indeed, that smell leads us to our second croc for the night - a 7ft female with her line of ridges and top half of her head sticking out of the water, eyes shining in a rather sinister fashion courtesy of the spotlight. She moves around a bit which is fantastic to watch but I am on the wrong side of the boat to take a good photo and maybe for the first time in history, I don’t mind! We watch her for a while until she submerges and we move on again.
All of a sudden we turn a corner and right by my side of the boat there is a huge flapping of wings that makes me jump out of my skin. Fred swings the spotlight round just in time illuminate a brilliant white Great-Billed Heron – startled by us and flying straight out of the bush it was in. Its long legs swerve in front of the boat as it swoops off ahead of us, to be absorbed once again by the same darkness from whence it had come….and my heart quietens down once more! By now we are almost at the end of the full stretch of billabong and its time to turn around to make our way back. En-route we spot a small short-necked turtle, barramundi, saratoga, catfish and huge school of mullet – all happily swimming around in the shallows for our viewing pleasure. Further on, high up in a tree, the spotlight picks up a pair of eyes belonging to the small Owlet Nightjar and I never knew you could get an owl so small! It amazes me again when only a minute later, Fred sees a tiny Bar-Breasted Honeyeater – as with all the wildlife tonight, we get up as close as possible and this bird is so small that it defies belief that he has been spotted at all! I am in awe at the perfection of its intricate markings and marvel again at the wonder of Nature.
Before the cruise has time to come to an end, we smell “fish” again and, knowing it to be a saltie somewhere near to us, we cut the engine, flick off the spotlight and wait once more. As we do so, we get to watch the most beautifully bright, white, full moon emerge from behind a stand of trees to our right, casting its own brand of spotlight across the waters we are sitting on. Of all the sensational full-moon experiences we have had so far on this whole trip, watching this one whilst on a tiny boat in a croc-filled billabong and waiting for one of the “residents” to emerge, surely has to be the winner for the most surreal moon-rise we have had! It is both magical and a bit creepy and in the end it almost doesn’t matter that our croc hasn’t surfaced, or that we didn’t get to see one out of the water at any time. For as anyone who has ever been on a nighttime wildlife safari like this will know – it’s the hanging around that’s more thrilling than the spotting!
Ode to Yellow Waters
There’s a bright and milky full moon in the pinky pre-dawn sky
As we set off on our boat cruise with excitement running high
The early morning mist rolls off the waterway
Almost mystical and ancient, it wakes to a brand new day.
This then is our journey through the wetlands of Kakadu
A sensational experience, from me passed on to you
So come and join me while on this boat I get to see
All the amazing wildlife action which my camera snaps for me.
Say hello to the Jacanas with their orange comb-like crest
who seem to be the ones who walk on water best
And with the longest toes for a bird that is their size
to achieve this feat on lily pads is surely no surprise
Respect to Mr. Crocodile as you lay there near the bank
With your body in the water and your ridges holding rank!
You lurk there all lazily waiting with your tail quite nicely poised
To swish those fish right in your mouth with the minimum of noise!
G’day to the White-bellied sea eagle, you wonderful big bird of prey
Tell me what is it you will hunt from our great floodplains today?
Way up there in your tree you’re a sight to behold
As you sit there just like royalty all majestic and bold.
Are you watching the Kites, whistling piercingly above us
Tell me what have they’ve seen that requires such a rumpus?
Perhaps the two crocs in the water ahead
Fighting a battle - if need be till one’s dead?
And all to assert a domain just for one
As the Yellow Water Billabong prepares to salute the orange sun!
Wake up Mr Darterbird, time to unfurl your snakelike neck!
Take your spear of a bill and dive for the fish
swimming right underneath our good deck!
At the waters edge stand White Egrets, a long time already there
If you dally much longer there’ll be surely none left, for any of them to spare!
And greetings to you, my dear Jabiru, with your legs all long and all red
You’re a fish hunter that with stately stride these shallow waters do tread
But a strange bird for sure, with your kneecaps backwards bent
And a powerful black beak, that can…a crocs skin dent!
Rise and shine all you beautiful kingfishers, show us your azures and your teals
Give our cameras the run as you flit in the sun, in a bid to get all of your meals!
And for anyone else who still lies there in bed
let these hoards of Whistling Plumed Ducks be your alarm ringing
For the sun has now risen and its time to get up
And join in with all of their singing!
(By Caroline Cumming, 2009)
Rock Art and Sunsets – feeling the spirit of Kakadu
"The most important thing in the Aboriginal way of life is culture. When I look at a lot of other Aboriginal people who don’t have culture, I feel sad for them because without culture you don’t really feel that you have a place of belonging. We have our culture. Our land is our life"
Mandy Muir
“That painting there, inside the cave, it got to be looked after because my father, granddad, all look after. Now me, I got to do the same. If that painting get rubbed off, there might be big trouble. That important story”
Bill Neidjie – Bunitj clan
It has seemed to us that in Kakadu and Arnhem Land, geology and the aboriginal art/culture are all inextricably linked and it’s been quite a mind-blowing experience for us to start to grasp the meaning of this! Both lands provide stunning vistas of breathtakingly prehistoric landscapes with some of the oldest exposed rocks in the world. At Ubirr in Kakadu, for example, we were literally sitting on rock that was 1.7 billion years old - that’s about three times older than the first signs of single-celled life on earth! What a head-spin!
As well as Kakadu country being all about hills and ridges, savannah woodlands and monsoon forests, billabongs, floodplains, tidal flats and coast, it is also renowned for being “Stone Country”. The National Park is literally dominated by the circuitous Arnhem Land Escarpment. This is a dramatic sandstone cliff-line which ranges 30-300m high and winds for 500km through Kakadu, forming the natural boundary between Kakadu and Arnhem Land. Stone country is wild and largely inaccessible because of deep chasms and gorges crisscrossing it, with creeks that in the Wet run down the escarpment in the form of mighty waterfalls that then fill up the huge floodplains. It is the place where Kakadu’s rivers begin their journey – and it was the place where we were to have most of our cultural experiences so far, listening to ranger talks explaining things whilst we watched and “felt” with our emotions!
During the Wet, the Stone Country provided generations of Bininj (the local aboriginals) with rock shelters and painting sites and it was through visiting some of these, that we were able to experience the symbiotic nature of land and culture/art. At Nourlangi Rock, home to Kakadu’s best rock-art, we saw paintings which depicted the environmental and social changes over 20,000 years of aboriginal occupation. Now that’s something to find on a bit of rock! At Ubirr, we learnt how groups of aboriginals would traditionally camp out under the cool rock shelters there and exploit the rich resources of the nearby East Alligator River and Nadab floodplain. There, the rock art depicted the traditional foods abundant in the area such as waterfowl, mussels, wallabies, crocs, goannas, echidnas, yams, and fish. There was art telling certain stories about law, how to behave and about creation. Also, some interesting examples of contact art which depicted the aboriginals first contact with “white fella” – guns and white fella’s with pipes and hands in their pockets There was a range of different art styles and we could see how paintings have often been superimposed over older ones. Most of the X-ray style paintings were from within the last 1500 years. We were thrilled to also see a painting of a thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), that had to be at least as old as the time when these animals last roamed, which would have been 2-3000 years ago! It was a humbling experience in many ways, to see rock art from the longest surviving race and culture on this planet and from people who have lived on the land in ways we would never have to. To be standing there and looking at the clues they left behind to each other and to us - about what they were eating, believing and teaching their kids! Wow!
What with the age of all the rock art and geology around us, not to mention the spiritual energy emanating out of it all, it’s hardly surprising then, that our sunset experiences up at Ubirr’s stunning Nadab Lookout were pretty profoundly spiritual too! It was one thing to sit on stone that’s 1.7 billion years old and watch the surrounding rocks light up amber-gold from a sinking sun. But it was another entirely, to look out and down onto the vast, lush, green Nadab floodplains littered with billabongs and trees and a handful of wild black pigs - knowing that just 140 million years ago it had all been covered by a shallow sea and that at other times in history, mega wombats the size of a Kombi van and giant kangaroos tall enough to look into a bus! It was impossible for me not to look out at the vista and understand that special connection Aboriginals have with all that is natural. To understand that they see themselves as part of Nature and that everything in Nature is part-human – and their belief that long ago special spirit creatures started the aboriginal society and everything I could see in the landscape before me. If I relaxed my gaze I could even imagine seeing those ancient aboriginals walking across the land below. I swear I could feel their spirit presence too, when immediately after sunset a prevailing still breeze turned into an abrupt and strong gust – a wind that went no sooner than it had come. It was indeed an awesome moment! On this particular night too, the surrounding landscape was lent some further drama by a huge controlled burn-off over to the east in Arnhem Land. It sent up tall plumes of thick black smoke, that then curled off across the vista, the orange flames near the ground a stark contrast next to the black and green. Again, to look at that fire-front, even the fire itself seemed ancient in its energy and in a sense I guess it was, since Aboriginals have been doing these controlled burns as a way to protect themselves against more devastating ones, since time immemorial.
We sat up at Ubirr for sunset again the next day only this time the light was hazy from the fires the day before and the smaller, new fires of that day too. This haze faded out the vibrant greens and shrouded the dominating escarpment, causing it to appear even more ancient and mystical. As with the night before, a hush came upon the crowd of us that had gathered for sunset. In relative silence then, we witnessed the huge, red-orange sun sinking fast and resting, momentarily, right on top of a ridge in the far north-western corner of Kakadu. For a second it looked like the land itself was holding that sun, caretaking it for a moment in time before letting it move further down and out of our view. What an absolutely magical way for us to say a fond farewell to Kakadu!
Kakadu by Night – hunting for a pair of red eyes!
Just as the stars are starting to twinkle in the Kakadu night sky, I step gingerly off the bank of a billabong and onto a small 20 seater boat that’s been specially designed for our night’s activity. The boat is without a canopy so that we can marvel at the nighttime skies above us while we cruise. It wobbles with my weight and as I take my place right up the front of the vessel, it immediately occurs to me just how low to the water we really are and how small really this little boat actually is – that there actually isn’t much between me and any hungry croc we may encounter tonight!
I am about to embark on a night wildlife safari, cruising Djarradjin Billabong while spotlighting for all the wildlife that comes alive after dark. This is to include not only any number of the “day” birds roosting on the billabong, but “hopefully” also any of the 11 known crocs that inhabit this very 2km stretch of water, detected by their glowing red eyes in the dark! So it’s a sobering thought as we embark, to be told that the dominant croc here tonight (‘The Boss”), is a 5m saltie! I am still far from reassured when our guide insists “but he rarely surfaces when the boat is around”. Before I can reconsider though, the boat is pushed away from the bank and our guide Fred jumps onboard, getting the skipper to switch on the engine. It instantly whirrs into life so that I can feel its mild vibration coursing through me and, with the boat in darkness save for the natural light of the stars above us and the big spotlight that’s now switched on in Fred’s hand, we motor away from the bank and the safari begins!
By now there is a distinct coolness and chill to the air despite the corking hot day we have all suffered. It is a coolness that becomes much more noticeable once we were moving and it’s hard to even know whether I am actually cold or shivering with a bit of nerves and apprehension! Fred is up ahead of everyone, standing at the helm of the boat and leaning against the rail as he scans the waters, trees and banks for any signs of life. He is a local, born and bred aboriginal who also happens to be a Kakadu Park Ranger involved in the management of saltwater crocs, so I figure he ought to know what he is doing and that I ought to be safe with him. My elbow rests on the bars of my side of the boat and it’s close enough to the water to catch the brunt of cool spray that the boat creates as it slips its way forward. As I look up at all the stars so beautifully spread out above our canopy, it strikes me that I feel almost as close to them as I do to the water I’m nearly touching and, nerves or no nerves, it’s fantastic to seem so connected to it all in this way. There is a peacefulness but whilst it is quiet and in some ways serene, it doesn’t quite feel relaxing – given where we are and what we are here to do!
It’s not until the spotlight reveals it, that I see our first bend just up ahead and as we navigate the narrow way, I clock one of those white Styrofoam balls Fred had told us about back at camp. It was suspended from a tree and dangling tantalizingly low near the waters surface. From his talk earlier in the night, I now knew that they use these balls as a way to determine what sort of crocs and how many there are in this billabong. Crocs are by nature inquisitive and they bite anything they see in order to find out what it actually is! Small puncture holes, we were told, denote harmless freshwater crocs - but “you don’t want to see half the ball gone – ‘cos that denotes a salty!” We pass this ball in seconds and I have enough time to notice that it has BOTH kinds of holes! Immediately it feels like the scare-factor for the night has just shot through the roof! It’s not helped along, when the guide says “Ever seen that movie “Rogue”? – ‘bout a tour boat that kept getting attacked by a huge rogue salty? Well….THIS boat was the one they used for the movie – and that’s a fact! We charged ‘em big bucks for the use of it and that’s how we got our business up and running!” Suddenly I’m acutely aware of the fact that my elbow is hanging out the side gap of the boat and I pull it in like a shot and inch closer to Gordy, away from the side rails! But before any further uneasiness can set in we have our first wildlife sighting and, as if the Universe is trying to break us in gently for the night, it turns our to be the very harmless and beautiful orange and blue Azure Kingfisher, fast asleep on a small branch, its sharp bill tucked right in under its wing and pointing down past its feathers to its tail. I feel like I am intruding on its slumber with our bright light but I am so happy to have seen him. Next up are two huge White-Bellied Sea-Eagles high up in the trees – we stop for a moment to observe one of them twisting his head around a lot and stamping his foot in a bid to be rid of all the mozzies. It’s starting to become clear what an amazingly unique birding and wildlife experience this is going to be tonight!
We continue on, all the while scanning for the pair of red eyes that would denote….a croc! Almost immediately we are rewarded with a sighting alongside the boat and there’s just enough time to see the eyes and face of one before it sinks way too fast down below the surface – lost to all the myriad of cameras pointed at it, with fingers ready to click! It’s like something out of an arcade game and in a way quite surreal. What follows though, takes that “surreal” a step further. The boat engine is deliberately cut, the spotlight turned off and we are left to just sit on the water in relative darkness – letting a few moments pass in the hope that during this time the croc will resurface. It is quite eerie just sitting and waiting like this! I hear some splash to my right and go “whattheshitwazthat???!!!”, jumping to the conclusion it’s the croc when in actual fact its just a barramundi jumping…and my heart can quieten down again. In my head though, I can hear the theme music to Jaws and I wonder why no-one has ever created a piece of music with the same intensity for a croc! After a while, Fred switches the spotlight back on and scans the water, not knowing where the croc will have actually resurfaced, if it has at all. It is a pattern that is to be repeated a few times during the rest of the night but on this occasion the croc is more patient (or less interested) than we are, and we set off again on our travels.
Though there is the unease always present, it’s still fantastic to be traveling along in the dark in a small boat like this, watching the spotlight illuminate trees and reveal their tortuous root systems, exposed by the previous Wet season floods – roots that slide down into the water to meet whatever is below with less trepidation than I would have! There are some beautiful reflections on the water too, not to mention sightings of groups of Whistling Plumed Ducks and Radjah Shellducks under the trees and a few Rufous Night Herons, hunched over like old men in overcoats, trying to hide from us but failing miserably. Now and again a “fishy” smell alerts us to the fact that a croc is nearby and I realize just how creepy a smell can actually be! Indeed, that smell leads us to our second croc for the night - a 7ft female with her line of ridges and top half of her head sticking out of the water, eyes shining in a rather sinister fashion courtesy of the spotlight. She moves around a bit which is fantastic to watch but I am on the wrong side of the boat to take a good photo and maybe for the first time in history, I don’t mind! We watch her for a while until she submerges and we move on again.
All of a sudden we turn a corner and right by my side of the boat there is a huge flapping of wings that makes me jump out of my skin. Fred swings the spotlight round just in time illuminate a brilliant white Great-Billed Heron – startled by us and flying straight out of the bush it was in. Its long legs swerve in front of the boat as it swoops off ahead of us, to be absorbed once again by the same darkness from whence it had come….and my heart quietens down once more! By now we are almost at the end of the full stretch of billabong and its time to turn around to make our way back. En-route we spot a small short-necked turtle, barramundi, saratoga, catfish and huge school of mullet – all happily swimming around in the shallows for our viewing pleasure. Further on, high up in a tree, the spotlight picks up a pair of eyes belonging to the small Owlet Nightjar and I never knew you could get an owl so small! It amazes me again when only a minute later, Fred sees a tiny Bar-Breasted Honeyeater – as with all the wildlife tonight, we get up as close as possible and this bird is so small that it defies belief that he has been spotted at all! I am in awe at the perfection of its intricate markings and marvel again at the wonder of Nature.
