Buttes of the Breakaways

At sunset on our last night we headed out to the Breakaways – an amazing arrangement of mesas and buttes that appear to have broken away from the Stuart Range, that rise up out of the gibber rock flats to glow in the evening light – all salt, pepper, nutmeg and ginger tones and tinges.

Beautiful Breakaways

Once these outcrops lay under that ephemeral Inland Sea that stretched from the Diamantina to the Flinders Ranges.

Paprika and white landscape

Nowadays, they stand, starkly sensational, just waiting for someone to come and label them as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. A hop, step and a jump north of Coober Pedy.  My only surprise is that a thousand painters were not lined up side by side grabbing their palette knives and paint brushes, on queue.

Glowing as we turn to leave

One of the most beautiful sights, surely, in all of Australia.

Stunning at sunset

After this, much needed rain set our travels into fast forward so that sooner than expected we were back home, unpacking our gear.

But with magical memories. 

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Catacombs to Boot Hill

We had our hippee-length hair trimmed at Marj’s dugout hair salon, attached to her beautiful underground home. She gave us a complete and extensive tour: ensuite, walk-in robe as large as most master bedrooms, guest and reception rooms galore. Utterly charming: a unique experience.  

I checked on the internet: anyone, with the wherewithal can buy a completely-kitted-out 3 bedroom dugout here for around $100,000, give or take a few tens of thousands. There are plenty for sale.

We eat at the famed and crowded Tom and Mary’s Greek Taverna in the centre of town, where we feast on platters of protein-rich pork, lamb and beef steak piled over mounds of golden oven baked potatoes with olive oil dressed salad on the side. We dive into wacking great triangles of sticky baklava and rich ice-cream for dessert, finishing off with a sweet, thick, grainy, black Greek coffee, to die for.

Our crew at the Greek Taverna

Then, in penance, we traipse around all the church dugouts we can find: the Serbian, with its religious icons and five-level ceiling vault cleverly carved into sandstone walls and ceilings; the cosy Catholic, very homely; the Anglican Catacomb, my favourite, kitted out with a starkly minimalist black bush-timber altar and décor.  Simple and stunning.

Gorgeous altar 

A whimsical sign for Boot Hill Cemetery took us on a quick detour over gravel to the town cemetery, which now ranks up there among the most interesting outback cemetery we have seen.

Whimsy at Boot Hill 

One grave has a keg embedded in the surface. Intravenous is good, if you can get it no other way. You just know this guy must have been good fun. Billy Connolly even mentions this grave on his Aussie bike ride tour. 

Another has friends who regularly leave full bottles and unopened cans of beer for ‘ron: for the hereafter. Many of the deceased are clearly characters. There is a headstone for Crocodile Harry; another for the beloved daughter of John and Yoka, who, we can see still have a shop downtown. Imagine. 

Then there’s Buffalo Tony, whose lifelong partner happened to be, Handy Anny. A large number of gravesites are for Serbs, Croatians, Germans, Hungarians, Italians and Greeks. There are, reputedly, fifty different nationalities living in Coober Pedy, many of them wishful miners, hoping to strike it rich.   Before they get to Boot Hill.

May they rest in peace

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Diggers and dugouts

Mullock hills and mine shafts

The first opal in Coober Pedy was found quite late in Aussie mining history: 1 Feb 1915.  That day, fourteen year old Will Hutchison, was left alone in a tent-camp while his dad set off searching for gold and water.  Even then, fourteen year old boys could not stay still.  

When dad returned after a day of no success, Will was missing.  Dad was just about to send up a panic alert, when back into the camp strolled young Will with a pick in his hand, a smile on his face, and a sack full of opal floaters on his back. That day Will was in luck, he even found water.  Riches all around.  

Young Will did not, however,  live to see the day in 1926, when the settlement he unwittingly started was eventually named Coober Pedy, after Kupa Piti, an aboriginal variation meaning ‘white man’s dugout’.

After the war, 'Diggers', named for the trenches they clawed out for shelter against wartime bombardment, found their way to Coober Pedy where they built different dugouts and gouged a living chipping for fabled opals.

