All that glitters

We turned east along the notorious Plenty Highway and headed to Gemtree to try our hand at fossicking. 

After a morning’s backbreaking labour, panning, we came away with a washing machine full of red-dyed clothes and a small handful of gorgeous garnets, some of good size, that we left to be cut and polished into what panned out to be a pair of very expensive Christmas gifts for the girls. Tho’ the insurable value of the soon-to-be-finished pieces of jewellry is meant to take away some of the pain. But ouch!

Panning like a pro

Gemtree is a wonderful bush camp with a natural earth airstrip onsite and a red clay and tussock-grass golf course for players of red-dirt golf. There is a 'donkey' hot water system where water is running through coils in 44 gallon drums and heated by throwing small branches of wood underneath, at regular intervals during the day. If the job is forgotten the water goes cold. When we needed it the water was skin-stripping hot, and the toilet paper so soft. Such simple things, such welcome luxuries: but what more could a body want.

We took long bush walks in the late afternoon and early morning and found great arid-country specimens of flora and fauna. A surprise sighting of a rare Grey Falcon had our blood pressure pumping; as did a high-flying Black Breasted Buzzard with its rufous bits and glorious prominent white bull’s eye patches under its wings. 

On the ground we found gnarled corkwood with its deeply furrowed trunk like a heavy duty tire tread; and Dead Finish, that vicious spiky bush with its grim bush humour name implying that before this plant completely dies out all others will have long gone before.

Dead Finish, alive and well 

We came across a cluster of delightful mulga ants nests built like tiny medieval red-earth sandcastles, with an inner hollowed-out bailey courtyard, encircled by high protective red-earth barricades of sand – to protect the ant colony from a deadly rainwater run-off death in times of wet in this concrete-hard land. These were the home of large black ants, tirelessly winding their way back home, each carrying a thin needle of mulga leaf in their jaws, twice their size, to lay as a meticulously-neat decorative camouflage atop their red earth castle barricades.

We head home to barbecue sticky pork ribs in the cool of the evening and probe a native bush banana vine growing on barren tendrils at the base of a trunk near our campsite.

'Gems' everywhere, here.

Built like a medieval barricade

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Derelicts, dropouts and dreamers

We morning tea on the steps of one of the outbuildings of the next Telegraph Station: this one at Barrow Creek. It somehow misses out on the charm of the Tennant Creek respite. Close by, there is a graveyard where a former station manager and his offsider are buried after a massacre by a group of aboriginals. Payback, one assumes.

This is the town of the 2001 Peter Falconio murder. His body has never been found. Given the vastness of the outback it may never be.

Barrow Creek looks like Derelict Junction: a meeting place for hobos, deros and dropouts. There is a sign for a caravan park but I must have blinked, and missed it. The pub is on cracked concrete blocks that once had a lick of paint.  Inside, it is a ‘character’ pub, the walls layered thickly with pin-tacked currency from Outer Mongolia to Iceland,  guaranteeing the donor that no matter what state he’s in when he comes by again he’ll still have the price of a beer, hanging on the wall.

A character pub

Further down the track just south of Ti Tree we stop for home-made mango icecream at Red Centre produce. Here, mangoes, grapes and other produce, grow profusely in water sucked from the artesian basin. A Chinese market gardener and storekeeper is in charge today. It is wonderful to see all these acres of green produce bearing fruit out in this rain-dry land, but such a worry to realise the artesian basin is being depleted to do it. I can't help wondering how they both will survive.

And here, in the dry heartland of Australia, I upgrade my broadband access and find an internet connection instantly using my dongle. Nowhere is really that remote anymore. None of this is like it once was. This flicker of an enlightenment really gives me pause.


At Aileron, we find a pub with several Albert Namatjira originals on the walls.  Despite it being a public holiday the art gallery is opened and a local artist is sitting cross-legged on the floor dropping meticulous white dots onto her work with a long cotton bud stick. 

Artist doing fine paintwork

She is surrounded by hundreds of beautiful Utopian art pieces hanging on racks and walls: neat, careful work, reasonably priced. 

As the sun sinks low in the west we turn back for a time, east along the Plenty Highway, to Gem Tree. Off to experience the Central Australian gem fields, hoping to strike it rich, just like the early prospectors who came this way. 