Before the cruise has time to come to an end, we smell “fish” again and, knowing it to be a saltie somewhere near to us, we cut the engine, flick off the spotlight and wait once more. As we do so, we get to watch the most beautifully bright, white, full moon emerge from behind a stand of trees to our right, casting its own brand of spotlight across the waters we are sitting on. Of all the sensational full-moon experiences we have had so far on this whole trip, watching this one whilst on a tiny boat in a croc-filled billabong and waiting for one of the “residents” to emerge, surely has to be the winner for the most surreal moon-rise we have had! It is both magical and a bit creepy and in the end it almost doesn’t matter that our croc hasn’t surfaced, or that we didn’t get to see one out of the water at any time. For as anyone who has ever been on a nighttime wildlife safari like this will know – it’s the hanging around that’s more thrilling than the spotting!
Ode to Yellow Waters
There’s a bright and milky full moon in the pinky pre-dawn sky
As we set off on our boat cruise with excitement running high
The early morning mist rolls off the waterway
Almost mystical and ancient, it wakes to a brand new day.
This then is our journey through the wetlands of Kakadu
A sensational experience, from me passed on to you
So come and join me while on this boat I get to see
All the amazing wildlife action which my camera snaps for me.
Say hello to the Jacanas with their orange comb-like crest
who seem to be the ones who walk on water best
And with the longest toes for a bird that is their size
to achieve this feat on lily pads is surely no surprise
Respect to Mr. Crocodile as you lay there near the bank
With your body in the water and your ridges holding rank!
You lurk there all lazily waiting with your tail quite nicely poised
To swish those fish right in your mouth with the minimum of noise!
G’day to the White-bellied sea eagle, you wonderful big bird of prey
Tell me what is it you will hunt from our great floodplains today?
Way up there in your tree you’re a sight to behold
As you sit there just like royalty all majestic and bold.
Are you watching the Kites, whistling piercingly above us
Tell me what have they’ve seen that requires such a rumpus?
Perhaps the two crocs in the water ahead
Fighting a battle - if need be till one’s dead?
And all to assert a domain just for one
As the Yellow Water Billabong prepares to salute the orange sun!
Wake up Mr Darterbird, time to unfurl your snakelike neck!
Take your spear of a bill and dive for the fish
swimming right underneath our good deck!
At the waters edge stand White Egrets, a long time already there
If you dally much longer there’ll be surely none left, for any of them to spare!
And greetings to you, my dear Jabiru, with your legs all long and all red
You’re a fish hunter that with stately stride these shallow waters do tread
But a strange bird for sure, with your kneecaps backwards bent
And a powerful black beak, that can…a crocs skin dent!
Rise and shine all you beautiful kingfishers, show us your azures and your teals
Give our cameras the run as you flit in the sun, in a bid to get all of your meals!
And for anyone else who still lies there in bed
let these hoards of Whistling Plumed Ducks be your alarm ringing
For the sun has now risen and its time to get up
And join in with all of their singing!
(By Caroline Cumming, 2009)
Rock Art and Sunsets – feeling the spirit of Kakadu
"The most important thing in the Aboriginal way of life is culture. When I look at a lot of other Aboriginal people who don’t have culture, I feel sad for them because without culture you don’t really feel that you have a place of belonging. We have our culture. Our land is our life"
Mandy Muir
“That painting there, inside the cave, it got to be looked after because my father, granddad, all look after. Now me, I got to do the same. If that painting get rubbed off, there might be big trouble. That important story”
Bill Neidjie – Bunitj clan
It has seemed to us that in Kakadu and Arnhem Land, geology and the aboriginal art/culture are all inextricably linked and it’s been quite a mind-blowing experience for us to start to grasp the meaning of this! Both lands provide stunning vistas of breathtakingly prehistoric landscapes with some of the oldest exposed rocks in the world. At Ubirr in Kakadu, for example, we were literally sitting on rock that was 1.7 billion years old - that’s about three times older than the first signs of single-celled life on earth! What a head-spin!
As well as Kakadu country being all about hills and ridges, savannah woodlands and monsoon forests, billabongs, floodplains, tidal flats and coast, it is also renowned for being “Stone Country”. The National Park is literally dominated by the circuitous Arnhem Land Escarpment. This is a dramatic sandstone cliff-line which ranges 30-300m high and winds for 500km through Kakadu, forming the natural boundary between Kakadu and Arnhem Land. Stone country is wild and largely inaccessible because of deep chasms and gorges crisscrossing it, with creeks that in the Wet run down the escarpment in the form of mighty waterfalls that then fill up the huge floodplains. It is the place where Kakadu’s rivers begin their journey – and it was the place where we were to have most of our cultural experiences so far, listening to ranger talks explaining things whilst we watched and “felt” with our emotions!
During the Wet, the Stone Country provided generations of Bininj (the local aboriginals) with rock shelters and painting sites and it was through visiting some of these, that we were able to experience the symbiotic nature of land and culture/art. At Nourlangi Rock, home to Kakadu’s best rock-art, we saw paintings which depicted the environmental and social changes over 20,000 years of aboriginal occupation. Now that’s something to find on a bit of rock! At Ubirr, we learnt how groups of aboriginals would traditionally camp out under the cool rock shelters there and exploit the rich resources of the nearby East Alligator River and Nadab floodplain. There, the rock art depicted the traditional foods abundant in the area such as waterfowl, mussels, wallabies, crocs, goannas, echidnas, yams, and fish. There was art telling certain stories about law, how to behave and about creation. Also, some interesting examples of contact art which depicted the aboriginals first contact with “white fella” – guns and white fella’s with pipes and hands in their pockets There was a range of different art styles and we could see how paintings have often been superimposed over older ones. Most of the X-ray style paintings were from within the last 1500 years. We were thrilled to also see a painting of a thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), that had to be at least as old as the time when these animals last roamed, which would have been 2-3000 years ago! It was a humbling experience in many ways, to see rock art from the longest surviving race and culture on this planet and from people who have lived on the land in ways we would never have to. To be standing there and looking at the clues they left behind to each other and to us - about what they were eating, believing and teaching their kids! Wow!
What with the age of all the rock art and geology around us, not to mention the spiritual energy emanating out of it all, it’s hardly surprising then, that our sunset experiences up at Ubirr’s stunning Nadab Lookout were pretty profoundly spiritual too! It was one thing to sit on stone that’s 1.7 billion years old and watch the surrounding rocks light up amber-gold from a sinking sun. But it was another entirely, to look out and down onto the vast, lush, green Nadab floodplains littered with billabongs and trees and a handful of wild black pigs - knowing that just 140 million years ago it had all been covered by a shallow sea and that at other times in history, mega wombats the size of a Kombi van and giant kangaroos tall enough to look into a bus! It was impossible for me not to look out at the vista and understand that special connection Aboriginals have with all that is natural. To understand that they see themselves as part of Nature and that everything in Nature is part-human – and their belief that long ago special spirit creatures started the aboriginal society and everything I could see in the landscape before me. If I relaxed my gaze I could even imagine seeing those ancient aboriginals walking across the land below. I swear I could feel their spirit presence too, when immediately after sunset a prevailing still breeze turned into an abrupt and strong gust – a wind that went no sooner than it had come. It was indeed an awesome moment! On this particular night too, the surrounding landscape was lent some further drama by a huge controlled burn-off over to the east in Arnhem Land. It sent up tall plumes of thick black smoke, that then curled off across the vista, the orange flames near the ground a stark contrast next to the black and green. Again, to look at that fire-front, even the fire itself seemed ancient in its energy and in a sense I guess it was, since Aboriginals have been doing these controlled burns as a way to protect themselves against more devastating ones, since time immemorial.
We sat up at Ubirr for sunset again the next day only this time the light was hazy from the fires the day before and the smaller, new fires of that day too. This haze faded out the vibrant greens and shrouded the dominating escarpment, causing it to appear even more ancient and mystical. As with the night before, a hush came upon the crowd of us that had gathered for sunset. In relative silence then, we witnessed the huge, red-orange sun sinking fast and resting, momentarily, right on top of a ridge in the far north-western corner of Kakadu. For a second it looked like the land itself was holding that sun, caretaking it for a moment in time before letting it move further down and out of our view. What an absolutely magical way for us to say a fond farewell to Kakadu!
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Post 20 - Greetings From East Kimberley, WA - Part 5: Beyond the Gibb - Journal
“Dear Family and friends at home,
How can I fight this urge to roam?
Much as I love your honest ways,
The memory of happy days
The laughter, song, good company,
And yet the bush calls out to me
In voice magnificent and strong
But I’ll be back before too long.”
(Bush Poem “Point me North”, by Keith Lethbridge)
This last blog in our Kimberley series and indeed the last blog from our travels throughout W.A, comes to you with a very heavy heart indeed! We are delighted to say though, that whilst trips to the nearby towns of Kununara and Wyndham were interesting and scenic, it was to be the final days spent at an incredibly magical place called Diggers Rest Station, that captured our hearts and souls and perhaps placed them forever in the East Kimberley! A working horse station, we knew it to be one of those well-kept secrets that we were glad to have found out about – another chance to escape the tourist-trail and be back amongst nature again. The minute we opened the main gate into the property after the 37km drive from the nearest town, we knew we had struck gold. What an incredible, sensational view it was too – the Cockburn Ranges in the distance and this one big, trackway meandering its way past goats and horses all the way up to the small Homestead. Wow! In fact, so special is the scenery around Diggers Rest that the property was chosen by Baz Luhrman for a couple of his sequences in the movie Australia – a cattle rush/stampede on the cast King River mudflats and a kissing scene in front of a mighty Boab. We came to Diggers though, to ride on horseback across some of this amazing East Kimberley landscape. Our first night at the Station preceded the night spent at El Questro Homestead (you couldn’t get two more different experiences!) and then we returned for 3 more nights, extending our stay in a bid to not ever have to leave! The last time either of us had ridden was years ago in both Peru n and then in Argentina but the East Kimberley landscape had absolutely got our juices going to get back in the saddle! Little did we know though, just how much we were also going to love the other experiences we enjoyed at Diggers! We hope that through our journal and photo album, we will manage to share with you some of the magic that is this very, very, special place!
Diggers Rest Station – meet the animals, meet the characters!
How best shall we describe Diggers Rest to you all? Is it through the 400 South-African, floppy eared, Boer goats; the 65 horses; 150 head of cattle; dozen chooks; the baby goat who thought he was human; the 2 mad-as-hatters kelpie dogs; the pair of emus; the frog in the toilet; or the cheeky bowerbirds, butcherbirds and sulphur-crested cockatoos? Or is via the equally eclectic bunch of people who own or work on the Station - the 2 German girls who help do the horsetreks and break in the wild horses; a wiry and wonderful 60yr-old walking bikini from Switzerland, called Rita; her partner Michael, once ex-nurse and now a rather dab stationhand; the lovely Janice from Broome; the American owner from North Carolina, Alida, who used to teach art, and 3rd generation Kimberley man and husbnd Roderick, who was away mustering at the time; or the ex-stockman from the 30’s called Bill, who could recite more bush poetry than you could shake a stick at! The answer is, we feel, in all of it – the animals and the people and the wonderful energy they exude! And eclectic though the staff may have seemed to be as a bunch, it somehow all seemed to work perfectly and they were quite the little family! We have come to realize that certain towns and places attract folk with character and we like that! And what they all seemed to have in common at Diggers Rest, was a love and passion for both the East Kimberley and horses. We would very much love to join them permanently!
The Homestead – when can we move in????
A first impression of Diggers Rest may cause you to think it’s run-down, messy or even chaotic but that is it’s absolute charm and we were under its spell from the word go! This magical place truly grew on us very quickly indeed and took a deep hold in our hearts and souls. A single-roomed, stone building housing a lounge, the Homestead is hugged by a 3m wide verandah all around the outside and completed with a corrugated iron roof. Attached via the roof to one end of the verandah is a separate building, also made of stone. It housed Alida’s fantastic, rustic-style kitchen which I can assure you, has everything she possibly needs to cook up the most amazing dinners and hearty, wholesome Homestead fare for everyone! It was most definitely my kind of kitchen! All manner of homely bric-a-brac is to be found around the verandah, along with a number of plastic tables and chairs for staff and guests to eat at, and a hotchpotch of sofas - covered in blankets and sat on by the chooks and, at times, the baby goat and us!
As for us, we were camped on the lawn right outside the homestead – beside the fenced-off horseyard and saddling area on one side …..and a huge pile of horse shit on the grass by our tent on the other side! We were in heaven though because here, we were able to experience an even more authentic station experience than we had done anywhere else to date – feeling much more a part of both human and animal Homestead life!
Slurp – the baby goat who thought he was a human!
Slurp was the cutest little thing I think I ever did see – a 3 week-old baby goat who did not know he wasn’t a human! He was unbelievably cute and adorable and I just wanted to hug him THE WHOLE TIME! Abandoned by his mother at birth, he was brought into the Station and has been constantly hungry for the love and attention ever since, that has never been short in coming his way from both staff and guests! He would walk around the homestead all day, loving the strokes and the pats, chewing and sucking on your finger, with his soft floppy brown ears flapping and his tiny little head - nobbled in 2 places where his horns have yet to grow out from – playfully headbutting your arm or leg. WHAT an adorable little thing! He always needed one of his 2 surrogate mums (Janice or Sandra – and sometimes I counted!) to stand with him while he drank his milk out of a bowl on the ground, through a loose teat – wearing more of the milk on his face than he ever did in his mouth and hence his name! Despite their attempts to do the first stage of weaning him into the wild (putting him on the other side of the fence for a few hours each day, where the horses were), Slurp hated being away from us all! During the day then, while he was over the fence, he would just walk around, bleating and bleating his tiny but definitely audible bleat. It would break my heart to hear it and yet I knew I had to leave him there! All I could do was to call out affectionately: “Sluuurp!” - whereupon he would stop in his tracks and come across to the fence for a stroke! But oh! How hard to then have to walk away from him! My gorgeous, adorable Slurp! He just didn’t know he was a goat - and he just wanted to be a human!
A day in the life of a Homestead!
It has just been so magical to be a part of Diggers Rest living and all of its rhythms of the day! From first light, when the goats and the birds wake you with their noise and the animals are getting fed, to the hours then spent sitting in the shade of the wide verandah, reading bush ballads, playing the odd game, and then watching and being a part of the rest of the day as it unfolds. It has been so special to watch the mustering of the horses, the beautiful way of breaking the new wild ones in and the saddlling of them in preparation for any horsetreks that day. Or watching the blue heelers on our side of the fence going absolutely crazy all afternoon, dashing off here in a flurry of barks, flying across the lawn there - making sure everything is in check…. whether that is to chase off an emu on the other side of the fence or round up the horses. (The hilarious thing of course was that they were not on the right side of the fence to be of any effect whatsoever - but they were enacting the role they were bred for and it was in their bones!! Hilarious!). Meanwhile, Rita and her bikini (a rather surreal sight in what is really a dustbowl of an environment!) are going about their duties – hosing the grass, doing the laundry, feeding the animals and even welcoming in any new guests in her sing-song Swiss voice! The smell of horse, chook and goat droppings pervades the air and yet, strangely, we grow to love the rich, earthy smells that make this place home. At various moments during the day the pitiful and almost human-like bleating of goats is carried on the wind – vying with both the sounds of snorting horses thudding their hooves as they act out their pecking order, as well as the prolific birdsong and the chooking of the chooks! This is a place where possession is nine tenths of the law and goats, horses, emus and chooks will fight for their place around or on the daily bale of hay put out for them to feed on.
Time can both stand still and fly at Diggers, so when sunset comes it always surprises us either way! The two young calves stand at the front gate, waiting for the milk that is going to be poured for them in the trough - their moos competing with Slurp’s bleats for the same feeding service! With the arrival of dusk, the huge goatherd congregates in the front stockyard, some clambering over the bits and pieces of discarded, rusty old station equipment. The bucks meanwhile, are jumping high, only to come crashing down on their opponent with a sickening crack of a headbutt, only to then lock horns in a show of supremacy. They kick up the dust with their antics – a dust that just hangs in the air, reddened by the glow of the setting sun far behind them on the expansive landscape. All in all, quite the surreal sunset experience!
After sunset, the horseriders return and the lights go on in both the kitchen and the verandah. People – including us – gather together on the sofas and chairs to talk about their day and to wait with grumbling stomachs for dinner. From the kitchen, Alida is waving her usual culinary wand for the staff and guests, chatting to people now and again as she does so and taking the nightly call from her husband Roderick, who is away for a few days on a cattle muster down south. She takes it all in her stride and nothing seems to faze her!
