Spikey-tailed goanna and other bush tales

Tennant Creek is grassy and green, surprising us. We thought it might be dry as a tinder, even in this year of lush inland rain, but, wonderfully, it seems like this much of the time.

The Outback Campground at the bottom of town is one of my favourite camps so far: it is all compacted red earth: way too hard for tent pegs; we just had to let the canvas flap free. You can see why this substance made such great dirt floors for early settlers, it is as solid as concrete. Tall green native trees blanket the campground in generous shade and offer a leafy rustling canopy through which we could see the night stars.

Town is a mix of new public buildings, and older, more retro ones, barred up against random bottle throwers. The motel advertises free WIFI and the purple coffeeshop makes decent coffee. Under the stars we have another night listening to a unique bush poet and learning more about bush lore.

Jimmy Hooker, a Tennant Creek legend, known as the Bush Tucker Man of the Barkley, who has been written about in newspapers across the land, and who was the subject of an ABC Australian Stories episode for television, offered his nightly bush chat by the campsite fire. 

 Jimmy’s mother was black, and it is from her that his earliest memories of bush lore emerge. At age 11, after only a few days of schooling in his life, Jimmy’s parents sent him off to work as he wouldn’t go to school, and his first job on a station was that of a ‘poddy-duffer’,  a calf thief.   Jimmy has a lifetime of tales he will tell as long as there is someone within cooee to listen.

Delicious bush coconut

He had us tasting bush coconut from the desert bloodwood tree, bruising and sniffing jungarri leaves that  smelled just like bush vicks, hunting out native lemon grass in the washout across the road tearing off the dry stalks and sniffing the subtle lemon grass stalks – a little subtler even than Thai lemongrass. He had us tearing down to the roots, exposing the long stalk of native ginger, delicious to eat, delicious as flavouring. We ate Ngamari, mistletoe fruit, smaller than grapes but softer, a sweet and sour treat I could happily munch on at will. And Jimmy had barbecued for us a kangaroo tail, the crisp outside flesh tasting just like pork cracking. The small inner bones, like a tiny vertebrate, soft and juicy.

We spent the morning in the Nyinkka Nyunyu (spiky-tailed goanna) Aboriginal Art and Cultural Centre, one of the most beautiful structures in town.  Architect designed with flowing roof lines in the shape of a goanna, it sits low to the ground but looks, at any minute, as if it might just slither off, head reared protectively, ready to run.

Clever architecture like a goanna's body

The works displayed were from local well known and emerging artists and there was an excellent exhibition of artists who used 'bush tucker' as the theme. These varied from naïve to sophisticated and revealed the diverse, lush Barkley Tableland food bowl. The art was enhanced by exhibits in the museum space, perfectly bottled specimens of the delicious bush tucker and medicines we had tried last night with Jimmy.  

All around is  native land. All around there is flora and fauna unique to the region and right there, in the grounds of Nyinkka Nyunyu, is a sacred site to the goanna.

Tennant Creek is an ideal spot to learn more about the bush and the the ways of the traditional people.

Galahs loving the weather

oooOOOooo