A Van Called Erasmus.
CHAPTER SIX
From Uluru to Alice Springs was another dayful of bugger all. Calling upon all my descriptive powers I could never make this tedious, repetitive scenery into anything readable although I’m sure many authors are capable of doing just that. With the exceptional amount of rain the countryside had soaked up over the past two weeks things were greening. Perhaps the red earth would soon be more lookable if the emerging green tinge would carry on emerging. The James ranges which we drove through would have maybe seemed worth looking at if we hadn’t already seen so much in a similar vein. It had been a full fortnight since we’d seen a native animal from the cab although Clare had seen two camels. People told us that when there was plenty of feed following the rains the animals didn’t venture near the road. They weren’t missing anything.
The bush (there are actually several of them) was undergoing a regenerative phase. I had spoken to a ranger back at the Olgas who told me that the native shrubs and trees have big lignotubers under the ground. I was impressed. I thought they were woodwind instruments. According to Mr Ranger Sir what you see above ground with these plants is only two thirds of the whole planty scheme of things. They’re designed by David Bellamy (or was it the Rainbow Serpent?) so that the top can burn and the real heart of the thing, which is underground, just carries on as though nothing has happened. These ligno what’sits are big. Mr. Ranger Sir said they can be “about as big as …oooh let me see…half a small car I suppose?” When we stopped for a pee and tea break in a place utterly indistinguishable from anywhere we’d seen in the past eight hours of driving, we could see the old lignos at work. We’d come past hundreds of kilometres of dead shrubs varying in height between a metre and three times that. Now, as we looked at the bases of these shrubs almost every one was sprouting anew from under the ground. I think that if we’d made our trip perhaps a fortnight after Lignotuber Revival Week we’d have seen a vastly different panorama.
Through the swish of the windscreen wipers Alice Springs came into view slowly. It wasn’t like the Olgas that suddenly sprang out at us from behind the nothingness. The Alice is not a small place. It has a permanent population of twenty five thousand souls, the overwhelming majority of which are attached to bodies.
We drove around town looking for a Laundromat. The weather had been so wet that we hadn’t been able to do any washing for a long time and I’d taken to marking my underpants with Textas on all the sides I’d used – right way round, back to front, inside out front and back. The town seldom sees rain and suffers from temperatures in excess of forty degrees Celsius for weeks on end. Drying the washing in this climate doesn’t normally present a problem but on this day all the people who didn’t have dryers were in the Laundromat. Some were from cattle stations and came with ten bin liners full of washing. There was segregation in the laundrette too. Grey nomad travellers occupied one corner patiently waiting to use the dryers. At the opposing end were the aboriginal women hypnotically watching their washing spin around. The middle ground was held by the white cattle station wives with kids that found it necessary to kick and punch each other. Their mums, used to the wide open spaces where sound doesn’t echo, shouted at them at the tops of their voices and smacked the backs of their legs. It took us three hours to get our meagre odds and ends washed and back in place but it was worth it just to be able to go to sleep with the smell of washing detergent again.
Alice Springs is a surprisingly sophisticated place and I’d like to take the population of Coober Pedy there so they could see what could be done with the shit hole they inhabit. If Coober Pedy is about opals then Alice Springs is about Aboriginal art. The town is covered in it. Some of it good, some excellent but most “mediochre.” We could probably have stayed there for a couple of weeks going out on day trips and have filled every day. It has a good pedestrian mall with upmarket shops and restaurants where you can sit outside and enjoy a coffee with a little people watching thrown in. We didn’t actually see any little people though. The tourists come from all points of the globe and wander up and down the mall threading themselves in and out between the local Aboriginal populations.
Some of the art shops - and there are many - are stylish. They sell three thousand dollar paintings, expensive didgeridoos and necklaces and so forth and the goods are top class. To authenticate some of the more expensive items they have the artist visit the shop and have their photograph taken with the piece they’ve created; often pictured actually signing the back of the painting. As you go through the paintings the artist’s picture is attached to each one. I was struck by three things. The first being that the Aborigines, who have created all these paintings and object d’art, aren’t the one’s selling them. There’s a lot of money changing hands in the art shops of Alice Springs but it’s all done by white people and not necessarily by Australians. I heard a variety of accents among the art shop proprietors there.