Finally then, with everything cooked and ready to go, the dinner bell is rung and everyone jumps to the serving table to get their feed. And my goodness, it is a feed and all the better for being eaten outside! We have the pleasure of dining on 3 occasions at Diggers and there is more food than you know what to do with! Hearty, wholesome fare – from the absolutely delicious, sticky goat ribs (they don’t kill any goat that has a personal name, so Slurp is safe!) and sausage and bean hotpot and all the side dishes that went with these, to the sensational and succulent barrumundi, caught in the chocolate-brown waters of the King River that day and donated by friends to Alida – the fish then cooked to perfection and the absolute best barra I have eaten so far, with roast potatoes and an array of salads from Alida’s homegrown veggie patch. Cake and custard seems to be a family favourite here and who can refuse an ample serving? And then of course there is the amazing Indonesian banquet we get to eat one night, cooked by a guest and friend of Alida’s and better than anything you would get in a restaurant!
A day in the life of a Homestead then, can be a busy and exhausting one…. if you happen to be the owner or a member of staff! Most nights they all retire to their own beds soon after dinner – their beds being a camper-trailer, a caravan, a bush hut, or for Alida, the separate 2-storey house next door that is her “other home”! They leave whatever guests are around to themselves and their own conversations. One night though, we have the very special pleasure of the ex-stockman Bill, reciting some of his amazing repertoire of bush ballads and stories of times gone by, along with a viewing of some of his art (sensational sketches of aboriginals he has known over the year plus carvings on the skin of Boab Nuts – the man is an absolute genius). And then it is off to bed with us, too, for it can be very exhausting watching a station at work!
Three Blazing Saddles- the old, the hungry, and the idiosyncratic!
Now we are no expert on horses but it is clear for anyone to see that the horses at Diggers are some of the Kimberley’s best stockhorses available for riding. So on a morning that came without the heat and humidity we had all been suffering from lately, we jumped at the opportunity to go on a private trek with Alida, to ride through some of the wonderful scenery and see some of the amazing Boabs on her property. Alida was to ride Arthur, her favourite old horse, while I was given beautiful Brownie and Gordon was to ride on Dexter who apparently was a “bit of a character!” Hmmm! Gordon knew then, that if the horse he was about to ride on was being described as having “character” and “certain idiosyncrasies”, that it did not bode well (but then better him than me as he is, after all, a more experienced rider than me!). We set off with water bottles and camera in tow and had the most fantastic morning in the midst of the most glorious landscape and scenery. It really was so much better to experience it on horseback too! With the red and brown-hued Cockburn Ranges never far from view, we crossed creeks and rode along rivers, spotting for birds and crocs and delighting in all the wallabies bounding off at the sight of us and at a flock of ibis, beautifully silhouetted in the branches of a dead tree. With Alida up front and me in the middle, it was Gordon then who always took up the rear with Dexter. This in itself was often humorous as I would hear Gordon behind me, cussing now and again at Dexter’s “idiosyncrasies”. These included wanting to just to go really slow and then, when urged by Gordon to pick up the pace, trotting with a very unusual and awkward gait, that in itself would change from time to time, just when Gordon had thought he had worked old Dexter out! As for me, well whilst I couldn’t have asked for a better horse, the act of stopping was always an interesting one – especially when posing for photographs. Brownie would hardly ever pose with his head up – favouring instead to scoff his face with grass at every opportunity and no amount of gentle persuasion or firm nudging from me would make him change his mind! The only time I didn’t notice what he was doing with his head was when Gordon and I were posed in front of the infamous huge Boab and kissing, in a salute to the scene from Australia with Nicole and Hugh!. Upon reflection though, given Brownies penchant for a good feed, it is perhaps fitting that I ended up riding him! And a good feed wasn’t just on the mind of Brownie either. As we rode further into the property, we came upon some of the head of cattle and Alida promptly started scanning for one they might be able to kill in the next few days for meat for the freezer! As we paused by some trees, we were fascinated to learn just how they do this – which is to ride out there and identify a cow, and then, while her husband climbs up a nearby tree and hides with a gun, Alida and her helpers muster the cow towards that tree, so that Roderick can take aim and kill it with one shot. It is then butchered there and then – one side first, then the cow is rolled over onto leaves and the remaining side butchered. They then take the meat back to the homestead, leaving the cow where it is. Wow! What a different world I live in with my butcher doing it all for me!
We wished we rode horses more than we do because we would love to have done a 5 day trek following the paths of the drovers of old. Alas though, our bums were numb by the end of the morning and as we turned back for the station, we were ready for home!
Bush Poet Gordon has his say!
Watch out for this name ‘cos I reckon you’re going to be hearing more from this man on the bush-poet circuit in the future! He goes by the name of “Cobber Cumming” and he has been inspired by all the exposure to bush poetry he’s been having lately. Here is his first ever bush poem (or any other kind of poem for that matter!). Just think - all this time, he was a poet……and he didn’t know it! Be sure to email him your encouragement if you like what you read!
Resting at Diggers
We came to rest, I guess as Digger himself had once done
At first our days here were to be numbered just the one
But after an afternoon spent in the glorious shade
A contrary decision was soon to be made
We’ll stay for three days more, that’ll do
Tho we secretly suspect that three will be too few
Much time was spent watching things be done
Whilst working hard to stay clear of the sun
Here on the verandah we sat and viewed all around
Certainly a piece of magic was what we had found
This piece of magic called Diggers Rest
A place of heart & soul, the Kimberley at its best
We watched as a new horse was patiently trained
So intent was the watching that I became quite drained
Both horse and trainer doing so well
On a roll now, no time to spell
Roll up the sleeves and wipe the sweat
Plenty to do, not finished just yet
All of this effort, watching from my seat
Can build in a bloke a huge need to eat
Luckily, at Diggers a bloke never need worry
Within the kitchen magic happens, with ne’er a flurry
Transforming wholesome ingredients into magnificent fare
When that dinner bell rings you’ll be glad that you’re there
The Cockburns stand behind like a back-drop from a movie set
A bloke could make a pretty good movie out here, I’ll bet
Hang on! Some movie mobs already been through
Making that film, you know the one, with Nic and Hugh
Had the big kiss under the Boab tree
So Caz says “why don’t we do it too – you and me?”
So we decide to go for a ride that very next day
Not quite Clancy being called to the fray
But a good bit quieter our ride was to be
Our ride out to that big old Boab tree
We positioned our steeds without too much going amiss
And managed to quickly grab our movie scene kiss
Luckily my mount was surer on foot than I am in the saddle
If he’d taken off, I’d have been up the creek without a paddle
Tho’ taking off was not on his mind
He was so slow a walker, we were always behind!
Dex is a great character, that much is for sure
But my fondness for him will most certainly endure
We loved the horses and goats and dogs
And even the inhabitants of the loos – the green tree frogs
The Kelpies dashing from side to side
Surely sooner or later they must collide
By good fortune, no such calamity was to occur
No squeals or yelps or flying of fur
Ever alert for anything amiss or astray
Always on hand to keep the emus at bay
A dog’s job is never fully done of course
Must stay on guard, a good bark – oops that was a horse
Never mind from this side of the fence all is good and fair
But imagine what we could do if we were allowed over there
Diggers Rest, a place of characters, both man and beast
By some simple design, a jig-saw together all pieced
Nothing flash or grand or ostentatious
But warm and welcoming and friendly and gracious
No sooner here than you feel completely at home
So why was it again we had wanted to roam?
(Cobber Cumming 2009)
So, how to leave Diggers Rest Station?
The answer to the question “Just how does one leave Diggers?” is simply: “try not to!” On what was to be the very last morning of our stay at the Homestead and indeed of our time in W.A, the hugs and the farewells were so very, very hard - as was leaving my adorable Slurp. The chooks tried to brighten things up with a hilarious action of one of them somehow getting into our car through the open door and sitting in the footwell on my side! Shooed away by Gordon, the chook simply flew onto the frame of the wound-down window on my side and started clucking away! There was no egg for us but we took his coming into our car as a sign that maybe we weren’t meant to be leaving Diggers after all - and quite frankly we were so heavy hearted about leaving Diggers that it was easy to read anything as a sign! But in the end, leave we did and as we closed the main gate behind us and went on our way, imagine our surprise when minutes later, upon crossing a creek bed, we saw a wading Jabiru (unmistakable with his gorgeous long red legs) and then 2 huge and beautiful Brolgas, that flew out from a tree and continued to fly the road just ahead of us for a few seconds before veering off left and out of sight! It was such a beautiful moment and I just burst into tears! And yes, you guessed it – it was another sign I am sure, that we were meant to come back, as for ages now I had wanted to see a Brolga up close!
So perhaps for us, the question right now isn’t one of how to leave Diggers but more of “when can we come back and how can we work there?”!! There is no doubt that Gordon would love Michael’s job of station-hand…..but does that mean that I would have to do a Rita and don a bikini???????!
And worse still, how to leave W.A?
As I am sure you will have surmised by now, we have had an absolute blast in W.A and it is such an amazing state! For 5 years we have lived in its beautiful city and then, embarking on this trip, enjoyed revisiting the south-western corner of Yallingup, Margaret River, Denmark and Esperance. We have loved venturing north of Perth for the first time, to explore the amazing coastlines of Kalbarri, Coral Bay, Exmouth and Ningaloo and then up to Broome. The Kimberley has been nothing short of sensational also but believe it or not, we didn’t visit everything there was to visit! So leaving W.A then is really all about planning to come back next year to do some of the other things! These will include Karrijini, which contains the most spectacular gorges and is host to some of the most challenging gorge walks in the whole of W.A - sadly missed out this time due to the spinal problems I have been experiencing. And we didn’t see all of the East Kimberley either – deliberately, I might add, so that we can have a reason to come back! So next time a flight over the Bungle Bungles will be on the agenda. Moreover, we want to come back to East Kimberley just after the Wet, so that we can see a completely different palette of colours and have a completely different set of experiences – for example, helifishing for barramundi, flights over the teeming Mitchell Falls and Kings Cascade and a return to El Questro Homestead and Diggers Rest! So watch this space - because by our reckoning we will be back by the end of next March!
How can I fight this urge to roam?
Much as I love your honest ways,
The memory of happy days
The laughter, song, good company,
And yet the bush calls out to me
In voice magnificent and strong
But I’ll be back before too long.”
(Bush Poem “Point me North”, by Keith Lethbridge)
This last blog in our Kimberley series and indeed the last blog from our travels throughout W.A, comes to you with a very heavy heart indeed! We are delighted to say though, that whilst trips to the nearby towns of Kununara and Wyndham were interesting and scenic, it was to be the final days spent at an incredibly magical place called Diggers Rest Station, that captured our hearts and souls and perhaps placed them forever in the East Kimberley! A working horse station, we knew it to be one of those well-kept secrets that we were glad to have found out about – another chance to escape the tourist-trail and be back amongst nature again. The minute we opened the main gate into the property after the 37km drive from the nearest town, we knew we had struck gold. What an incredible, sensational view it was too – the Cockburn Ranges in the distance and this one big, trackway meandering its way past goats and horses all the way up to the small Homestead. Wow! In fact, so special is the scenery around Diggers Rest that the property was chosen by Baz Luhrman for a couple of his sequences in the movie Australia – a cattle rush/stampede on the cast King River mudflats and a kissing scene in front of a mighty Boab. We came to Diggers though, to ride on horseback across some of this amazing East Kimberley landscape. Our first night at the Station preceded the night spent at El Questro Homestead (you couldn’t get two more different experiences!) and then we returned for 3 more nights, extending our stay in a bid to not ever have to leave! The last time either of us had ridden was years ago in both Peru n and then in Argentina but the East Kimberley landscape had absolutely got our juices going to get back in the saddle! Little did we know though, just how much we were also going to love the other experiences we enjoyed at Diggers! We hope that through our journal and photo album, we will manage to share with you some of the magic that is this very, very, special place!
Diggers Rest Station – meet the animals, meet the characters!
How best shall we describe Diggers Rest to you all? Is it through the 400 South-African, floppy eared, Boer goats; the 65 horses; 150 head of cattle; dozen chooks; the baby goat who thought he was human; the 2 mad-as-hatters kelpie dogs; the pair of emus; the frog in the toilet; or the cheeky bowerbirds, butcherbirds and sulphur-crested cockatoos? Or is via the equally eclectic bunch of people who own or work on the Station - the 2 German girls who help do the horsetreks and break in the wild horses; a wiry and wonderful 60yr-old walking bikini from Switzerland, called Rita; her partner Michael, once ex-nurse and now a rather dab stationhand; the lovely Janice from Broome; the American owner from North Carolina, Alida, who used to teach art, and 3rd generation Kimberley man and husbnd Roderick, who was away mustering at the time; or the ex-stockman from the 30’s called Bill, who could recite more bush poetry than you could shake a stick at! The answer is, we feel, in all of it – the animals and the people and the wonderful energy they exude! And eclectic though the staff may have seemed to be as a bunch, it somehow all seemed to work perfectly and they were quite the little family! We have come to realize that certain towns and places attract folk with character and we like that! And what they all seemed to have in common at Diggers Rest, was a love and passion for both the East Kimberley and horses. We would very much love to join them permanently!
The Homestead – when can we move in????
A first impression of Diggers Rest may cause you to think it’s run-down, messy or even chaotic but that is it’s absolute charm and we were under its spell from the word go! This magical place truly grew on us very quickly indeed and took a deep hold in our hearts and souls. A single-roomed, stone building housing a lounge, the Homestead is hugged by a 3m wide verandah all around the outside and completed with a corrugated iron roof. Attached via the roof to one end of the verandah is a separate building, also made of stone. It housed Alida’s fantastic, rustic-style kitchen which I can assure you, has everything she possibly needs to cook up the most amazing dinners and hearty, wholesome Homestead fare for everyone! It was most definitely my kind of kitchen! All manner of homely bric-a-brac is to be found around the verandah, along with a number of plastic tables and chairs for staff and guests to eat at, and a hotchpotch of sofas - covered in blankets and sat on by the chooks and, at times, the baby goat and us!
As for us, we were camped on the lawn right outside the homestead – beside the fenced-off horseyard and saddling area on one side …..and a huge pile of horse shit on the grass by our tent on the other side! We were in heaven though because here, we were able to experience an even more authentic station experience than we had done anywhere else to date – feeling much more a part of both human and animal Homestead life!
Slurp – the baby goat who thought he was a human!
Slurp was the cutest little thing I think I ever did see – a 3 week-old baby goat who did not know he wasn’t a human! He was unbelievably cute and adorable and I just wanted to hug him THE WHOLE TIME! Abandoned by his mother at birth, he was brought into the Station and has been constantly hungry for the love and attention ever since, that has never been short in coming his way from both staff and guests! He would walk around the homestead all day, loving the strokes and the pats, chewing and sucking on your finger, with his soft floppy brown ears flapping and his tiny little head - nobbled in 2 places where his horns have yet to grow out from – playfully headbutting your arm or leg. WHAT an adorable little thing! He always needed one of his 2 surrogate mums (Janice or Sandra – and sometimes I counted!) to stand with him while he drank his milk out of a bowl on the ground, through a loose teat – wearing more of the milk on his face than he ever did in his mouth and hence his name! Despite their attempts to do the first stage of weaning him into the wild (putting him on the other side of the fence for a few hours each day, where the horses were), Slurp hated being away from us all! During the day then, while he was over the fence, he would just walk around, bleating and bleating his tiny but definitely audible bleat. It would break my heart to hear it and yet I knew I had to leave him there! All I could do was to call out affectionately: “Sluuurp!” - whereupon he would stop in his tracks and come across to the fence for a stroke! But oh! How hard to then have to walk away from him! My gorgeous, adorable Slurp! He just didn’t know he was a goat - and he just wanted to be a human!
A day in the life of a Homestead!
It has just been so magical to be a part of Diggers Rest living and all of its rhythms of the day! From first light, when the goats and the birds wake you with their noise and the animals are getting fed, to the hours then spent sitting in the shade of the wide verandah, reading bush ballads, playing the odd game, and then watching and being a part of the rest of the day as it unfolds. It has been so special to watch the mustering of the horses, the beautiful way of breaking the new wild ones in and the saddlling of them in preparation for any horsetreks that day. Or watching the blue heelers on our side of the fence going absolutely crazy all afternoon, dashing off here in a flurry of barks, flying across the lawn there - making sure everything is in check…. whether that is to chase off an emu on the other side of the fence or round up the horses. (The hilarious thing of course was that they were not on the right side of the fence to be of any effect whatsoever - but they were enacting the role they were bred for and it was in their bones!! Hilarious!). Meanwhile, Rita and her bikini (a rather surreal sight in what is really a dustbowl of an environment!) are going about their duties – hosing the grass, doing the laundry, feeding the animals and even welcoming in any new guests in her sing-song Swiss voice! The smell of horse, chook and goat droppings pervades the air and yet, strangely, we grow to love the rich, earthy smells that make this place home. At various moments during the day the pitiful and almost human-like bleating of goats is carried on the wind – vying with both the sounds of snorting horses thudding their hooves as they act out their pecking order, as well as the prolific birdsong and the chooking of the chooks! This is a place where possession is nine tenths of the law and goats, horses, emus and chooks will fight for their place around or on the daily bale of hay put out for them to feed on.