Today, we see signs that show hundreds upon hundreds of vertically dug prospecting shafts: uncovered. Unprotected. Everywhere. A quarter of a million of them, or so it is said. Anyone could fall into one of these and die. Rules and laws about reclamation are still waiting to be clarified around here. Do miners, whose leases are complete fill in these shafts, or not? Who knows? Nothing seems set in stone for long. But one day, I fear, this random regulation is going to be a massive headache for the governing body who leases this mining land.

Underneath the bullock heaps

Coober Pedy appears  straight out of a wild west movie, though possibly, even more anarchic.  Mining towns, in the days our great-grandfathers wandered the country searching for something to fill their worn and weatherbeaten swags, must have looked just like this a hundred and fifty years ago.

Great falls of rubble slide from on high, straight down onto the main street: an accident waiting to happen. Unpaved streets radiate where local traffic demands and tyre treads mark the routes.

Random. Rafferty’s Rules.

Nowadays, low slung hills have been shaved vertically by big machines that toss waste into piled heaps -- and leave it. Into that clean-shaven hill a pit-roaring drill-and-bit bores out rooms horizontal to the ground, metres deep in the deep rocky hills.  Dugouts.

Dugouts 

Half Coober Pedy’s population of three to six thousand (give or take three thousand in any single season) live in such underground homes: some simple bedsits, others palatial pads with pools, ponds, gold taps and billiard rooms -- all darkened, cavernous and cool -- a stable 25C inside, while outside, on a summer’s day, you might fast fry a fresh egg on any flat rock.

Some twenty or thirty of these places belong to Hong Kong opal buyers who maintain homes and cars here, year round, and take their pick of the packets of opals available for sale.   

So, times certainly have changed.  

Many are palatial

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Trullis for troglodytes

We left King’s Canyon after a bout of rainy weather undermined many of the canyon walking paths, then drove long miles until we came to an almost treeless, featureless, gibber plain, the outer western edge of Sturt’s Stony Desert.

Red ochre rocks still 

We arrived in the throes of a monster storm that descended on us like an apocalypse – as though the uranium, just east over at Olympic Dam, had suddenly mushroomed explosively, leaving these sodden impassable wastelands in its wake.

This is Mad Max territory. It could be the home of ferals, wild things, and other mutant beasties. We find bleached bones on gibber rocks, and shiver.

Skeleton bones on gibber rock

As we drive on breaking into low cloud, a navy blue horizon emerges, heavily pocked with mullock heaps: pink, white, ginger, cinnamon, coffee. These remnant rubbish piles left by opal miners pepper the landscape and look for all the world like trulli igloos -- dwellings for tiny troglodytes.

This is Coober Pedy. So amazing and unexpected a landscape it takes your breath away. Nowhere in Australia, have I seen such a sparse and arid moonscape. It does not feel like earth. More like Mars, or even the moon.

No wonder tourists flock here. This is as unusual as a place gets.

Cinnamon and white bullock heaps

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Long time passing

Head raised in query

Where have all the traditional owners gone?

We had thought that this new town, Yulara, set up to cater to the hoards of tourists who flock here, might have been run by local indigenous folk. But, no, that sure is not what’s happening.Yulara, a tiny resort town, is practically an all-white enclave. It lies just outside the National Park, where the two big rocks are situated – yet inside Aboriginal lands.

Vast nearly uninhabited landscape

We had thought, before arriving, that the notion of Uluru being ‘given back’ to its traditional owners meant they would have some control over it, some obvious ownership of it: perhaps welcome and introduce people to it.  We were wrong. We had thought to see a real aboriginal presence at Uluru. Or, at least, in the vicinity. Again, we were wrong.

For the first three days, we saw one, only, non-white person shopping at the supermarket. Yesterday, at the Cultural Centre, we saw a few more: artists,  we think, taking a rest break in the back room, playing with a photo application on a computer.  Leaving today, we saw four others, drawing money from an ATM in the shopping precinct. Not a huge presence. Less than a dozen local folk in four days.  Where are they, then?

Tourist facilities 
.