Dreamers all.

Incredibly detailed artwork

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Rainbow Serpents' eggs

Setting up camp

As the sun slid down the sky we set up camp beneath the brow of giant cluster of perfectly rounded red rocks then headed off to discover the tale of their existence.

Camping in convoy

Over the aeons water entered high ground, vertically and laterally, and carved these rocks out of this place - 'Rainbow Serpents' eggs',  the aboriginals believe.

Rainbow Serpents' eggs

Here at the camp site there is a bush loo, terrific information boards, and endless walks in all directions. The site is an ancient site where local tribes would band together eating bush tucker and telling tales of the Dreaming.

One such tale is of a young male who wandered far from his tribe, enticed by rock spirits, deeper into the rocks, never to return. Despite endless chants he was taken, gone forever.  Which sounds  to me like a traditional version of the Picnic at Hanging Rock tale, and this place could be straight out of that movie.

We took photos at sunset, ate barramundi curry by moonlight, then turned off all the lights and drowned in the night skies easily finding Scorpio, the Southern Cross, the Milky Way; and with the binoculars an even more magical world of powdery fuzzy glows mixed with sharp spiky-bright stars deeper into the night sky.

We slept a bit, woke in the dark, pulled thick jackets on over our pyjamas, and waited for the slow sunrise to emerge and bathe the rounded rocks in a red glow: hanging rocks, balancing rocks, nesting rocks, split ones, fat ones, crumbled ones.

Sometimes it is just wonderful to be alive.

Balancing for now

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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

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Diesel and kerosene-tin comfort

We arrived late at Barkly Homestead after a pitstop at Camooweal for afternoon tea.  

At Barkly Homestead we received a timely reminder about the extra costs of living in the west: We were told they go through an extraordinary 500 litres of diesel a day just to keep their generators functioning for passers-by comfort. A sobering expense.

Barkley Homestead uses 500 litres of diesel each day

We set up quick camp there and ate pub grub at the very neat pub, swept and mopped within an inch of its linoed life. Prices were not much different from Brisbane, food in plentiful portions. Again, female backpackers from Europe served us, working here for three months in their first year in order to get a second year extension to their tourist visa. Shell-shocked a little still, at their selected location, they were smiling, efficient and hospitable.

The Barkley Highway took  us across the Barkley Tableland towards Tennant Creek. These are map features from childhood school days. Tennant Creek was established quite late, in the 1930s, when a stockman’s horse kicked over a tracery of fine gold and started a small gold rush there. Tennant Creek gold was particularly tough and needed battering to extract which made it a noisy, hard job of work.

Before the gold, the Overland Telegraph Station, about 11 kms north of town, was the isolated attraction. It was one of about a dozen repeater stations along this route connecting communications from Port Augusta to Darwin in the 1870s. From Darwin, the communications went along undersea cable to Java from where they were transmitted to the rest of the world.

Parks and Wildlife Service of Northern Territory look after the Telegraph Station now and it is in much the same condition as when it was first built: the stone quarried from nearby has been injected, now, with silicon as a protective damp barrier. Everything is as it was: the root cellar to store locally grown vegetables and fruits; the smoke house, with hand-adzed Mulga supports and beaten kerosene tins decorating its front gable. An ant-bed oven, for cooking has been sited between the smoke house and the kitchen. The kitchen, telegraph office, battery room and bedroom for the station manager were beautifully built with keystone corners, compacted gravel floors, and ventilation holes that once may have been covered in wet hessian to enhance cooling.  Outback were the huts for the linesmen, the blacksmith’s shop, and the butchery – still with its hanging racks and blockwood table.

Telegraph station - huge job of caring and sharing

The station was the earliest building around, and you can just imagine the hoards of explorers, drovers, squatters and settlers who must have traipsed from south to north up this lonely isolated Telegraph track, and, inevitably, called in.  Amazingly, a bicycle tourist rode past one day and called in for a bit of a blacksmith repair on his bike chassis.  He was on an around Australia adventure trip, in 1897.  He praised the care, comfort and skill offered to him in this isolated spot.

Supplies like flour, sugar and salt arrived every six months for such stations, but it is just as well there were gardens and stock yards, because, like remote lighthouse-keepers along the coast, these station keepers up the inland route would have been responsible for feeding and sheltering all who wandered in from the road: thirsty, hungry or just plain lonely and needing to talk.