Time can both stand still and fly at Diggers, so when sunset comes it always surprises us either way! The two young calves stand at the front gate, waiting for the milk that is going to be poured for them in the trough - their moos competing with Slurp’s bleats for the same feeding service! With the arrival of dusk, the huge goatherd congregates in the front stockyard, some clambering over the bits and pieces of discarded, rusty old station equipment. The bucks meanwhile, are jumping high, only to come crashing down on their opponent with a sickening crack of a headbutt, only to then lock horns in a show of supremacy. They kick up the dust with their antics – a dust that just hangs in the air, reddened by the glow of the setting sun far behind them on the expansive landscape. All in all, quite the surreal sunset experience!
After sunset, the horseriders return and the lights go on in both the kitchen and the verandah. People – including us – gather together on the sofas and chairs to talk about their day and to wait with grumbling stomachs for dinner. From the kitchen, Alida is waving her usual culinary wand for the staff and guests, chatting to people now and again as she does so and taking the nightly call from her husband Roderick, who is away for a few days on a cattle muster down south. She takes it all in her stride and nothing seems to faze her!
Finally then, with everything cooked and ready to go, the dinner bell is rung and everyone jumps to the serving table to get their feed. And my goodness, it is a feed and all the better for being eaten outside! We have the pleasure of dining on 3 occasions at Diggers and there is more food than you know what to do with! Hearty, wholesome fare – from the absolutely delicious, sticky goat ribs (they don’t kill any goat that has a personal name, so Slurp is safe!) and sausage and bean hotpot and all the side dishes that went with these, to the sensational and succulent barrumundi, caught in the chocolate-brown waters of the King River that day and donated by friends to Alida – the fish then cooked to perfection and the absolute best barra I have eaten so far, with roast potatoes and an array of salads from Alida’s homegrown veggie patch. Cake and custard seems to be a family favourite here and who can refuse an ample serving? And then of course there is the amazing Indonesian banquet we get to eat one night, cooked by a guest and friend of Alida’s and better than anything you would get in a restaurant!
A day in the life of a Homestead then, can be a busy and exhausting one…. if you happen to be the owner or a member of staff! Most nights they all retire to their own beds soon after dinner – their beds being a camper-trailer, a caravan, a bush hut, or for Alida, the separate 2-storey house next door that is her “other home”! They leave whatever guests are around to themselves and their own conversations. One night though, we have the very special pleasure of the ex-stockman Bill, reciting some of his amazing repertoire of bush ballads and stories of times gone by, along with a viewing of some of his art (sensational sketches of aboriginals he has known over the year plus carvings on the skin of Boab Nuts – the man is an absolute genius). And then it is off to bed with us, too, for it can be very exhausting watching a station at work!
Three Blazing Saddles- the old, the hungry, and the idiosyncratic!
Now we are no expert on horses but it is clear for anyone to see that the horses at Diggers are some of the Kimberley’s best stockhorses available for riding. So on a morning that came without the heat and humidity we had all been suffering from lately, we jumped at the opportunity to go on a private trek with Alida, to ride through some of the wonderful scenery and see some of the amazing Boabs on her property. Alida was to ride Arthur, her favourite old horse, while I was given beautiful Brownie and Gordon was to ride on Dexter who apparently was a “bit of a character!” Hmmm! Gordon knew then, that if the horse he was about to ride on was being described as having “character” and “certain idiosyncrasies”, that it did not bode well (but then better him than me as he is, after all, a more experienced rider than me!). We set off with water bottles and camera in tow and had the most fantastic morning in the midst of the most glorious landscape and scenery. It really was so much better to experience it on horseback too! With the red and brown-hued Cockburn Ranges never far from view, we crossed creeks and rode along rivers, spotting for birds and crocs and delighting in all the wallabies bounding off at the sight of us and at a flock of ibis, beautifully silhouetted in the branches of a dead tree. With Alida up front and me in the middle, it was Gordon then who always took up the rear with Dexter. This in itself was often humorous as I would hear Gordon behind me, cussing now and again at Dexter’s “idiosyncrasies”. These included wanting to just to go really slow and then, when urged by Gordon to pick up the pace, trotting with a very unusual and awkward gait, that in itself would change from time to time, just when Gordon had thought he had worked old Dexter out! As for me, well whilst I couldn’t have asked for a better horse, the act of stopping was always an interesting one – especially when posing for photographs. Brownie would hardly ever pose with his head up – favouring instead to scoff his face with grass at every opportunity and no amount of gentle persuasion or firm nudging from me would make him change his mind! The only time I didn’t notice what he was doing with his head was when Gordon and I were posed in front of the infamous huge Boab and kissing, in a salute to the scene from Australia with Nicole and Hugh!. Upon reflection though, given Brownies penchant for a good feed, it is perhaps fitting that I ended up riding him! And a good feed wasn’t just on the mind of Brownie either. As we rode further into the property, we came upon some of the head of cattle and Alida promptly started scanning for one they might be able to kill in the next few days for meat for the freezer! As we paused by some trees, we were fascinated to learn just how they do this – which is to ride out there and identify a cow, and then, while her husband climbs up a nearby tree and hides with a gun, Alida and her helpers muster the cow towards that tree, so that Roderick can take aim and kill it with one shot. It is then butchered there and then – one side first, then the cow is rolled over onto leaves and the remaining side butchered. They then take the meat back to the homestead, leaving the cow where it is. Wow! What a different world I live in with my butcher doing it all for me!
We wished we rode horses more than we do because we would love to have done a 5 day trek following the paths of the drovers of old. Alas though, our bums were numb by the end of the morning and as we turned back for the station, we were ready for home!
Bush Poet Gordon has his say!
Watch out for this name ‘cos I reckon you’re going to be hearing more from this man on the bush-poet circuit in the future! He goes by the name of “Cobber Cumming” and he has been inspired by all the exposure to bush poetry he’s been having lately. Here is his first ever bush poem (or any other kind of poem for that matter!). Just think - all this time, he was a poet……and he didn’t know it! Be sure to email him your encouragement if you like what you read!
Resting at Diggers
We came to rest, I guess as Digger himself had once done
At first our days here were to be numbered just the one
But after an afternoon spent in the glorious shade
A contrary decision was soon to be made
We’ll stay for three days more, that’ll do
Tho we secretly suspect that three will be too few
Much time was spent watching things be done
Whilst working hard to stay clear of the sun
Here on the verandah we sat and viewed all around
Certainly a piece of magic was what we had found
This piece of magic called Diggers Rest
A place of heart & soul, the Kimberley at its best
We watched as a new horse was patiently trained
So intent was the watching that I became quite drained
Both horse and trainer doing so well
On a roll now, no time to spell
Roll up the sleeves and wipe the sweat
Plenty to do, not finished just yet
All of this effort, watching from my seat
Can build in a bloke a huge need to eat
Luckily, at Diggers a bloke never need worry
Within the kitchen magic happens, with ne’er a flurry
Transforming wholesome ingredients into magnificent fare
When that dinner bell rings you’ll be glad that you’re there
The Cockburns stand behind like a back-drop from a movie set
A bloke could make a pretty good movie out here, I’ll bet
Hang on! Some movie mobs already been through
Making that film, you know the one, with Nic and Hugh
Had the big kiss under the Boab tree
So Caz says “why don’t we do it too – you and me?”
So we decide to go for a ride that very next day
Not quite Clancy being called to the fray
But a good bit quieter our ride was to be
Our ride out to that big old Boab tree
We positioned our steeds without too much going amiss
And managed to quickly grab our movie scene kiss
Luckily my mount was surer on foot than I am in the saddle
If he’d taken off, I’d have been up the creek without a paddle
Tho’ taking off was not on his mind
He was so slow a walker, we were always behind!
Dex is a great character, that much is for sure
But my fondness for him will most certainly endure
We loved the horses and goats and dogs
And even the inhabitants of the loos – the green tree frogs
The Kelpies dashing from side to side
Surely sooner or later they must collide
By good fortune, no such calamity was to occur
No squeals or yelps or flying of fur
Ever alert for anything amiss or astray
Always on hand to keep the emus at bay
A dog’s job is never fully done of course
Must stay on guard, a good bark – oops that was a horse
Never mind from this side of the fence all is good and fair
But imagine what we could do if we were allowed over there
Diggers Rest, a place of characters, both man and beast
By some simple design, a jig-saw together all pieced
Nothing flash or grand or ostentatious
But warm and welcoming and friendly and gracious
No sooner here than you feel completely at home
So why was it again we had wanted to roam?
(Cobber Cumming 2009)
So, how to leave Diggers Rest Station?
The answer to the question “Just how does one leave Diggers?” is simply: “try not to!” On what was to be the very last morning of our stay at the Homestead and indeed of our time in W.A, the hugs and the farewells were so very, very hard - as was leaving my adorable Slurp. The chooks tried to brighten things up with a hilarious action of one of them somehow getting into our car through the open door and sitting in the footwell on my side! Shooed away by Gordon, the chook simply flew onto the frame of the wound-down window on my side and started clucking away! There was no egg for us but we took his coming into our car as a sign that maybe we weren’t meant to be leaving Diggers after all - and quite frankly we were so heavy hearted about leaving Diggers that it was easy to read anything as a sign! But in the end, leave we did and as we closed the main gate behind us and went on our way, imagine our surprise when minutes later, upon crossing a creek bed, we saw a wading Jabiru (unmistakable with his gorgeous long red legs) and then 2 huge and beautiful Brolgas, that flew out from a tree and continued to fly the road just ahead of us for a few seconds before veering off left and out of sight! It was such a beautiful moment and I just burst into tears! And yes, you guessed it – it was another sign I am sure, that we were meant to come back, as for ages now I had wanted to see a Brolga up close!
So perhaps for us, the question right now isn’t one of how to leave Diggers but more of “when can we come back and how can we work there?”!! There is no doubt that Gordon would love Michael’s job of station-hand…..but does that mean that I would have to do a Rita and don a bikini???????!
And worse still, how to leave W.A?
As I am sure you will have surmised by now, we have had an absolute blast in W.A and it is such an amazing state! For 5 years we have lived in its beautiful city and then, embarking on this trip, enjoyed revisiting the south-western corner of Yallingup, Margaret River, Denmark and Esperance. We have loved venturing north of Perth for the first time, to explore the amazing coastlines of Kalbarri, Coral Bay, Exmouth and Ningaloo and then up to Broome. The Kimberley has been nothing short of sensational also but believe it or not, we didn’t visit everything there was to visit! So leaving W.A then is really all about planning to come back next year to do some of the other things! These will include Karrijini, which contains the most spectacular gorges and is host to some of the most challenging gorge walks in the whole of W.A - sadly missed out this time due to the spinal problems I have been experiencing. And we didn’t see all of the East Kimberley either – deliberately, I might add, so that we can have a reason to come back! So next time a flight over the Bungle Bungles will be on the agenda. Moreover, we want to come back to East Kimberley just after the Wet, so that we can see a completely different palette of colours and have a completely different set of experiences – for example, helifishing for barramundi, flights over the teeming Mitchell Falls and Kings Cascade and a return to El Questro Homestead and Diggers Rest! So watch this space - because by our reckoning we will be back by the end of next March!
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Post 19 - Greetings From East Kimberley, WA - Part 4: El Questro Homestead- Journal
Well what can I say to start off this blog except that we had the most amazing time here! For years we have wanted to stay at this very exclusive Homestead and when we were overnighting here we had to pinch ourselves to make sure it was all real that we were here at all – especially given the length of time we have been smelly campers on this trip! This is the place that famous celebrities and movie makers come to when they are in the Kimberley or visiting El Questro Park and its $2,500-3,000 a night ticket price for the two most sought-after rooms, reflects the exclusivity of the place! It is exclusive not only because just 12 people may stay here at any one time but also because of the private and sensational location it boasts within the wilderness park and the sheer remoteness of where it is within the whole of W.A generally. There are all sorts of luxury places to stay in Australia with sensational and often private views, but El Questro is totally unique on so many levels that it takes “special” and exclusivity to a whole new dimension!
Despite always having wanted to stay here, how we actually came to overnight here was quite by lucky chance. You see, you have to book ELQ Homestead often months in advance so, when we set off on our trip round Australia we decided against booking in on this year-long trip, simply because we had no real idea of itinerary, which made it very difficult to plan that far ahead. So it didn’t even occur to me then, in the first few nights of bush-camping within the Park, to ask about whether there was, by any remote chance a room to be had at such short notice. However, having met a couple on the Explosion Gorge tour who had just had stayed there for a night the day before - and were waxing lyrical about it – our long-held desire to do the Homestead was passionately re-ignited! So much so that when we got back to the Swinging Arm Bar after the tour I asked whether a room was by any chance available - and would you believe it there was! And it got better than that! Whilst there was one of the “cheaper” rooms available in two days time, it did not have the sensational views, balcony and bathtub that the “Chamberlain Suite” or the sought after ‘room next door’ were famous for. Imagine our delight then when I was informed that the “room next door” WAS available however – but for one night only (usual requirement is a minimum 2 night stay) and for a date after we were due to leave our bush-camp and move on. Needless to say we jumped at it - and rejigged our travel itinerary so that we could come back to the park a few days later just to make this dream come true! This then, is our story and the photos we’ll treasure! We hope you get suitably green with envy – or better still, inspired to come here for yourselves one day! (And if any of you want to gift me another night here for my birthday I would love you forever!)
One arrives at one’s Homestead
The minute we made the turn marked “private” on a road we had gone up and down on most days en-route to our bush-camp, we knew it was real and that after all this time we actually were going to stay at the Homestead! Knowing that we would be getting only “posh nosh” during our stay, I was busily scoffing a last bag of crisps (!!) when before I knew it we were at the Homestead itself and someone was already coming out to greet us! Imagine my horror then at possibly being caught inflagrantè with a cheapy bag of crisps in my hand and a mouth stuffed with them! It was all Gordon could do to jump out of the car and go over to the woman and accept her greeting, thereby buying me a few frantic seconds where I ducked down into the floor-well of my seat, trying to finish crunching the crisps and swallow them! That done, I quickly brushed myself off, cleaned my greasy hands and stepped out of the car in a manner as if to say “Hello, I arrive at exclusive Homesteads all the time!”
After exchanging greetings at the side of the car one was asked if one wanted ones car parked - (even though it was only to be left a yard or so away!) One politely declined of course – but it was more a case that we were far too embarrassed to let her get in our messy, dusty 4WD lined with the offending crisp packet and a couple of damp towels from the morning’s shower, that were adding a certain aroma to the vehicle!
Upon that polite decline then, one was, without further ado, escorted onto the premises, with one’s overnight bag being carried in by the woman herself. Jeez she must have wondered what the hell was in it though, as it was so heavy - but to tell you the truth, after a month of bush-camping you need all the toiletries and implements you can muster, to scrub yourself clean and be worthy of residing in a Homestead!
So, as one was led in and escorted over to the bar, one was then asked whether one would prefer a champagne or a beer. I chose the champers of course and Gordon the cold beer! Before she even poured them out though, we were promptly being handed a little basket of pristine white, fluffy, rolled up flannels - ice-cold, so that one could “refresh” one’s face from the heat of the day! And then, as the drinks were handed to us, our host smiled and said “Welcome to El Questro Homestead!” Welcome indeed!
One is shown to one’s very luxurious room
With only a few sips of champagne and beer drank, one was invited to bring both to our room which would now be shown to one! We were led along a delightful dark-timber walkway, lined at intervals with soft maidenhair ferns lit up by the filtered light upon them and soon arrived at our door. As that door was opened we instantly saw the most amazing view and sensationally appointed room, felt the wonderfully cold air from the aircon, smelt the gorgeously fresh, clean aroma of lemongrass and heard the soft, relaxing spa-music already playing inside! Needless to say, for the next 45minutes prior to lunch, we enjoyed this room of ours - taking photos of it all, admiring the sensational exclusive view from our balcony; checking out the fridge (and squealing more with delight at the jar of home-baked cookies than at all the complementary drinks inside it); jumping in the egg-shaped, freestanding bathtub to try it out for size; flopping onto the king-sized bed to test its squidginess (and I can testify it’s the biggest marshmallow I have ever slept on or in!); and generally just finishing off our drinks with a few congratulatory self-toasts! Having stayed at quite a few luxurious or expensive places in our previous careers, what we loved about the Homestead was that it is designed to feel more like a home than a hotel. That’s why when we arrived into the main lounge room, there was no reception desk, no sign for a night bellman, and no cash register at the bar (all the alcohol is complementary). We also loved the note in our room that stated that if we’d like a beverage, then we were to feel free to help ourselves from the fridge, to the coffee plunger or the extensive wooden box of various tea selections. Likewise, if we wanted an early morning cup of tea or glass of fresh OJ in our room (without having to go to the fridge!), then all we had to do was simply to advise someone of this the night before and they would drop it to our room at the designated time! Well, if as they suggested in this note, that they wanted me to feel like I could call this place “home”, then I think it’s fair to say that they succeeded!