Yulara seems to be the only obvious town within cooee. It consists of several hotels of varying star levels, a massive campground, a small supermarket, shopping centre, and a village, accommodating a couple of thousand folk who work in and around Yulara, tending tourists, day in and day out. These worker-dwellers are almost exclusively young backpackers, or career hospitality workers, enroute to other postings in other places. They seemed to outnumber even the tourists, at least when we were there, and at off-times, we surmise, could keep the town operating just by the sheer fact of their presence

It was originally built by the Northern Territory government, but was sold and is now owned by a property trust group who use Voyagers, the Ayers Rock Resort group, as the operational managers of the sites in town.  Keeping it functional for tourists. Even so, the whole complex has been on the open market, now, for two years, so they have taken the cream they needed off the top, and it is about to be off-loaded again. Just when it is needing an injection of millions spent renovating it, so any interested purchasers really need beware!

So. Are any traditional owners even on the board of directors of this property trust? Is there any reason for them to be? Or is the entire town simply a profit-making entity, with its prime commitment to shareholders of the trust, as opposed to affinity with, or commitment to, any traditional owners of this place.

What about authenticity? What do overseas visitors think when they come to a heavily sacred site and see no traditional custodians on or about their special place. Or are property trust managers not paid to think of such things?

Flowers sightings are rare

We didn’t see a single worker at any one of the properties who even looked remotely like an indigenous person. And when we asked if there were any, staff were equally flummoxed. Some had been told, when hired, that indigenous folk were on the payroll, tho’ they had not seen any, they admitted.  Some had even been asked, on their appointment, if they would like to contribute a portion of their income to indigenous welfare. None of them seemed to understand what this meant exactly, so none we had spoken to, had ticked that option box yet. 

Maybe there are indigenous workers at Yulara, but it really was quite a shock in four days to see not a single one. Not even an aboriginal presence at the gates into the National Park which is actually disconcerting given the 'rap' for the place.

Knowing now that Parks Australia seems to control the National Park, and the property trust seems to control Yulara, we can’t help wondering what, exactly, the indigenous folk of the region have actually gained from their ownership of Ulura?

Some things, though, we do understand. A warden at the gate to Uluru told us that they do receive a contribution of a quarter of each entry fee into the park. The ticket price, these days, is $25 per person, and as there are approximately 400,000 entrants to the park a year, that would make a contribution to the local folk of approximately two and a half million a year, I guess.

So where does that go exactly? To whom? And where are these folk?  What exactly does it pay for?

And what happens to the many other millions each year from just the park entry fee alone? It can’t all go on the road, surely. Such a little itty bitty thing that’s not all that old to start with: built at the time Yulara was built. Or maintenance: the area seems to be all in the hands of nature now, dependent on wind and the weather.

And, too, whatever happens to all the many tens of millions that come in to the Yalara resort complex itself, each year?

Yalara, we see from the tourist guff, was named for ‘howling’ or  ‘dingo’ -- and deep in the night you hear the dingos, eerily howling at the moon, in their packs.

On the prowl, no doubt, for their pound of flesh.

Camel sightings are rare

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Raining on the rock

No rain at this time

But it was raining on the rock the day we arrived.  

From Erldunda, almost to Yalara, we had heavy soaking tropic-style downpour: then, on the day we left, drenching rain. The Lasseter Highway was all damp gritty ochre-red sand, tufted at the verges with spinifex and grasses, green, fresh and cleanly laid out in linear fashion, as in a landscape designer’s prize desert garden design. This terrain does not look parched.

All across the landscape delightfully whimsical juvenile desert oaks, unique to the centre, stand like toy wooden soldiers, straight as a dye, but with their long thready needles drooping sadly. Every time I see them silhouetted against the new moon, with Venus rising, I have to laugh. They are so funny, yet durable. Termite-proof and nail-hard they were cut down and used as well-water liners in the early days of settlement and, no doubt, many are still in place today.

In the sunset of their lives

On all the routes we've been traveling we are impressed at the NT government's concerted effort to provide excellent picnic facilities.  Just about everywhere we’ve needed them great low-slung wooden picnic tables-cum-chairs have been provided and, as a variation, in Uluru/Kata Tjura National Park, one-off wooden love seats have been handmade out of recycled timbers torn up by Cyclone Tracy. Works of art, these: showpieces. 

