Caterpillar dreaming

Clearly coffee time

It is said that a caterpillar crawled up from the place known as Emily’s Gap. Another followed it. The procession of caterpillars crawled out over this land. They created hills, they created valleys, they created riverbeds -- around this place known as Alice Springs.

Using this simple, lovely metaphor of a caterpillar, the traditional owners of this land explain how the physical spaces that make up the central heart of Australia came into being. The East and West Macs – the MacDonnell Ranges -- cross the land like giant processional caterpillars following each other silently, head-to-tail, mile upon mile, across the vast land.

Mile upon mile

Lovelier hills I have not seen anywhere.  Heavy quartzite rims caterpillar-hump-backed hills like jagged vertebrae, carving out ancient thorny spines.  Caterpillar dreaming, so it goes.

Tucked into these rock-topped hills are the gaps and gorges that make Alice Springs a veritable tourist mecca: Standley Chasm, whose red rock glows best at high noon with the sun directly overhead, named after Ida Standley, the first white woman teacher in these parts. 

Humans like ants

 Simpson’s Gorge, approached on foot, along a flat wide dry riverbed, is picture-postcard pretty, and straight out of a Hans Heysen painting, rimmed on all sides by red river gums, with the rock of the gorge at one end, gilded red, in the afternoon sun. Ormiston Gorge is an artist's paradise and a bus-load of artists are there painting it.

So peaceful 

 Trephina Gorge, we approached from a long high ridge walk overhead. Don’t believe them when they say these walks are easy; they are not. Amazingly, Bec managed all of them. We scrambled down to the base of its sandy river basin, to view the gorge rising up just like an ancient Inca city wall, meticulously-carved, perfectly-formed building blocks—etched by aeons of wind and water action, not by man.

With a little help from her dad

Further along, we visited Jessie and Emily’s Gorge, where exquisite patches of aboriginal art on the gorge walls pictorialise the caterpillar dreaming tale.  Stripes of ochre were painted onto the rock telling the processional caterpillar tale. This is one of the most beautiful pieces of aboriginal art I have ever seen.

Emily's caterpillar dreaming 

The following day, out at Palm Valley, in the Finke Gorge, alive with rare palms from the age of the dinosaurs, we see the effects of aeons of dripping water streaking the face of the MacDonnells in exactly the same pattern of the striped aboriginal caterpillar art. The colour of the mountains reflect the colour of the caterpillar art.

As in the time of the dinosaurs

At Hermannsburg, we visit the historic precinct of the first Lutheran mission run by Carl Strehlow. Even today, remnants remain of how this caring German family attempted to carve a life out of this rocky barren earth: the date palms that Freida Strehlow grew in the sunken garden out back of her home still stand, as do the thick cool stone whitewashed walls of the church, school, home, and outbuildings.

Albert Namatjira was born at Hermannsburg

Here, Albert Namatjira worked at his art and became the first aboriginal in Australia to be granted citizenship in 1957. Which seems quite bizarre now, that that needed to happen at all. Citizenship. The first people of this nation. Amazing that it happened so recently – and in my life time. I think I am embarrassed.

Some roads are impassable right now, given the lovely rain. Others bear signs advising extreme four wheel driving conditions, allowing only high clearance vehicles access. We manage, quite easily, despite dire warnings to the contrary, a drive into the very heart of the Gosse Bluff comet crater. This is a vast rim of high red rock, left by a comet fall some 140 million years ago. The comet exploded rock deep from thousands of metres in the very heart of the earth, dropping it back on to the land surface like a volcanic caldera.

The aboriginals have a dreaming tale explaining Gosse Bluff. Once, a group of women in the form of stars, were dancing along the Milky Way when, another, wishing to dance, put down her wooden baby-carrier, far too near the edge, so over the edge it toppled, crashing to earth so that the impact rippled all across the land creating this extraordinary formation.

We think Gosse Bluff has to be quite as spectacular as Uluru, and, maybe even larger. Though, this remains to be seen as we don’t hit Uluru for a few days yet.

Gosse Bluff

oooOOOooo