One is seated for lunch
At 1pm it was time for lunch, with all 12 of us being seated on the long, dark-timbered veranda, at a stylishly set table which had colours to complement those of the natural surrounds we could see around us. And the view Gordon and I had of those surrounds, was nothing short of spectacular! The Homestead has a complete, uninterrupted eagles-eye view of the immense Kimberley wilderness. Every tree, shrub and blade of grass in its manicured grounds, I was told, were planted with the aim of creating an extraordinary oasis. As our eyes spanned across the lush green lawn (a weird sight after so much dust for so long on our travels!), down to the beautiful swimming pool, the cliffs-edge of the gorge and beyond that to the wonderful Chamberlain River below it and it’s tree-lined far banks, we thought we had landed in heaven! But heaven, it would seem, actually appeared when lunch did! A more than amply portioned, mixed Seafood Salad – of Barramundi, Ocean Trout, King Fish, Calamari and Scallops with a Thai Basil, Chilli and Lime Vinagriete – sent our tastebuds tingling, along with freshly made sourdough bread and plenty of rather special Riesling to accompany it. Would you believe it, we still even had room after that, for the English Trifle that followed - complete with its strawberries, sherry and crème anglaise! (I am sorry to report that no photos of any our food were taken during our stay - I know that’s not like us but then somehow it didn’t seem quite appropriate to be getting down close to our plates with the camera, at a table of 10 other diners, some of whom were perhaps a bit more well-heeled than us! So we will leave it to your imaginations instead!) Nevertheless, slightly more well-monied people than us or not, a delightful hour was spent with everyone chatting to one another and swapping stories from all their walks of life!
One is chauffered to a very private, exclusive rendezvous for two
As special guests of the Homestead, one is permitted to do a number of tours within El Questro park for free and a complete, personalized itinerary can even be drawn up for one, depending on how one wishes to spend one’s time. Given that we were staying only one night and had been seeing the sights of the park during the nine days we bush-camped, the main emphasis that we wanted, was to just enjoy our room and the Homestead. However there was just one trip that we did indulge in, simply because we had deliberately left it for while we were houseguests. The reason for this was that if we did it when at the Homestead, we would get a much more exclusive experience of it. The trip in question was a trip out to Zebedee Springs – closed by midday to every other man and his dog visiting the park, but available in the afternoon ONLY, for the exclusive use of Homestead guests. While we had been bush-camping at ELQ we were always hearing of the springs being already busy by 7am and heaving for the rest of the day after that after that, sometimes with 50 or 60 people! (remember, we were then in school holidays and there were bloody Victorians everywhere!). How amazing then, to not have to be there with every man and his dog and how much more amazing to be guaranteed an exclusive time there for the two of us, without even any of the remaining 10 houseguests wanting to go there on that day! Wow!
So, no sooner had one finished lunch at the table, one’s picnic bag was being packed (“Would you like to take a bottle of champagne or some beers”), complete with bottle opener, glassware and a couple of pool towels. One was then led by one’s chauffer to the Homestead’s awaiting 4WD, whereupon one was driven down to and escorted into Zebedee Springs, some 20 minutes away. Zebedee Springs is a veritable Garden of Eden - a rich pocket of heavily covered rainforest, lush pandanus, maidenhair ferns, livistona palms and permanent, mineral-rich thermal waters at a constant temperature of 32 degrees. The waters of Zebedee Springs have their origins in rainwater that fell centuries ago and probably a great distance away. Emanating from the base of an unnamed 200m cliff, these spring waters cascade over large rocks and into a string of spa-like pools. This then was to be the setting of for our quiet, intimate rendezvous! Upon arrival one’s champagne bottle was popped open and one was told that one could stay as one as long wanted. All one needed to do when one was finished, was to make one’s way back down to the car! And so a rather lovely couple of hours were spent drinking the bubbles in one’s glass while the bubbles of the thermal springs were busily bubbling up one’s arse!! There were of course also the photography moments and slippery rock-clambering (with tripod, lol!), followed by some skinny dipping, as we indulged in our exclusive status!
Frolicking done, one then pampers oneself before dinner
Back at the Homestead, there was just time for a beer and another champers as we sat by the pool on the lawn and watched the sun dip down behind the gorge, before then retiring to our room for some leisurely time spent getting ready for dinner! And what fun that was too! We have never been anywhere before where we have been able to stand side by side in front of a free-standing bath tub, enjoying the wonderful jet of hot water from a rather huge showerhead (one for each of us)whilst simultaneously looking out onto the view in front of us beyond the balcony! That view was the face of the deep, gorge wall right by our window as well as the far banks of the river, all floodlit for our viewing pleasure. It looked fantastic in all its burnished gold and amber and continued to be lit up like this until after dinner had finished! And so a rather special time was had, spa-music playing, as we pampered ourselves with all the complementary, fantastic-smelling, bathing goodies they had given us and then wrapping ourselves in the lovely thick, white-cotton bathrobes as we continued to relax on our balcony.
One is shown to one’s intimate dining spot for two
Dinner – and how it is served - is what the Homestead is famous for. At 6.30pm we dragged ourselves off our balcony to join the other houseguests for a fabulous selection of canapés and cocktails, whilst also choosing our wine for the night. A short while after cocktails, each couple were escorted, couple by couple, to each of their intimate dining spots for the night! How fantastic then, for us to be given the best spot of them all, due to the higher “room-status” that we had of the remaining people dining there that night! We were led across the darkened lawn, startling a stalking night heron as we went, over to the cliff-edge and then down a few small candlelit steps that led us to our dining table for the night. The table was beautifully set and lit only with candles. Discreet and very private from anyone elses, it was perched high on a barren, rocky ledge of the Chamberlain gorge, perfectly positioned to overlook the bank of the river opposite, which was all floodlit and golden, casting reflections of the same onto the absolutely still water beneath it. We were to enjoy the stillest of nights with no breeze and yet the temperature was by this stage very pleasant after what had been a humid day.
Dinner then, was served under a blanket of twinkling stars and a clear, expansive sky. We were some 100km from the nearest town and essentially in the middle of nowhere, with four freshwater crocs inhabiting the waters below us – and yet this chef was able to create for us the most sublime food! We began with a House Cured Salmon Gravlax with an advocado and snowpea tendril salad and a nashi pear and dill dressing. This was followed by a sumptuous grilled loin of lamb with cannellini bean, tomato and mint sauté; baby carrots, local beans, and a redcurrant and sage sauce. Our bottle of red went down very well with all of that, as you can imagine! But there was barely enough room for the dark chocolate and griottine cherry cake that came out as the finale, served as it was with a vanilla bean icecream and raspberry sauce. Needless to say, we were valiant and tried our best! (Again, we are sorry to report that no photos exist of this feast – mainly because on this occasion, we were basically in darkness, save for some little candles, and so there was insufficient light for photography. For us though, we have no need of the photos, for it was such a special night that it will remain with us forever!)
As desert was being served, we were told that they were going to feed the crocs afterwards if we wanted to join them. In actual fact this meant feeding
the fish and it is that, that attracts the freshwater crocs living in this section of the river. So, standing on a wide ledge pretty much at the edge of the top of the gorge, with a couple of different floodlights positioned to light up the fish and turtles for our viewing pleasure, we patiently waited for some croc action. Whilst we saw a croc though, he wasn’t very hungry and lost interest quickly but for us the turtles were especially sweet with their comical swimming action of legs seeming to move completely independent of each other as they tried to hurry for the bread!
One enjoys one’s balcony and bed
Finally retiring back to our room, a change into our lovely cotton bathrobes saw us then move out onto our private balcony. With all the floodlights now off and an expansive starry sky being reflected down in the water below, the experience of a Kimberley sky was even more magical than all the other magical starry nights we have had! With just the one night there, it was hard to leave the balcony, still air and sensational water view and - and yet it was hard to miss out on that squidgy marshmallow bed too and so by around 11pm it was off to bed we went!
And now, one get’s the most out of one’s final morning!
By 5a.m the dawn was only just starting and yet, wide awake and not wanting to miss a minute of the room we had use of now until just 10a.m, I was running a bath by 5.30 and in it 20minutes later! With a pot of herbal tea to hand and the bathroom doors open to the outside air, I watched the scene outside turn into full-blown morning and listened to the birdsong. There was time afterwards for a few photos around the grounds and then breakfast awaited. It was a huge menu of choice with some really interesting things on there but in the end we went for some sensational fresh fruits served with Kangaroo Island Honeyed Sheeps Yoghurt, and some homemade wholegrain sourdough bread with scrambled eggs with mushrooms. Divine! After that, it was Gordon’s turn to enjoy the bath in what was to be our last hour in the room! By 10a.m, with all our stuff packed up and taken into the car, all that remained was to enjoy the last 2 hours we were allowed on the property, by sitting by the pool and wondering how we were ever going to leave not just the Homstead but also the Kimberley. It was with a heavy heart when we pulled out of that driveway I can tell you – but what a blast! And yes, you’ve
Guessed it – WE WILL BE BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Despite always having wanted to stay here, how we actually came to overnight here was quite by lucky chance. You see, you have to book ELQ Homestead often months in advance so, when we set off on our trip round Australia we decided against booking in on this year-long trip, simply because we had no real idea of itinerary, which made it very difficult to plan that far ahead. So it didn’t even occur to me then, in the first few nights of bush-camping within the Park, to ask about whether there was, by any remote chance a room to be had at such short notice. However, having met a couple on the Explosion Gorge tour who had just had stayed there for a night the day before - and were waxing lyrical about it – our long-held desire to do the Homestead was passionately re-ignited! So much so that when we got back to the Swinging Arm Bar after the tour I asked whether a room was by any chance available - and would you believe it there was! And it got better than that! Whilst there was one of the “cheaper” rooms available in two days time, it did not have the sensational views, balcony and bathtub that the “Chamberlain Suite” or the sought after ‘room next door’ were famous for. Imagine our delight then when I was informed that the “room next door” WAS available however – but for one night only (usual requirement is a minimum 2 night stay) and for a date after we were due to leave our bush-camp and move on. Needless to say we jumped at it - and rejigged our travel itinerary so that we could come back to the park a few days later just to make this dream come true! This then, is our story and the photos we’ll treasure! We hope you get suitably green with envy – or better still, inspired to come here for yourselves one day! (And if any of you want to gift me another night here for my birthday I would love you forever!)
One arrives at one’s Homestead
The minute we made the turn marked “private” on a road we had gone up and down on most days en-route to our bush-camp, we knew it was real and that after all this time we actually were going to stay at the Homestead! Knowing that we would be getting only “posh nosh” during our stay, I was busily scoffing a last bag of crisps (!!) when before I knew it we were at the Homestead itself and someone was already coming out to greet us! Imagine my horror then at possibly being caught inflagrantè with a cheapy bag of crisps in my hand and a mouth stuffed with them! It was all Gordon could do to jump out of the car and go over to the woman and accept her greeting, thereby buying me a few frantic seconds where I ducked down into the floor-well of my seat, trying to finish crunching the crisps and swallow them! That done, I quickly brushed myself off, cleaned my greasy hands and stepped out of the car in a manner as if to say “Hello, I arrive at exclusive Homesteads all the time!”
After exchanging greetings at the side of the car one was asked if one wanted ones car parked - (even though it was only to be left a yard or so away!) One politely declined of course – but it was more a case that we were far too embarrassed to let her get in our messy, dusty 4WD lined with the offending crisp packet and a couple of damp towels from the morning’s shower, that were adding a certain aroma to the vehicle!
Upon that polite decline then, one was, without further ado, escorted onto the premises, with one’s overnight bag being carried in by the woman herself. Jeez she must have wondered what the hell was in it though, as it was so heavy - but to tell you the truth, after a month of bush-camping you need all the toiletries and implements you can muster, to scrub yourself clean and be worthy of residing in a Homestead!
So, as one was led in and escorted over to the bar, one was then asked whether one would prefer a champagne or a beer. I chose the champers of course and Gordon the cold beer! Before she even poured them out though, we were promptly being handed a little basket of pristine white, fluffy, rolled up flannels - ice-cold, so that one could “refresh” one’s face from the heat of the day! And then, as the drinks were handed to us, our host smiled and said “Welcome to El Questro Homestead!” Welcome indeed!
One is shown to one’s very luxurious room
With only a few sips of champagne and beer drank, one was invited to bring both to our room which would now be shown to one! We were led along a delightful dark-timber walkway, lined at intervals with soft maidenhair ferns lit up by the filtered light upon them and soon arrived at our door. As that door was opened we instantly saw the most amazing view and sensationally appointed room, felt the wonderfully cold air from the aircon, smelt the gorgeously fresh, clean aroma of lemongrass and heard the soft, relaxing spa-music already playing inside! Needless to say, for the next 45minutes prior to lunch, we enjoyed this room of ours - taking photos of it all, admiring the sensational exclusive view from our balcony; checking out the fridge (and squealing more with delight at the jar of home-baked cookies than at all the complementary drinks inside it); jumping in the egg-shaped, freestanding bathtub to try it out for size; flopping onto the king-sized bed to test its squidginess (and I can testify it’s the biggest marshmallow I have ever slept on or in!); and generally just finishing off our drinks with a few congratulatory self-toasts! Having stayed at quite a few luxurious or expensive places in our previous careers, what we loved about the Homestead was that it is designed to feel more like a home than a hotel. That’s why when we arrived into the main lounge room, there was no reception desk, no sign for a night bellman, and no cash register at the bar (all the alcohol is complementary). We also loved the note in our room that stated that if we’d like a beverage, then we were to feel free to help ourselves from the fridge, to the coffee plunger or the extensive wooden box of various tea selections. Likewise, if we wanted an early morning cup of tea or glass of fresh OJ in our room (without having to go to the fridge!), then all we had to do was simply to advise someone of this the night before and they would drop it to our room at the designated time! Well, if as they suggested in this note, that they wanted me to feel like I could call this place “home”, then I think it’s fair to say that they succeeded!
One is seated for lunch
At 1pm it was time for lunch, with all 12 of us being seated on the long, dark-timbered veranda, at a stylishly set table which had colours to complement those of the natural surrounds we could see around us. And the view Gordon and I had of those surrounds, was nothing short of spectacular! The Homestead has a complete, uninterrupted eagles-eye view of the immense Kimberley wilderness. Every tree, shrub and blade of grass in its manicured grounds, I was told, were planted with the aim of creating an extraordinary oasis. As our eyes spanned across the lush green lawn (a weird sight after so much dust for so long on our travels!), down to the beautiful swimming pool, the cliffs-edge of the gorge and beyond that to the wonderful Chamberlain River below it and it’s tree-lined far banks, we thought we had landed in heaven! But heaven, it would seem, actually appeared when lunch did! A more than amply portioned, mixed Seafood Salad – of Barramundi, Ocean Trout, King Fish, Calamari and Scallops with a Thai Basil, Chilli and Lime Vinagriete – sent our tastebuds tingling, along with freshly made sourdough bread and plenty of rather special Riesling to accompany it. Would you believe it, we still even had room after that, for the English Trifle that followed - complete with its strawberries, sherry and crème anglaise! (I am sorry to report that no photos of any our food were taken during our stay - I know that’s not like us but then somehow it didn’t seem quite appropriate to be getting down close to our plates with the camera, at a table of 10 other diners, some of whom were perhaps a bit more well-heeled than us! So we will leave it to your imaginations instead!) Nevertheless, slightly more well-monied people than us or not, a delightful hour was spent with everyone chatting to one another and swapping stories from all their walks of life!
One is chauffered to a very private, exclusive rendezvous for two
As special guests of the Homestead, one is permitted to do a number of tours within El Questro park for free and a complete, personalized itinerary can even be drawn up for one, depending on how one wishes to spend one’s time. Given that we were staying only one night and had been seeing the sights of the park during the nine days we bush-camped, the main emphasis that we wanted, was to just enjoy our room and the Homestead. However there was just one trip that we did indulge in, simply because we had deliberately left it for while we were houseguests. The reason for this was that if we did it when at the Homestead, we would get a much more exclusive experience of it. The trip in question was a trip out to Zebedee Springs – closed by midday to every other man and his dog visiting the park, but available in the afternoon ONLY, for the exclusive use of Homestead guests. While we had been bush-camping at ELQ we were always hearing of the springs being already busy by 7am and heaving for the rest of the day after that after that, sometimes with 50 or 60 people! (remember, we were then in school holidays and there were bloody Victorians everywhere!). How amazing then, to not have to be there with every man and his dog and how much more amazing to be guaranteed an exclusive time there for the two of us, without even any of the remaining 10 houseguests wanting to go there on that day! Wow!