Recycled after Cyclone Tracy

As are the unique thatched, humpy shelters that have been strategically placed to provide shade in lieu of large shade trees. They all look as though they were meant to be here and are wonderful and extremely welcome additions to the landscape.

Humpy shelters.  So Australian. 

We stop for morning tea overlooking Mt Connor, which, along with Uluru and Kata Tjuta, make a majestic triumverate of monolithic rocks in this ancient landscape. Why is this one so under-rated, when it, too, is utterly majestic?  Gosse Bluff is larger than Uluru. Kata Tjuta/Mt Olga is also larger than Uluru, and topographically, a tad more interesting, as, from a distance, it is made up of about a dozen different ‘heads’ which have eroded over the centuries from what once was a single massive rock-cake head composed of a batter of sand and mud, mixed with granite pebbles, boulders and cobbles. This sedimentary conglomerate erodes easily, which explains the name Kata Tjuta: ‘many heads’-- where lines of erosion have created round balls of rock, each like a giant's marble.

Eroding quickly like giant marbles

On one of our fine days here, we walk between two of Kata Tjuta’s heads, up over her grainy rocky-red spine swept hard and clean by the weather, into her cool heart, until we are enclosed by walls as high as a temple of stone, planted with exotic remnant plants, some of which grow nowhere else on earth. Quite special it is.

Yet Ulura remains the star. And there are some good, self-perpetuating, reasons for this. Formulated around the same time as its rocky cousin, Kata Tjuta, but with different foldings, compressions, and tilts, over aeons, Uluru is composed of arcose, a sandstone rich in felspar. It pokes only a small head above the ground. Underground its core goes many kilometres deep. Slower, much slower than Kata Tjuta, it erodes.

Uluru on a fine day It is rooted deep beneath the earth 

Rain on the rockface becomes droplets that find other droplets, forming into streamlets that groove down the face of the rock, wearing it out over time -- creating the features that form the core of the Dreamtime tales of this region. Close up it looks like a land-locked whale, with ancient shedding barnacled skin; one that has lost its way, and blobbed amorphously down in this vast space for a rest.

We walked for over three hours around the base of Uluru following the tales of gashes, grooves and gouges on virtually every interesting surface. These tell of the battle between Liru, the poisonous snake, and Kuniya, the woma python. 

A survivor in an arid landscape

Or Tatji, the small red lizard, who threw his curved throwing stick so hard it embedded into the rock so deep, that when he attempted to gouge it out with his bare hands, he left scars of rounded hollows, still there today. Or the Bell-bird brothers who, while stalking their feast of emu were overtaken by two blue-tongued lizard men who killed the emu, ate parts of it, then lied about touching it, but, betrayingly, left chunks of dead emu meat behind, which lie there still -- sandstone slabs on the face of the rock.

Every groove tells a tale

Everywhere is so much more interesting than its public face of being just a well-photographed rock. Tales of the Dreaming, and sacred sites as special as church altars in beautiful cathedrals, make up this place -- and are what folk pay to see. Nature plays her part, too, painting the rock pretty in pink or purple in the full light of day, yellow at times, then flame-red at sunrise and sunset.

And still the rock generates its own new tales: which makes this as big a drawcard as the pilgrim way.

A ‘Sorry Book’ in the Cultural Centre is inches thick revealing page after disconsolate page of individual letters from folk all over the world, Poland to Pittsburg, who have come to this place, been tempted to take away a tiny piece of the rock, or even a single grain of sand, only to have been dogged by such intolerably bad luck and impossible misfortune that they have been compelled to write: atoning. Returning the pieces of stolen rock with abject apologies. Attempting to improve their fortune. Hundreds upon hundreds of tortured and beautifully appealing letters.

Tiny brass memorials for those who did not survive

Then, pounded into the side of the rock – more scars – part way up its face.  Not far from the chained path the traditional elders have requested folk not climb as a mark of respect to this place are brass memorials, as in a graveyard, to those who have fallen while climbing the rock: a young male teacher, in front of a busload of his Baptist-school students; a female tourist from Yorkshire, only twenty-five; a sixty-two year old man, whose singular life-long ambition had been to climb the rock.

And so many others.