I don’t get it. I don’t see why Aborigines aren’t in the shops selling their own wares in upmarket, sophisticated surroundings. Perhaps they don’t want to but if that’s not the case what if they all went on strike? If they cut off supply a lot of Alice Springs would have to go into immediate hibernation. The whole town sells itself on its Aboriginality. Hoardings everywhere invite the visitor to buy Aboriginal, to take trips to places with names like ‘Corroboree Rock” etc. etc. Book shops sell books about Aboriginal art, customs and bush tucker ad infinitum but it’s all being done by whites.
The second thing that struck me was the subservient attitude of the Aboriginal artists when they entered the shops to sell their paintings and the patronising attitude that was returned to them by the shop owners. I heard shop owners speaking to their colleagues and customers about the artists as though the person standing in front of them wasn’t there and using expressions such as “bless her.” The third thing in relation to the art scene in Alice Springs was the number of female artists photographs I saw attached to paintings depicting the artist with a split lip or a black eye.
In the shopping centre we had to pay fifty cents each to use the toilet. The purpose behind the high price was to put this rather pedestrian pee-hole out of the range of the Aboriginals. I used the internet service at the library while we were in town and was charged six dollars per hour for it. South Australian libraries offer the service free! We also visited the Alice Springs Desert Park. It’s crap – don’t go there. The small trees, shrubs and plants in the place looked identical to the stuff we’d been driving through and, in my case, peeing into for days. I couldn’t tell the difference.
This town that Neville Shute wrote so lovingly of sits in the middle of the east and west McDonnell ranges which are just another long line of craggy hills for geologists to get excited about and for people like me to drive past. The McDonnells are thin, two dimensional mountains rather like the backs of stegosaurs. From some angles, and at some times of day, they look like a nose to tail procession of marine iguanas with the fins on their backs erect. Those of you wishing to replicate the McDonnells at home should:
1 Take a fresh Swiss Roll and squash it between your hands, making a pointed ridge at the top.
2 With your fingers splayed, push down a little on the ridge so that you end up with a series of fairly uniform humps and hollows.
3 Airbrush the bottom half of the Swiss Roll with a little Indian Red.
4 Mount your Swiss Roll in the middle of a flattened, rusty forty four gallon drum sprinkled with dried grass clippings
You’ll find the strata thus created by the jam in the Swiss Roll is nigh on an exact replica of the McDonnell Ranges. The difference in size between the Swiss roll and the flattened forty four gallon drum will give you an idea of the size ratio of the ranges to the plains they reluctantly inhabit.
Alice Springs was for us a stop where we could load up at the supermarket and get a few things done that hadn’t been possible for a few weeks due to the lack of goods and services in the fairly remote places we’d been passing though. I went to the hairdressers and got myself a number seven. I can’t keep up with things like numbers for haircuts. It wasn’t that long ago when, if you’d walked into a hairdresser’s and said you wanted a number two, they’d have told you to bugger off or shown you to the toilet. I suppose the numbers start at zero and anything below that would mean having skin taken off your scalp? I have no idea where the numbers end. What number would a Rastafarian haircut be? Probably about ninety I reckon. I know I’m not allowed to ask for a sixty nine but I’ve still got a lot to learn. I seem to remember a thirty seven from years ago though; for some reason I associate it with lychees and ice cream. Now there’s an idea. Chinese restaurants could get together with hairdressers and offer mystery nights where you can buy tickets with numbers from one to ten. You’d buy a number seven ticket which you’d present at each establishment and compare the experience with your mates down at the hospital afterwards.
By now the weather was raining so consistently that we decided we’d have to use The Alice as a base for a while and go out on two day sojourns coming back in when if the weather really got bad and roads became impassable due to creeks in flood. We stocked up with food at Woolworths and headed for the East MacDonnells. The fairly regular dips in the ridges of this long line of mountains has, in a few places, been broken by rivers forming the famous gorges that became sacred site for the Aboriginals and, later still, tourists attractions for everyone else.
There are probably about a dozen of them all told and I guess we went to half of them. Each had an entirely different ambience and none were a disappointment. They’re mostly in national parks with names like Simpsons Gap or Glen Helen Gorge but the odd one is on private property and they charge an entrance fee. One such was called Standley Chasm where I asked the woman behind the counter “how much would you charge an old man to look at your chasm?” She looked at me stony faced and said “We don’t ‘ave no concessions ‘ere.”