So, no sooner had one finished lunch at the table, one’s picnic bag was being packed (“Would you like to take a bottle of champagne or some beers”), complete with bottle opener, glassware and a couple of pool towels. One was then led by one’s chauffer to the Homestead’s awaiting 4WD, whereupon one was driven down to and escorted into Zebedee Springs, some 20 minutes away. Zebedee Springs is a veritable Garden of Eden - a rich pocket of heavily covered rainforest, lush pandanus, maidenhair ferns, livistona palms and permanent, mineral-rich thermal waters at a constant temperature of 32 degrees. The waters of Zebedee Springs have their origins in rainwater that fell centuries ago and probably a great distance away. Emanating from the base of an unnamed 200m cliff, these spring waters cascade over large rocks and into a string of spa-like pools. This then was to be the setting of for our quiet, intimate rendezvous! Upon arrival one’s champagne bottle was popped open and one was told that one could stay as one as long wanted. All one needed to do when one was finished, was to make one’s way back down to the car! And so a rather lovely couple of hours were spent drinking the bubbles in one’s glass while the bubbles of the thermal springs were busily bubbling up one’s arse!! There were of course also the photography moments and slippery rock-clambering (with tripod, lol!), followed by some skinny dipping, as we indulged in our exclusive status!
Frolicking done, one then pampers oneself before dinner
Back at the Homestead, there was just time for a beer and another champers as we sat by the pool on the lawn and watched the sun dip down behind the gorge, before then retiring to our room for some leisurely time spent getting ready for dinner! And what fun that was too! We have never been anywhere before where we have been able to stand side by side in front of a free-standing bath tub, enjoying the wonderful jet of hot water from a rather huge showerhead (one for each of us)whilst simultaneously looking out onto the view in front of us beyond the balcony! That view was the face of the deep, gorge wall right by our window as well as the far banks of the river, all floodlit for our viewing pleasure. It looked fantastic in all its burnished gold and amber and continued to be lit up like this until after dinner had finished! And so a rather special time was had, spa-music playing, as we pampered ourselves with all the complementary, fantastic-smelling, bathing goodies they had given us and then wrapping ourselves in the lovely thick, white-cotton bathrobes as we continued to relax on our balcony.
One is shown to one’s intimate dining spot for two
Dinner – and how it is served - is what the Homestead is famous for. At 6.30pm we dragged ourselves off our balcony to join the other houseguests for a fabulous selection of canapés and cocktails, whilst also choosing our wine for the night. A short while after cocktails, each couple were escorted, couple by couple, to each of their intimate dining spots for the night! How fantastic then, for us to be given the best spot of them all, due to the higher “room-status” that we had of the remaining people dining there that night! We were led across the darkened lawn, startling a stalking night heron as we went, over to the cliff-edge and then down a few small candlelit steps that led us to our dining table for the night. The table was beautifully set and lit only with candles. Discreet and very private from anyone elses, it was perched high on a barren, rocky ledge of the Chamberlain gorge, perfectly positioned to overlook the bank of the river opposite, which was all floodlit and golden, casting reflections of the same onto the absolutely still water beneath it. We were to enjoy the stillest of nights with no breeze and yet the temperature was by this stage very pleasant after what had been a humid day.
Dinner then, was served under a blanket of twinkling stars and a clear, expansive sky. We were some 100km from the nearest town and essentially in the middle of nowhere, with four freshwater crocs inhabiting the waters below us – and yet this chef was able to create for us the most sublime food! We began with a House Cured Salmon Gravlax with an advocado and snowpea tendril salad and a nashi pear and dill dressing. This was followed by a sumptuous grilled loin of lamb with cannellini bean, tomato and mint sauté; baby carrots, local beans, and a redcurrant and sage sauce. Our bottle of red went down very well with all of that, as you can imagine! But there was barely enough room for the dark chocolate and griottine cherry cake that came out as the finale, served as it was with a vanilla bean icecream and raspberry sauce. Needless to say, we were valiant and tried our best! (Again, we are sorry to report that no photos exist of this feast – mainly because on this occasion, we were basically in darkness, save for some little candles, and so there was insufficient light for photography. For us though, we have no need of the photos, for it was such a special night that it will remain with us forever!)
As desert was being served, we were told that they were going to feed the crocs afterwards if we wanted to join them. In actual fact this meant feeding
the fish and it is that, that attracts the freshwater crocs living in this section of the river. So, standing on a wide ledge pretty much at the edge of the top of the gorge, with a couple of different floodlights positioned to light up the fish and turtles for our viewing pleasure, we patiently waited for some croc action. Whilst we saw a croc though, he wasn’t very hungry and lost interest quickly but for us the turtles were especially sweet with their comical swimming action of legs seeming to move completely independent of each other as they tried to hurry for the bread!
One enjoys one’s balcony and bed
Finally retiring back to our room, a change into our lovely cotton bathrobes saw us then move out onto our private balcony. With all the floodlights now off and an expansive starry sky being reflected down in the water below, the experience of a Kimberley sky was even more magical than all the other magical starry nights we have had! With just the one night there, it was hard to leave the balcony, still air and sensational water view and - and yet it was hard to miss out on that squidgy marshmallow bed too and so by around 11pm it was off to bed we went!
And now, one get’s the most out of one’s final morning!
By 5a.m the dawn was only just starting and yet, wide awake and not wanting to miss a minute of the room we had use of now until just 10a.m, I was running a bath by 5.30 and in it 20minutes later! With a pot of herbal tea to hand and the bathroom doors open to the outside air, I watched the scene outside turn into full-blown morning and listened to the birdsong. There was time afterwards for a few photos around the grounds and then breakfast awaited. It was a huge menu of choice with some really interesting things on there but in the end we went for some sensational fresh fruits served with Kangaroo Island Honeyed Sheeps Yoghurt, and some homemade wholegrain sourdough bread with scrambled eggs with mushrooms. Divine! After that, it was Gordon’s turn to enjoy the bath in what was to be our last hour in the room! By 10a.m, with all our stuff packed up and taken into the car, all that remained was to enjoy the last 2 hours we were allowed on the property, by sitting by the pool and wondering how we were ever going to leave not just the Homstead but also the Kimberley. It was with a heavy heart when we pulled out of that driveway I can tell you – but what a blast! And yes, you’ve
Guessed it – WE WILL BE BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Post 18 - Greetings From East Kimberley, WA - Part 3: The Gibb River Road/El Questro - Journal
“If one were to paint this country in its true colours, I doubt it would be believed. It would be said at least that the artist exaggerated greatly, for never have I seen such richness and variety of hue as in these ranges”
(Extract from the novel “Kings in Grass Castles” by Mary Durack, a historical novel about the pioneering history of the Kimberley, which I have loved reading!)
Hard though it was to leave our stunning bush camp at Home Valley, we nevertheless packed up at the crack of dawn to drive the hour further north up the Gibb and into El Questro Wilderness Park - a private, million acre property that has invested huge amounts of money into making itself “the” place to come in the Kimberley in terms of seeing everything. We had to get up at “a sparrows fart” of course, because of those bloody Victorians and school holidays! What we were after, was to snare ourselves one of the 25 bush-camps along the Pentecost River, far away from the chaos and mayhem of El Questro’s main camping area – and to do this we had been told we would have to get there by 7a.m, hope we are first in line and that someone would be leaving a bush-camp that morning! Grrrrr! Well there must have been a God and he must have been smiling down on us that day, for we landed ourselves the absolute best and most remote camping spot of them all, with heaps of space and shade and complete river-frontage. Not the same sort of spectacular riverside camping as Home Valley but still absolutely beautiful in its own right – and far from the maddening crowds! El Questro may well be more “commercial” than any of our other stays along the Gibb, but by the same token we must admit that you really can do a huge amount of things here and it has some amazing scenery on offer! Furthermore, during the 9 gorgeous nights we had in our secluded site, we managed to remain quite unaffected by the noise and hullabaloo of school holidays and enjoyed a 100% authentic wilderness, bush-camping and solitude experience. This too may have been helped along by the fact that due to my ankle injury from Home Valley, we spent our first few days (the last few days of the school holidays), doing some activities that the masses WEREN’T doing! And so we enjoyed a very exhilarating chopper flight, drove some 4WD tracks on the property, joined a small group on a gorge cruise and even hired a small boat ourselves, to be just one of 3 little morning boaters on the Chamberlain River. There have also been wonderfully quiet days just enjoying our camp – reading books, listening to Peaceful Doves cooing, the small squeaks of double-barred finches and the babbling of the river just downstream from us. Breakfasting like kings, we have sat down on our recliners to a plate of Gordon's superb, home-made damper rolls, all crispy and still hot out of our oven - and devoured with butter and lashings of Maggie Beer jams! In a campsite like this one it has been all too easy to while away the time watching the crystal clear reflections in the water from the trees on the opposite bank. For a moment they have you believing there’s a whole underwater forest down there until a bird swoops down to get an insect and the ripples bring you back to reality! Just sitting and “being” of course is also when you can have some wonderful wildlife moments – such as the elusive, red-legged jabiru that flew along the river the morning we arrived; the cheeky sulpher-crested white cockatoo who often came down onto the dark-grey pebbles at the waters edge to drink and admire its own reflection; the sunbathing Water Monitor who kept betraying his presence by the rustle of leaves; and of course the wild bulls who often came to graze on the bushes just yards from our tent! There could have been far worse locations to have to rest up the foot I guess and although it was a disappointment to still not be able to join Gordon on a couple of El Questro’s famous gorge walks in the end, we still had the most amazing time! We even managed to get a couple of nights in at the Swinging Arm Bar near the main campsite, for some great music, rodeo-style entertainment and campfire action! And of course there were some funny moments and bane-of-the-traveller happenings. So do sit back and enjoy our tales and the best we could manage of trying to capture the impossible in our photo album – namely the sheer beauty and expansiveness of the East Kimberley, which really has to be felt and seen in the flesh to fully understand and experience it!
A Bush Doctor’s Lot - more than just a “band-aid job”
There’s an amazing service out here in outback/rural Australia called the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which, as its name suggests, involves a plane and a doctor going to remote places to give emergency medical aid. However, what befell me as I slipped and injured myself while out doing a gorge walk, could not really be deemed a medical emergency and so instead of the Flying Doctor Service I received a different kind. The Bush Doctor Service. AKA – Gordon! Now as it turns out, Gordon was a bush doctor par excellence – pretty au-fait with bandages, saline irrigation, plasters, antiseptic cream and also on how to deal with one very squeamish, zero-pain-threshold patient! Coming down a slope I had lost my footing somehow and fell awkwardly into some big old gnarly branch sticking up out of the ground. The result was a nasty cut and puncture wound about a ¼ inch wide that decided to start dripping blood immediately. Of course, the big concern with any cut or puncture wound in the dusty, sandy, dirty outback is trying to get it cleaned out properly, covered and keep it free from infection. And sometimes, if you are the bush doctor, to do THAT, you need to at least be given permission to get near it! Poor Gordon! Now they teach you in First Aid training that you have always to reassure the patient and keep them calm. Well for this bush doctor that meant reassuring me that no big bad slithery snake would get me during the time it would take for Gordon to go back to the car the get the First Aid Kit! I didn’t feel reassured at all but knowing he had to go, I resigned myself to waiting for him in my spreadeagled positon on the rocks of the slope I had injured myself on, rather dramatically staining a rock dark red as I passed the time, and being attacked not by a snake but by a crazed little Willy Wagtail who was aggressively flying around my head and chattering like a machine-gun firing off a thousand rounds – and all because he didn’t like that I was near his nest in the tree! In what felt like an eternity, my bush doctor returned, his forehead dripping with sweat while my ankle was dripping with blood! If you ask Gordon yourself, he would say that on a scale of 1-10, I am a 9+ and in the “dreadful patient” category! Cleaning the wound out with some bottled water (to much groaning and whimpering from me along with instructions to do what he needs to do WITHOUT TOUCHING anything!), he strongly urged me to get stitches but I wasn’t having any of that ridiculous medical advice! No way Jose! So he had no choice but to put an antiseptic plaster on and a protective bandage and I hobbled back with him to the car.
Every day for the next week or so, came the twice-daily ritual of “inspecting the wound” – a farce really. Me, leaned fully back on a recliner in case I faint (I am super squeamish), Gordon sitting on a clapstool at my feet. First up is for him to unwrap the bandage with the utmost of care because, yes, you’ve guessed it, he has to do what he needs to do WITHOUT TOUCHING THE WOUND! Once the bandage is undone Bush Doctor Gordon gestures with his hand for me to do the next part, which is the peeling off of the plaster. You see I am too squeamish (or too much of a control-freak?!) to let him do it plus I figure I am the one, not him, who can feel whether the pressure hurts so I may as well be the one to peel the thing off. This peeling off of the plaster though, takes a good 5mins or so with me doing it – gingerly doing a bit at a time (it HURTS, OK?!) and at no point can I look at what’s being revealed…that’s the Bush Doctor’s job! So, as it’s slowly coming off, I am looking away and asking him what he thinks it looks like and a whole other raft of questions which every day went something like this:
Me: ‘What’s it look like?”
Gordon: “It looks Ok so far”
“Any infection or redness?”
“No, not that I can see?”
“What about the swelling – is it still there?”
“Yep, it’s still there”
“More or less than it was yesterday?”
(here there was one of two answers depending on the progress of the wound! If the reply was “About the same” it would lead to a whole sub-dialogue in which I would deem this bad and no progress and Gordon would have to work hard to reassure me that a maintained state meant it wasn’t getting worse! Obviously I was more consoled when the reply would be “a bit better”!)
“How much better on a scale of 1-10?” (no answer ever given!)
“Is it weeping”
“No” (though I think Gordon nearly was at this point!)
“There’s really no gunk?’
“No”
“Are you sure?”
“YES!”
“Should I take the antibiotics we have?”
“No, not yet, not while there’s no sign of infection”
“OK, well, it really hurts….what are you thinking to do with it then?”
“I just want to clean it up a bit again”
“is it really necessary to do that?”
“Well, I’d LIKE to do it”
“But it hurts so couldn’t you leave it?”
‘Well, I’d rather not”
“Why, what are you worried about – do you think it could still get infected?’
(and back down the rabbit hole of anxious questions about THAT!)
“No, I just want to do the best thing”
“Well can you get the old antiseptic cream off without touching the wound at all, just by using the top of a tissue?”
“Yep, I should be able to do that”
“NO TOUCHING IT THOUGH, OK?”
“OK”
“OK then, go on…….(seconds later)…are you on it now?”
Yep, it’s all done”
‘So what next?”
“I’ll put Paraderm on a new plaster and put it on”
“Well be gentle OK ‘cos it HURTS!”
Oh dear! Poor, poor, suffering Gordon! If any of you want to treat him when you next see him, buy him some beers as I think he may well still be in need! As for me, needless to say it’s been a HUGE inconvenience to be so incapacitated with the injury and I had to miss out on some walks I had wanted to do. The wound took 10 days just to form a thin scab at the bottom of the cut but even now as I write, almost 2 weeks later, the skin on both sides has not joined up! Mind you, annoying though it’s been, not only cows can “milk it” – so too can an extremely savvy patient! And so for the first few days at least, this bush doctor doubled up in his role as one of bush-butler also, serving meals and drinks to someone who, after all, (and with all that swelling), needed to keep their foot raised and their bum firmly in a chair!
Mad Bulls and Englishmen – A Tale of Aussie prowess!
Crossing the darkened lawn one night after a session at the Swinging Arm Bar, Gordon and I both got a little more than we bargained for! What looked to be like a couple near the railing we were on course to approach, actually turned out, as we neared, to be one of the wild, red, Kimberley Short Horn Bulls of the property, that you aren’t actually supposed to go near if you see one! Ooops, too late! This wild beast decides we are a threat before we can even compute that HE is actually a bull and, in a flash of his tail, he stomps his hooves and goes to give chase! I am terrified and peg it (one-leg-it peg-it queen!) as fast as my good ankle will let me, towards the log railing. I am convinced that this bull is on my tail and yet later on, Gordon tells me that wasn’t the case at all because Gordon was too busy distracting it away from me! But I am oblivious to this at the time, trying to run fast - but knowing I am going really slow - and confused as to why the bull hasn’t speared me yet! Meanwhile, in distracting the bull, Gordon ended up not being able to escape himself! His brainwave solution to this was to hide behind a tree – not a tree as fat as a boab, but a rather thin tree! As soon as Gordon stopped behind the tree, the bull stopped on the opposite side of the tree, looking at him! It was here that my good man drew on all those years of taking penalty shots in soccer! He jumped to the left, which the bull copied, then to the right, which the bull copied again, and then a quick left-right dart that momentarily stumped the bull, thereby facilitating his own escape over the fence to safety! Hilarious! What the pair of us must have looked like to any onlooker, I don’t know!