Slow eroding droplets of rain slide down the vertical face of the rock.

Like tears.

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Art, for money's sake

Tools of the trade

Alice Springs, itself, is surprisingly metropolitan: commercial art galleries, trendy restaurants and hip pubs abound.  The town has been oddly built: inward-looking physically, in a large square, with the buildings seeming to face the central serpentine layout of Todd Mall. Closing the space.  Given that this is where most of the action is that is fine, for now, but I can’t help feeling it is missing a more appealing external façade. But, no doubt, the influential city fathers will ensure this happens over time, as Alice really is the ‘capital' of central Australia and does not look likely ever to go backwards.  Recently, the first million dollar house sale went forward – so, all appears on the up and up, here. 

We’d heard stories before we came of dereliction and alcoholism -- but saw little of this. We were, instead, impressed at the functionality of the place. Again, backpackers make up the hard-core workforce in campsites, cafes, pubs and restaurants; but other local businesses appear to be alive and thriving. Alice is a happening place. All is not perfectly rosy, however.

A local policeman, at a fundraising market we visited, told us that over five thousand people in and around Alice Springs, remain homeless. And I’m sure, along the Todd River, many of these groups can be found gathered around campfires, just to stay warm, any day or night, at this time of the year.

Obvious loiterers in the mall are moved on, we noticed.  The few people we saw attempting to sell art or hand made goods from any transient market-stall in the mall were deftly shunted off by Council authorities or the police.

Indigenous art and craft appears to be the mainstay of the Todd Mall economy. Gorgeous pieces from talented and naïve artists and craftspersons are on display every which way you turn. But, not all is perfectly rosy, here, either.

Some supposedly ‘reputable’ art businesses in town may, in hindsight, not be viewed at all well, when one looks back on their art-purchasing practices at this point in time. They are carving out a powerful and influential hold over art production in this tiny corner of the art world. But, at what price?  Over the last couple of decades some of these art buyers have been supplying skilled and novice aboriginal artists with the tools of their trade. Free. Canvasses are pre-cut to size, large and small -- the size determined by the storekeeper, not the artist.  Delivery to the settlements is free. Along with jars of paints of many colours: free. Western colours. Not much evidence of traditional mediums or pigments.

Out of the goodness of their hearts these very same buyers send out trucks of seasonal fresh fruit and vegetables: food for the settlement inhabitants. They also bestow in-favour elders with gifts of vehicles for their settlements, 4-wheeled drives to disperse the favours they dispense.

In exchange the buyers get first dibs at the art that is completed in the settlement. First dibs at the artists. First dibs at the emerging artists developing in these communities.  Some even negotiate sole rights to the output of new and emerging artists so that they then have the right to turn that artist’s vision into coffee mugs and caricatures if they so wish. And in whatever form it comes, the product of that emerging artist will only be available, for sale, at that buyer’s outlet.

Such is their patronage.

And that’s not all.

There are, as always, steak knives.

When the fresh vegetables and new art supplies are delivered to these dusty remote communities, the completed art works are collected. Hundreds of them. Dozens by individual artists. Filling up all those clean canvases offered by the buyer on the last visit. Works are classified by the buyer as ‘rubbish’ or ‘not rubbish’. Signed there, by the artist,  photographed there -- supposedly for authenticity, with someone (anyone?) standing behind each piece of work -- and from this identifying photograph, a certificate of authenticity, for the more discerning purchaser, is generated.

Money exchanges hands.

Not huge amounts obviously, as these remote settlements are still mainly dust and scrap metal heaps.

No art palaces here.  More like piecemeal impoverishment.

The markup, though, is obvious on the works displayed on the glitzy white-painted gallery walls in town. 

Payment to the artist is often accompanied by a not-even-self-conscious verbal admonition to certain of the artists to: “Do more of this next time I come!” or: “Don’t do any more of that – I can’t sell rubbish!” Unsavoury, intrusive, deep-in-the-eye interference in the artists' choice of subject matter, colour and composition.

The message of the buyer is as subtle as a branding iron burn: Give me what I am looking for -- or the food, the vehicle, the clean blank canvasses and bright shiny new paints may, one day, simply dry up.

Woe.

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