What is interesting is how the personnel were entrusted by the southern authorities not only to find their way up north to locations like this, but once here to help build the station, manage and maintain it, and welcome the world outside through their doors. A huge job of pastoral care really. Even today, when it is just a quiet shell of what it once was, this station gives off a welcoming air of being a peaceful place.

You can just tell that folk were happy here.

Another  happy face

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Cattle and camels

The public loos at Dajarra were filthy. A first, enroute.  So far the small communities we’ve passed through have had reasonably well-maintained loos. Most are of concrete block construction, basic, and instead of windows, have a high open breezeway letting in insects and breezes, piped with water and plenty of free toilet paper. Some deserve a star rating.   But not Dajarra.  Dajarra looks as though it has had its day.

Yucht!

Once Dajarra was one of the largest cattle-trucking stops, not only in Queensland, but the world. Bigger even than Texas. Thousands upon thousands of cattle were herded from the Kimberleys, across country, right down to the Dajarra cattle yards where they were marshalled into cattle cars and carried east on the rail line from Dajarra heading for Townsville and the port. 

Today the rail lines are barely scars on the landscape. There is a small ramp that may have carried cattle on to those early cattle cars. There is no one around to tell. The last train ran in 1988. These days, what cattle end up here go by road train.

Dajarra needs to find another reason for being.

In the back blocks of town we find a large broken branch shaded on one side to sit while we have a picnic morning tea. Country music blares from a house next door.

We are on the Diamantina Developmental Road heading for Mt Isa, this morning. Water seems to have been sucked out of the earth out here. Even the trees are stunted and the hills rock-strewn, red and crumbly dry.

We slow down on the thin long road, thinly coated with bitumen to allow four large camels to sway slowly across, grinning at us, as we grin back at them. Further on, five more camels amble by. Lazy-moving yet inquisitive beasts -- just nine of the reputed one hundred thousand single-humped wild dromedaries now roaming the Outback, offspring of the Afghan stock brought to Australia as beasts of burden for explorers and settlers way back in the 1860s.

Pure in blood line

Pure in blood line still. So pure that Australia now exports camel stock back to the Middle East for racing and breeding.

We skirt the outer edges of Mt Isa with its blackened chimney stacks and tired featureless buildings. A drop of soapy water and a white-wash face-lift on most of these buildings might make this town look less transient, less debilitated, less dreary. But, while the mines rule Mt Isa will likely to continue sucking money out of the earth, and banking it.

We travel the Barkley Highway towards Camooweal: a wide straight road, upgraded from a bush track during the war.  At that time 80,000 American troops were in Australia’s top end and this route needed to be in prime condition to keep supplies moving through and from Darwin. Then, long tails of military convoys rolled along this route driving 12 day round trips back and forth to the Isa. 

Now, the road mostly carries grey nomads -- and me, with my ipod blaring forth podcasts and audiobooks from the car speakers via a snazzy FM transmitter, while my laptop is hooked up for juice to the cigarette lighter car charger -- along with the sat nav.  Even my broadband internet dongle is working this far out thanks to Telstra’s mobile phone network. And Bec’s DS Lite is glowing in the back seat.

We currently have all the media mod cons of the city functioning in the bush when needed.

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This is Australia calling

Our route this trip 

We met up with our Outback convoy in Toowoomba on the first Monday in May. There are four vehicles with nine of us travelling. Our loose plan has been to overnight mostly by waterholes or riverside camps as we travel through Mitchell to Blackall to Winton, then on to the Alice and surrounds. We break camp most mornings about 8.30am and space morning tea and picnic lunch breaks for shade and comfort as we drive fast through these early roads which we’re all familiar with.

For a few days travel is a fuzzy blur, shrugging off the disorienting fast pace of city life, adjusting to life on the road: to rustic country loos with their wonky rolls of toilet paper dangling from crudely built coat-hanger wire holders, jutting out of rusty nails banged into corrugated iron walls, shabby cotton cultivations with road verges thick with ragged tufts of white cotton spill, stately pairs of Emus dancing their long-legged ballet over shimmering flat fields, and wild big-horned goats slinking furtively through shadowy brigalow stands.