Breakdown Blues – when things go wrong, as they sometimes do….
They say that to go on the Gibb River Road and not have anything go wrong with your car or equipment, is unheard of - regardless of how long you are traveling on it for. And if you are doing the painful day-long drive to Mitchell Falls, forced to go at only 15km/h over the most corrugated, roughest tracks known to man, well then it has often been known for whole campertrailers to be written-off, car axles to break, the whole suspension to break beyond repair and to incur an extremely hefty fee to be towed back to the nearest repair place! Although we didn’t do that exceedingly rough track up to Mitchell Falls, we have nevertheless had quite a bumpy ride of it all since Dampier Peninsula and it was always only going to be a matter of time before things started to fail.
How best then, to describe to the English readers amongst you, what it is like to drive over the corrugations of the Gibb River Road? Hmmm, let me see – well, it is like driving over invisible cattle grids…..but doing that ALL the time! The car shudders and judders and vibrates and you think it’s going to just fall apart in a heap. There’s a constant vibration going from your feet right up to your head and often I have needed my neck-support around me to stop from getting a mild whiplash! There’s so much dirt in the window frames that THEY judder too, when wound down, not to mention squeak like polystyrene breeze blocks do when they are rubbed together. A constant bass drone accompanies you the whole way, deafening at times so that you can’t hear yourself talk let alone any music you had hoped to listen to! At times the car is vibrating so much it’s drifting sideways across the track (that was the case in Cape Leveque) and sometimes we have needed to stop to put the bonnet up and reconnect a wire that has juddered loose! Whenever a car comes there’s a ritual to be done – which is to immediately wind the window up and put the aircon on, ready for the assault of dust that’s about to strike. The minute the car has passed – and often these nutters are belting it down the track – a huge cloud of dust is sent up into the air. This was either red dirt in Cape Leveque or, white dirt if, like on the Gibb, there’s a bit of gravel on the ground. Either way it gives rise to a temporary “whiteout” which means you have to slow down - even if THEY didn’t - and you can smell the dust in the car despite the windows being up.
So, if all THAT is what is happening to us inside the car, you can imagine what is happening to the tyres on the car and the equipment in the front box of the trailer! Well, things started to break down when we were camped in Home Valley, starting with our generator. The generator of course is the thing that generates power for us when we are bushcamping and away from mains power, so that we can then in turn recharge the batteries in our trailer that run the freezer, fridge and tent lights. At the time this wasn’t too much of a problem when it happened, as we can always go about 5 or 6 days without having to charge any of our batteries and we knew that we would be arriving in El Questro two days later, where we believed we could get the generator repaired in the garage there. However, upon arriving at El Questro it turned out that they did not have the parts to repair our generator, nor did he believe that the nearest towms of Wyndham or Kunnunara would either! So now we were facing 9 days bushcamping, with no generator! To overcome this, Gordon had to remove one of the trailer batteries and take it down to the workshop to be recharged by them and, to help out further, we had to run our fridge, freezer, computers and other things off the car batteries via the inverter in the car - a really cool device that turns the 12v coming out of the car into 240 volt mains power. Then, to make sure that running all these things off the car battery didn’t wear the car batteries down, we then had to run the car engine for a couple of hours each day at camp, so that they in turn could recharge! (A note to ourselves: we are going to get a solar panel! We would have got one before leaving Perth but we were given to understand that though they were environmentally friendly, they were not as good as generators! Of course, if we had had one at this stage, life wouldn’t have been quite so complicated!)
At some point during all of these shenanigans at El Questro camp, our freezer then decided to die! We believe that this was quite possibly due to the jolting around it had been receiving on the road for the past month. Fortunately for us it happened during the early hours of the morning, so everything was still very cold - albeit defrosted. It was also a blessing that it happened with just 4 days or so to go before we were to leave the Gibb, so there was not too much food left in it (it would have been disastrous if it had happened 3 or 4 days into the Gibb, I can tell you!). We did a big cook-up of what was left – prawns, which we shelled and added to the ex-frozen vegetables to make a curry for the fridge; sausages that were cooked and put into the fridge; mince, that was added to the tomato-based sauce for dinner that night and the fruits, which were eaten with yogurt there and then. With all of that, and knowing that we still had our pantry box supplies and that we were eating at the Swinging Arm Bar’s BBQ the next night, we were able to have enough food left for the remainder of the trip!
When a couple of days later the freezer inexplicably came back from the dead, it seemed as if whatever the universe was throwing at us, we were conquering. Of course by this stage we had nothing to put into it Then a day later, the fridge decided it was IT’S turn to die! “Operation Switchback” was then commenced – with all the food having to be taken out of the dead fridge (R.I.P!) and transferred into the newly enlivened freezer, which, by turning the temperature down, we were able to turn into a fridge!
What a palaver – and you can only imagine Gordon’s grave concerns for the coldness of his beers! Not to mention his headache – when he woke the next morning to discover a flat tyre on the car! Poor bugger! On what was supposed to have been a day of rest for him after all these events (and the 3hr gorge walk he had done the day before!), there came into being an hour or so of physical work changing the tyre, and then driving the car back down to the main camping grounds to get the flat tyre fixed! All was good in the end. However, some two days later on the very last morning, as we had finally left the ELQ property and were back on the last stretch of the Gibb, that same flat tyre decided to shred! Poor Gordy! As if setting down our camp that morning hadn’t been strenuous enough, he now had to change the trye by the roadside, in the strange onslaught of humidity we were having at the time, while many an extremely rude passing vehicle (undoubtedly Victorian!) zoomed by and shrouded him in a cloud of white dust that hung for ages in the air around him!
Now before I end this saga of breakdown blues let me just tell you, that if you think they were merely related to the car and our own equipment, you’d be sorely mistaken. During all the above fuss and bother while at our camp in El Questro, we also had to deal with a breakdown one morning while out cruising on the Chamberlain River in our little hire-tinny! What had started out with the good intentions of being to have breakfast for two on the serene and tranquil waters, ended up turning into a bit of a fiasco when the motor died on us! We weren’t quite sure when exactly it happened, as the whole point of these battery-operated motors is that they are practically silent, so that you can enjoy the peacefulness of the gorge! However, we think it happened after about 20mins and were alerted to it when we didn’t seem to be making any progress forwards! Luckily, there was just enough power in the motor to get us over to a rocky ledge on the opposite side of the gorge, where we could tie up the boat to a small tree growing out of the very steep walls. While we breakfasted there, a much larger tour boat replete with tourists, passed us by and promised to tow us back when they turned round again later on up the river. By now however, I was starting to not be very happy at all about being stopped and tied up anywhere. Especially given that earlier, in order to get me in a small tinny in the first place on waters containing a saltwater croc, Gordon had said the reason we would be fine, would be because the vibration and sound of the motor would scare any croc away. WELL NOW WE DIDN’T HAVE A MOTOR! I am not too proud to admit that there are times in my life – especially if I am in fear - when I may act a little ungraciously. This then, was one of those times. Which means that what ought to have been a relaxed, tranquil, and composed scene was transformed into me losing the plot a bit through paranoia about crocs, and insisting that we not wait to be towed back but instead that we should paddle back ourselves with the paddles in the boat! Given the cross-wind we had, the distance we had to cover and the fact that Gordon knew he would have to do most of the power work himself, he was understandably reluctant to do what I was shrieking at him to do! He also knew we were in no real danger from crocs at all - but you see I was a lost cause and so that fell on deaf ears with me! So in the end we untied and Gordon took up position at the front of the boat. Standing with paddle in hand, he embarked on the lengthy paddle against the wind and back to shore, looking as if he should be on a gondola in Venice rather than on a river with a saltwater croc in it! Poor darling - though in fairness, as he was about to drop with exhaustion, I did pitch in and help with the rowing and together we did the final stretch back to shore! Just as we arrived at shore, the larger tour boat came into view around the bend and was pitched up beside us by the time we were carrying the dead motor and the battery off the boat! The tour guide came straight over to me, gushing as to how bad she felt about not having got back soon enough to tow us. She then promptly handed me an ice-cold bottle of bubbles left over from their tour and a cup of fresh fruits! Imagine the look on Gordon’s face as I smiled sweetly at her, thanked her and said that this was just the thing I needed after such a hard and traumatic morning!!!!!!
Choppers away!
Due to my ankle injury and not being able to walk anywhere, the first thing we did during our stay at El Questro, was a 1hr doorless helicopter-flight bonanza! What a fantastic experience it was too – it was not the first time either of us had been in a helicopter but it was the first time either of us had ever beenin a doorless one and the first time either of us had ever had the opportunity to fly south-north over a 1 million acre property, located in some of the most remote country of W.A! It was even more exhilarating, in a way, than the Microlight flight we did back in Ningaloo. This was because we were so buffeted by the strong gusts of cross-wind and not only could we feel it hit the chopper but we could also feel it whizzing through the doorless openings on both mine and Gordon’s side – which felt a bit strange because of course at the same time, we were having the experience of being INSIDE the plane and therefore not completely exposed to the elements, as with the Microlite! Plus of course there was the constant deafening noise of the rotary blades, sounding like artillery fire! Only once, very early in the flight, did I make the mistake of putting my right arm out of the door opening to point to something in the scenery behind me - only to have my arm whipped back against the chopper’s body by the downward pressure of the air around the rotary blades above us! It felt strong enough to whip my arm out of its socket if I had kept it there a minute longer! It was quite a different photography experience too, to be leaning out of a doorless chopper, with the wind forcing itself on to you. I was busy trying to keep my windswept hair out of my eyes so I could see (a problem not shared by Gordon) and keep the camera steady enough in order to quickly take the shot – and all the while the helicopter is vibrating, juddering and sometimes itself getting knocked sideways by a sudden cross-wind gust! Naturally, both Gordon and I had our camera strings round our necks and wrists to make sure we didn’t lose them - though at times for me I nearly strangled myself in the name of art! I guess after 45mins of taking photos something had to go wrong and it did! A valiant attempt by me to “get the shot” resulted in my sunglasses literally being blown right of my face! Bugger! As the pilot joked, “Oh well, I’m sure they’ll turn up in a few days on some wallaby’s face!!” When all is said and done though, as with the Microlight, at no time did I feel unsafe - even though it is widely agreed that helicopters are more dangerous to fly in! It was all worth the extra cost of a replacement pair of sunnies, as the scenery we flew over was nothing short of breathtaking and spectacular! ELQ from the air is a vast tapestry of colours, shapes and textures, rivers, gorges and waterfalls. Amongst the browns and dull greens of the Dry, there were also the most amazing terracottas, burnished golds and deep fiery reds. Seeing the property from the air is also the only way to really appreciate not only the scale of its vastness but also the vastness of the Kimberley as a whole, which has many other stations of a million acres or more! It also made you realize its size when you knew that the property had more cattle on it (about 7,000 head) than any other station on the Gibb and yet, so vast is the land on which they can roam, we didn’t even see one of them! The size of the terrain was also clear to us when the pilot choppered us over a very remote part of the property called “The Maze” – an intricate, steep-sided, winding gorge, that we were able to get an overall birds-eye view of! It took a group of people who wanted to be flown and dropped down there the week before, a total of 6 days to hike through! Amazing!
And so it was, after an hour of memorable thrills, we returned back to the heli-pad – Gordon to get a coffee and me to get a brush and some new sunglasses!
(Extract from the novel “Kings in Grass Castles” by Mary Durack, a historical novel about the pioneering history of the Kimberley, which I have loved reading!)
Hard though it was to leave our stunning bush camp at Home Valley, we nevertheless packed up at the crack of dawn to drive the hour further north up the Gibb and into El Questro Wilderness Park - a private, million acre property that has invested huge amounts of money into making itself “the” place to come in the Kimberley in terms of seeing everything. We had to get up at “a sparrows fart” of course, because of those bloody Victorians and school holidays! What we were after, was to snare ourselves one of the 25 bush-camps along the Pentecost River, far away from the chaos and mayhem of El Questro’s main camping area – and to do this we had been told we would have to get there by 7a.m, hope we are first in line and that someone would be leaving a bush-camp that morning! Grrrrr! Well there must have been a God and he must have been smiling down on us that day, for we landed ourselves the absolute best and most remote camping spot of them all, with heaps of space and shade and complete river-frontage. Not the same sort of spectacular riverside camping as Home Valley but still absolutely beautiful in its own right – and far from the maddening crowds! El Questro may well be more “commercial” than any of our other stays along the Gibb, but by the same token we must admit that you really can do a huge amount of things here and it has some amazing scenery on offer! Furthermore, during the 9 gorgeous nights we had in our secluded site, we managed to remain quite unaffected by the noise and hullabaloo of school holidays and enjoyed a 100% authentic wilderness, bush-camping and solitude experience. This too may have been helped along by the fact that due to my ankle injury from Home Valley, we spent our first few days (the last few days of the school holidays), doing some activities that the masses WEREN’T doing! And so we enjoyed a very exhilarating chopper flight, drove some 4WD tracks on the property, joined a small group on a gorge cruise and even hired a small boat ourselves, to be just one of 3 little morning boaters on the Chamberlain River. There have also been wonderfully quiet days just enjoying our camp – reading books, listening to Peaceful Doves cooing, the small squeaks of double-barred finches and the babbling of the river just downstream from us. Breakfasting like kings, we have sat down on our recliners to a plate of Gordon's superb, home-made damper rolls, all crispy and still hot out of our oven - and devoured with butter and lashings of Maggie Beer jams! In a campsite like this one it has been all too easy to while away the time watching the crystal clear reflections in the water from the trees on the opposite bank. For a moment they have you believing there’s a whole underwater forest down there until a bird swoops down to get an insect and the ripples bring you back to reality! Just sitting and “being” of course is also when you can have some wonderful wildlife moments – such as the elusive, red-legged jabiru that flew along the river the morning we arrived; the cheeky sulpher-crested white cockatoo who often came down onto the dark-grey pebbles at the waters edge to drink and admire its own reflection; the sunbathing Water Monitor who kept betraying his presence by the rustle of leaves; and of course the wild bulls who often came to graze on the bushes just yards from our tent! There could have been far worse locations to have to rest up the foot I guess and although it was a disappointment to still not be able to join Gordon on a couple of El Questro’s famous gorge walks in the end, we still had the most amazing time! We even managed to get a couple of nights in at the Swinging Arm Bar near the main campsite, for some great music, rodeo-style entertainment and campfire action! And of course there were some funny moments and bane-of-the-traveller happenings. So do sit back and enjoy our tales and the best we could manage of trying to capture the impossible in our photo album – namely the sheer beauty and expansiveness of the East Kimberley, which really has to be felt and seen in the flesh to fully understand and experience it!
A Bush Doctor’s Lot - more than just a “band-aid job”
There’s an amazing service out here in outback/rural Australia called the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which, as its name suggests, involves a plane and a doctor going to remote places to give emergency medical aid. However, what befell me as I slipped and injured myself while out doing a gorge walk, could not really be deemed a medical emergency and so instead of the Flying Doctor Service I received a different kind. The Bush Doctor Service. AKA – Gordon! Now as it turns out, Gordon was a bush doctor par excellence – pretty au-fait with bandages, saline irrigation, plasters, antiseptic cream and also on how to deal with one very squeamish, zero-pain-threshold patient! Coming down a slope I had lost my footing somehow and fell awkwardly into some big old gnarly branch sticking up out of the ground. The result was a nasty cut and puncture wound about a ¼ inch wide that decided to start dripping blood immediately. Of course, the big concern with any cut or puncture wound in the dusty, sandy, dirty outback is trying to get it cleaned out properly, covered and keep it free from infection. And sometimes, if you are the bush doctor, to do THAT, you need to at least be given permission to get near it! Poor Gordon! Now they teach you in First Aid training that you have always to reassure the patient and keep them calm. Well for this bush doctor that meant reassuring me that no big bad slithery snake would get me during the time it would take for Gordon to go back to the car the get the First Aid Kit! I didn’t feel reassured at all but knowing he had to go, I resigned myself to waiting for him in my spreadeagled positon on the rocks of the slope I had injured myself on, rather dramatically staining a rock dark red as I passed the time, and being attacked not by a snake but by a crazed little Willy Wagtail who was aggressively flying around my head and chattering like a machine-gun firing off a thousand rounds – and all because he didn’t like that I was near his nest in the tree! In what felt like an eternity, my bush doctor returned, his forehead dripping with sweat while my ankle was dripping with blood! If you ask Gordon yourself, he would say that on a scale of 1-10, I am a 9+ and in the “dreadful patient” category! Cleaning the wound out with some bottled water (to much groaning and whimpering from me along with instructions to do what he needs to do WITHOUT TOUCHING anything!), he strongly urged me to get stitches but I wasn’t having any of that ridiculous medical advice! No way Jose! So he had no choice but to put an antiseptic plaster on and a protective bandage and I hobbled back with him to the car.
Every day for the next week or so, came the twice-daily ritual of “inspecting the wound” – a farce really. Me, leaned fully back on a recliner in case I faint (I am super squeamish), Gordon sitting on a clapstool at my feet. First up is for him to unwrap the bandage with the utmost of care because, yes, you’ve guessed it, he has to do what he needs to do WITHOUT TOUCHING THE WOUND! Once the bandage is undone Bush Doctor Gordon gestures with his hand for me to do the next part, which is the peeling off of the plaster. You see I am too squeamish (or too much of a control-freak?!) to let him do it plus I figure I am the one, not him, who can feel whether the pressure hurts so I may as well be the one to peel the thing off. This peeling off of the plaster though, takes a good 5mins or so with me doing it – gingerly doing a bit at a time (it HURTS, OK?!) and at no point can I look at what’s being revealed…that’s the Bush Doctor’s job! So, as it’s slowly coming off, I am looking away and asking him what he thinks it looks like and a whole other raft of questions which every day went something like this:
Me: ‘What’s it look like?”
Gordon: “It looks Ok so far”
“Any infection or redness?”
“No, not that I can see?”
“What about the swelling – is it still there?”
“Yep, it’s still there”
“More or less than it was yesterday?”
(here there was one of two answers depending on the progress of the wound! If the reply was “About the same” it would lead to a whole sub-dialogue in which I would deem this bad and no progress and Gordon would have to work hard to reassure me that a maintained state meant it wasn’t getting worse! Obviously I was more consoled when the reply would be “a bit better”!)
“How much better on a scale of 1-10?” (no answer ever given!)
“Is it weeping”
“No” (though I think Gordon nearly was at this point!)
“There’s really no gunk?’
“No”
“Are you sure?”
“YES!”
“Should I take the antibiotics we have?”
“No, not yet, not while there’s no sign of infection”
“OK, well, it really hurts….what are you thinking to do with it then?”
“I just want to clean it up a bit again”
“is it really necessary to do that?”
“Well, I’d LIKE to do it”
“But it hurts so couldn’t you leave it?”
‘Well, I’d rather not”
“Why, what are you worried about – do you think it could still get infected?’
(and back down the rabbit hole of anxious questions about THAT!)
“No, I just want to do the best thing”
“Well can you get the old antiseptic cream off without touching the wound at all, just by using the top of a tissue?”
“Yep, I should be able to do that”
“NO TOUCHING IT THOUGH, OK?”
“OK”
“OK then, go on…….(seconds later)…are you on it now?”
Yep, it’s all done”
‘So what next?”
“I’ll put Paraderm on a new plaster and put it on”
“Well be gentle OK ‘cos it HURTS!”
Oh dear! Poor, poor, suffering Gordon! If any of you want to treat him when you next see him, buy him some beers as I think he may well still be in need! As for me, needless to say it’s been a HUGE inconvenience to be so incapacitated with the injury and I had to miss out on some walks I had wanted to do. The wound took 10 days just to form a thin scab at the bottom of the cut but even now as I write, almost 2 weeks later, the skin on both sides has not joined up! Mind you, annoying though it’s been, not only cows can “milk it” – so too can an extremely savvy patient! And so for the first few days at least, this bush doctor doubled up in his role as one of bush-butler also, serving meals and drinks to someone who, after all, (and with all that swelling), needed to keep their foot raised and their bum firmly in a chair!
Mad Bulls and Englishmen – A Tale of Aussie prowess!
Crossing the darkened lawn one night after a session at the Swinging Arm Bar, Gordon and I both got a little more than we bargained for! What looked to be like a couple near the railing we were on course to approach, actually turned out, as we neared, to be one of the wild, red, Kimberley Short Horn Bulls of the property, that you aren’t actually supposed to go near if you see one! Ooops, too late! This wild beast decides we are a threat before we can even compute that HE is actually a bull and, in a flash of his tail, he stomps his hooves and goes to give chase! I am terrified and peg it (one-leg-it peg-it queen!) as fast as my good ankle will let me, towards the log railing. I am convinced that this bull is on my tail and yet later on, Gordon tells me that wasn’t the case at all because Gordon was too busy distracting it away from me! But I am oblivious to this at the time, trying to run fast - but knowing I am going really slow - and confused as to why the bull hasn’t speared me yet! Meanwhile, in distracting the bull, Gordon ended up not being able to escape himself! His brainwave solution to this was to hide behind a tree – not a tree as fat as a boab, but a rather thin tree! As soon as Gordon stopped behind the tree, the bull stopped on the opposite side of the tree, looking at him! It was here that my good man drew on all those years of taking penalty shots in soccer! He jumped to the left, which the bull copied, then to the right, which the bull copied again, and then a quick left-right dart that momentarily stumped the bull, thereby facilitating his own escape over the fence to safety! Hilarious! What the pair of us must have looked like to any onlooker, I don’t know!
Breakdown Blues – when things go wrong, as they sometimes do….
They say that to go on the Gibb River Road and not have anything go wrong with your car or equipment, is unheard of - regardless of how long you are traveling on it for. And if you are doing the painful day-long drive to Mitchell Falls, forced to go at only 15km/h over the most corrugated, roughest tracks known to man, well then it has often been known for whole campertrailers to be written-off, car axles to break, the whole suspension to break beyond repair and to incur an extremely hefty fee to be towed back to the nearest repair place! Although we didn’t do that exceedingly rough track up to Mitchell Falls, we have nevertheless had quite a bumpy ride of it all since Dampier Peninsula and it was always only going to be a matter of time before things started to fail.
How best then, to describe to the English readers amongst you, what it is like to drive over the corrugations of the Gibb River Road? Hmmm, let me see – well, it is like driving over invisible cattle grids…..but doing that ALL the time! The car shudders and judders and vibrates and you think it’s going to just fall apart in a heap. There’s a constant vibration going from your feet right up to your head and often I have needed my neck-support around me to stop from getting a mild whiplash! There’s so much dirt in the window frames that THEY judder too, when wound down, not to mention squeak like polystyrene breeze blocks do when they are rubbed together. A constant bass drone accompanies you the whole way, deafening at times so that you can’t hear yourself talk let alone any music you had hoped to listen to! At times the car is vibrating so much it’s drifting sideways across the track (that was the case in Cape Leveque) and sometimes we have needed to stop to put the bonnet up and reconnect a wire that has juddered loose! Whenever a car comes there’s a ritual to be done – which is to immediately wind the window up and put the aircon on, ready for the assault of dust that’s about to strike. The minute the car has passed – and often these nutters are belting it down the track – a huge cloud of dust is sent up into the air. This was either red dirt in Cape Leveque or, white dirt if, like on the Gibb, there’s a bit of gravel on the ground. Either way it gives rise to a temporary “whiteout” which means you have to slow down - even if THEY didn’t - and you can smell the dust in the car despite the windows being up.
So, if all THAT is what is happening to us inside the car, you can imagine what is happening to the tyres on the car and the equipment in the front box of the trailer! Well, things started to break down when we were camped in Home Valley, starting with our generator. The generator of course is the thing that generates power for us when we are bushcamping and away from mains power, so that we can then in turn recharge the batteries in our trailer that run the freezer, fridge and tent lights. At the time this wasn’t too much of a problem when it happened, as we can always go about 5 or 6 days without having to charge any of our batteries and we knew that we would be arriving in El Questro two days later, where we believed we could get the generator repaired in the garage there. However, upon arriving at El Questro it turned out that they did not have the parts to repair our generator, nor did he believe that the nearest towms of Wyndham or Kunnunara would either! So now we were facing 9 days bushcamping, with no generator! To overcome this, Gordon had to remove one of the trailer batteries and take it down to the workshop to be recharged by them and, to help out further, we had to run our fridge, freezer, computers and other things off the car batteries via the inverter in the car - a really cool device that turns the 12v coming out of the car into 240 volt mains power. Then, to make sure that running all these things off the car battery didn’t wear the car batteries down, we then had to run the car engine for a couple of hours each day at camp, so that they in turn could recharge! (A note to ourselves: we are going to get a solar panel! We would have got one before leaving Perth but we were given to understand that though they were environmentally friendly, they were not as good as generators! Of course, if we had had one at this stage, life wouldn’t have been quite so complicated!)
At some point during all of these shenanigans at El Questro camp, our freezer then decided to die! We believe that this was quite possibly due to the jolting around it had been receiving on the road for the past month. Fortunately for us it happened during the early hours of the morning, so everything was still very cold - albeit defrosted. It was also a blessing that it happened with just 4 days or so to go before we were to leave the Gibb, so there was not too much food left in it (it would have been disastrous if it had happened 3 or 4 days into the Gibb, I can tell you!). We did a big cook-up of what was left – prawns, which we shelled and added to the ex-frozen vegetables to make a curry for the fridge; sausages that were cooked and put into the fridge; mince, that was added to the tomato-based sauce for dinner that night and the fruits, which were eaten with yogurt there and then. With all of that, and knowing that we still had our pantry box supplies and that we were eating at the Swinging Arm Bar’s BBQ the next night, we were able to have enough food left for the remainder of the trip!
When a couple of days later the freezer inexplicably came back from the dead, it seemed as if whatever the universe was throwing at us, we were conquering. Of course by this stage we had nothing to put into it Then a day later, the fridge decided it was IT’S turn to die! “Operation Switchback” was then commenced – with all the food having to be taken out of the dead fridge (R.I.P!) and transferred into the newly enlivened freezer, which, by turning the temperature down, we were able to turn into a fridge!
What a palaver – and you can only imagine Gordon’s grave concerns for the coldness of his beers! Not to mention his headache – when he woke the next morning to discover a flat tyre on the car! Poor bugger! On what was supposed to have been a day of rest for him after all these events (and the 3hr gorge walk he had done the day before!), there came into being an hour or so of physical work changing the tyre, and then driving the car back down to the main camping grounds to get the flat tyre fixed! All was good in the end. However, some two days later on the very last morning, as we had finally left the ELQ property and were back on the last stretch of the Gibb, that same flat tyre decided to shred! Poor Gordy! As if setting down our camp that morning hadn’t been strenuous enough, he now had to change the trye by the roadside, in the strange onslaught of humidity we were having at the time, while many an extremely rude passing vehicle (undoubtedly Victorian!) zoomed by and shrouded him in a cloud of white dust that hung for ages in the air around him!
Now before I end this saga of breakdown blues let me just tell you, that if you think they were merely related to the car and our own equipment, you’d be sorely mistaken. During all the above fuss and bother while at our camp in El Questro, we also had to deal with a breakdown one morning while out cruising on the Chamberlain River in our little hire-tinny! What had started out with the good intentions of being to have breakfast for two on the serene and tranquil waters, ended up turning into a bit of a fiasco when the motor died on us! We weren’t quite sure when exactly it happened, as the whole point of these battery-operated motors is that they are practically silent, so that you can enjoy the peacefulness of the gorge! However, we think it happened after about 20mins and were alerted to it when we didn’t seem to be making any progress forwards! Luckily, there was just enough power in the motor to get us over to a rocky ledge on the opposite side of the gorge, where we could tie up the boat to a small tree growing out of the very steep walls. While we breakfasted there, a much larger tour boat replete with tourists, passed us by and promised to tow us back when they turned round again later on up the river. By now however, I was starting to not be very happy at all about being stopped and tied up anywhere. Especially given that earlier, in order to get me in a small tinny in the first place on waters containing a saltwater croc, Gordon had said the reason we would be fine, would be because the vibration and sound of the motor would scare any croc away. WELL NOW WE DIDN’T HAVE A MOTOR! I am not too proud to admit that there are times in my life – especially if I am in fear - when I may act a little ungraciously. This then, was one of those times. Which means that what ought to have been a relaxed, tranquil, and composed scene was transformed into me losing the plot a bit through paranoia about crocs, and insisting that we not wait to be towed back but instead that we should paddle back ourselves with the paddles in the boat! Given the cross-wind we had, the distance we had to cover and the fact that Gordon knew he would have to do most of the power work himself, he was understandably reluctant to do what I was shrieking at him to do! He also knew we were in no real danger from crocs at all - but you see I was a lost cause and so that fell on deaf ears with me! So in the end we untied and Gordon took up position at the front of the boat. Standing with paddle in hand, he embarked on the lengthy paddle against the wind and back to shore, looking as if he should be on a gondola in Venice rather than on a river with a saltwater croc in it! Poor darling - though in fairness, as he was about to drop with exhaustion, I did pitch in and help with the rowing and together we did the final stretch back to shore! Just as we arrived at shore, the larger tour boat came into view around the bend and was pitched up beside us by the time we were carrying the dead motor and the battery off the boat! The tour guide came straight over to me, gushing as to how bad she felt about not having got back soon enough to tow us. She then promptly handed me an ice-cold bottle of bubbles left over from their tour and a cup of fresh fruits! Imagine the look on Gordon’s face as I smiled sweetly at her, thanked her and said that this was just the thing I needed after such a hard and traumatic morning!!!!!!
Choppers away!
Due to my ankle injury and not being able to walk anywhere, the first thing we did during our stay at El Questro, was a 1hr doorless helicopter-flight bonanza! What a fantastic experience it was too – it was not the first time either of us had been in a helicopter but it was the first time either of us had ever beenin a doorless one and the first time either of us had ever had the opportunity to fly south-north over a 1 million acre property, located in some of the most remote country of W.A! It was even more exhilarating, in a way, than the Microlight flight we did back in Ningaloo. This was because we were so buffeted by the strong gusts of cross-wind and not only could we feel it hit the chopper but we could also feel it whizzing through the doorless openings on both mine and Gordon’s side – which felt a bit strange because of course at the same time, we were having the experience of being INSIDE the plane and therefore not completely exposed to the elements, as with the Microlite! Plus of course there was the constant deafening noise of the rotary blades, sounding like artillery fire! Only once, very early in the flight, did I make the mistake of putting my right arm out of the door opening to point to something in the scenery behind me - only to have my arm whipped back against the chopper’s body by the downward pressure of the air around the rotary blades above us! It felt strong enough to whip my arm out of its socket if I had kept it there a minute longer! It was quite a different photography experience too, to be leaning out of a doorless chopper, with the wind forcing itself on to you. I was busy trying to keep my windswept hair out of my eyes so I could see (a problem not shared by Gordon) and keep the camera steady enough in order to quickly take the shot – and all the while the helicopter is vibrating, juddering and sometimes itself getting knocked sideways by a sudden cross-wind gust! Naturally, both Gordon and I had our camera strings round our necks and wrists to make sure we didn’t lose them - though at times for me I nearly strangled myself in the name of art! I guess after 45mins of taking photos something had to go wrong and it did! A valiant attempt by me to “get the shot” resulted in my sunglasses literally being blown right of my face! Bugger! As the pilot joked, “Oh well, I’m sure they’ll turn up in a few days on some wallaby’s face!!” When all is said and done though, as with the Microlight, at no time did I feel unsafe - even though it is widely agreed that helicopters are more dangerous to fly in! It was all worth the extra cost of a replacement pair of sunnies, as the scenery we flew over was nothing short of breathtaking and spectacular! ELQ from the air is a vast tapestry of colours, shapes and textures, rivers, gorges and waterfalls. Amongst the browns and dull greens of the Dry, there were also the most amazing terracottas, burnished golds and deep fiery reds. Seeing the property from the air is also the only way to really appreciate not only the scale of its vastness but also the vastness of the Kimberley as a whole, which has many other stations of a million acres or more! It also made you realize its size when you knew that the property had more cattle on it (about 7,000 head) than any other station on the Gibb and yet, so vast is the land on which they can roam, we didn’t even see one of them! The size of the terrain was also clear to us when the pilot choppered us over a very remote part of the property called “The Maze” – an intricate, steep-sided, winding gorge, that we were able to get an overall birds-eye view of! It took a group of people who wanted to be flown and dropped down there the week before, a total of 6 days to hike through! Amazing!
And so it was, after an hour of memorable thrills, we returned back to the heli-pad – Gordon to get a coffee and me to get a brush and some new sunglasses!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)