And there were spiders

Far ahead, and to the left on the horizon, are Namatjira-pink-and-purple hills. Kites are wheeling overhead searching for breakfast: not too much has died here in the last little while as there is so much water to keep small things alive. There are puddles, ponds and creeks in every crack, crevice and hollow. You can see where the rain is carving the land, washing raw edges off the road into jagged decaying scallops. Council workers have piled new gravel into mounds, just this morning, ready to flatten and repair – attempting to restrain nature.


We turn west after Winton, on Thursday, and smile. The urge comes to play John Williamson’s True Blue raucously loud across the flat plains.

The Kennedy Developmental Road is long to the horizon, straight and singularly narrow, smoothed off with shiny black patches of new bitumen and pocked, occasionally, with cattle grids. There is a glint of water in deeply rutted ditches on the sides of the road. We’ll make deep ruts, too, if we have to get off for a roadtrain.

Beyond the hills, just a few dozen kilometres to the left, on a station called Opalton, my great-great grandfather, William John Burt, laboured. An educated, green-country, Dorset-born-and-bred man, he basked here like a lone lizard, under this vast bleached blue sky, swatting slow, sticky flies.


We eat our picnic lunch at the Hilton, opposite the Middleton Hotel, halfway between Winton and Boulia, the only building within cooee, other than a lone station property. A hundred years ago Middleton was one of nine Cobb & Co changing stations on this sparsely populated inland route. Every thirty miles horses had to be changed and all over Australia in a network of amazing ‘roads’ Cobb & Co coaches travelled 28,000 miles a week, larger distances than anywhere else in the world. Before that, teamsters and mail carriers used Middleton as a way station.

A reminder of when Cobb and Co stopped here

Today, Middleton has beer on ice, not on tap: the landlady is tired and looking to sell. She would like to live some place where she doesn’t have to depend on a generator for power, she said. The Hilton picnic space, opposite, is a corrugated iron lean-to that has seen better days, and would be hard pressed to rate a single star by even a kindly RACQ picnic-rating Inspector, but it is free, shady, and we have two dogs from the pub for company. And the slow-moving, sticky flies.

Lunch at the Hilton 

We cross a series of waterways called the Diamantina Causeway, a low depression of land criss-crossed by a dozen or more creeks and channels that probably don’t even feature in normal drier years – days ago the water would have been across this road everywhere, flooding it. Now the channels are water-rich, fat reddish-brown: soil and vegetable stained. This is the Channel Country that we marked on maps in school days.

Gradually, the earth changes to rust, and, as we get closer, the hills become mesa-capped -- like New Mexico. The plains are clothed in buffel grass, a tough drought-resistant grass excellent for cattle feed, for which we probably have the Afghan traders to thank: they likely brought it to Australia in their saddle and duffle bags.

Mesas, as in New Mexico

We climb one of the dramatically-eroded mesas and look down on what once would have been the giant inland Eromanga Sea that once covered the large heart of Australia in water. Below us crocodiles would have snapped at our feet, the sea would have rippled with icthyosaurus – a large dolphin-like, air-breathing fish; the sky would have been frenetic with flying reptiles. An entirely different world

Once primitive giant sea-dragons swam freely 

The further west we go, the mesas, with crumbling clay tops, close in and surround us. The land looks more like a dry-gulch, John Wayne, western-movie set. Any minute I expect gun-totin’ cowboys to hightail it out of their bivouac in them thar hills.

One of the jewels of the desert 

That wet humid sea air is long gone. The land is stunning now in its mesa islands wearing drier clothes of rusted dirt – and fresh green green grass.

Boulia calls: the land of the Min Min lights: eerie vaporous will o’ wisps that flit and float in phosphorous incandescence like lights from another world – tho’ they did not surface for us.

Back of town we found galahs and lime budgerigars perched in an ancient skeletal Waddy tree. Waddys are rare now, and only a few are to be found here, and near Birdsville. One of the hardest woods in the world waddy was invaluable to the Aboriginals for weapons; and waddy ash was used as a mortar additive in early settlement construction – tho’ it often ruined settlers’ axes as they fought to cut it down.

A hard tree, almost extinct, rooted in its harsh landscape.  This is Australia, calling.

A remnant primitive waddy tree

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