I shouldn’t gloss over the gorges with frivolity. They’re all spectacular and they all have different types of rock formations. Their sandy bottoms have taken millions of years to create by slowly wearing down the rocks in the ranges. This, all the more mind boggling when one considers that some of the rivers that wore the rocks down only flow for a few days a year. That makes them much older than God and … just as wrinkled.
Hermannsburg Mission is out that way. An incongruous dispersal of whitewashed, German stone buildings; they looked as if they’d just fallen from the sky onto the wrong continent. It was a Lutheran mission that set out to civilise the Central Australian Aborigines back in the 1870s. A small procession of German pastors had worked themselves ragged in their misguided callings for decades to no real, lasting avail. Pastor Albrecht, who came in the early 1920s was, I think, the last. Albrecht was born, educated and raised to a debatable maturity in Russian occupied Poland and so would have been familiar, no doubt, with what the job west of Alice Springs entailed.
He was lame and his peer group didn’t seem to want to have much to do with him. He was a social misfit who did badly at school and was crazy about God. Seven other pastors had refused the Hermannsburg position before Albrecht applied for it. They were glad to get him – or anyone. He was a thoroughly nice man who believed implicitly that he was engaged in his God’s calling. He never once stopped to consider that he could have got it wrong; he didn’t need to, he knew he had it right - God told him. He was guilty of blinkered vision and universally, across space and time, should be roundly condemned for his failure to use the brain his God so thoughtlessly furnished him with. He was guilty of not bothering to think about or question what he was doing. His religion was, in his mind, right and the religions of the Aboriginals wrong. The conceited prick.
These days the Mission is a tourist attraction. It’s very attractive and the whitewashed Germanic church and outbuildings set among gum trees and date palms provides some rare photo opportunities. In the early 1980s the Mission and the land were handed back to the rightful owners who now employ white staff to manage it and earn them money from it. It’s fenced off and the windows are all barred to stop the owners getting into it and, presumably, despoiling it. I can’t see why the Aborigines can’t run it themselves. There’s a little village full of Aborigines at Hermannsburg where their parents and grandparents were born and I’m sure that tourists would like to be shown around by people whose forefathers had built the place and tended its gardens and sung the German version of All things Bright and Beautiful. There are reasons why the Aborigines at Hermannsburg don’t run their own show just as there are reasons why we didn’t see Aborigines employed on the land they own at Uluru in anything but menial positions. I just don’t know what they are. Is it that the system has failed to give them the right sort of education? Is it that the present crop of parents isn’t very good at parenting because they were stolen from their parents? Is it because they just don’t want to? Why is it that in the USA so many black people occupy such high positions in government or as film stars, entertainers, mayors of cities, presidential candidates etc. and Australian Aborigines here in their own country don’t.
Something in the back of my mind has been nagging me on this subject for a long time. Just why it is that American Negroes, the descendants of slaves, have done so well in comparison to our Aborigines? Perhaps we’ve killed our Aborigines with kindness? By this I mean welfare kindness. The white Americans gave their black Negro population little in the way of welfare compared with white Australians. American blacks had to fight for what they got and through fighting retained, and indeed further developed, a sense of pride through gaining in adversity. The majority of Australian Aborigines, by contrast, received at least their subsistence for doing nothing. Where was the incentive to get up off their butts and grow?
This is all my own home baked theory with a little bit of education on the subject thrown in. It’s a political hot potato and I’ll be pulled to bits for saying what I’ve said. It’s unthinkable to many that anyone should say that the invading marauding whites have killed the Aboriginals with kindness. Nevertheless I think it may be true. There are far more questions on the subject than answers out there. I hope by the end of our trip that Clare and I will have found some answers to these questions.
A few weeks back a fellow traveller told me that there was something basically wrong and deficient in a people who had lived on a continent for forty thousand years and didn’t have a single pyramid [or something of a similar ilk] to show for it. He was as guilty of not thinking as was pastor Albrecht. Had the Aborigines built a pyramid, what would they have done with it? They could have sat around it and starved to death but that’s all. The fact is that all civilisations that build fixed settlements are unable to do so until they can grow more than they can eat. When that can be done the surplus allows for a sedentary way of life where people can build things they couldn’t have carried with them when they were nomads.
What could the Aborigines have grown? So far the white invader settlers have failed to locate a single Australian staple crop. Nothing on the Australian continent is cultivatable to the point where a settled population can exist on what it grows let alone put a surplus in store for harvest failures. So far the Macadamia nut is the only Australian crop commercially cultivated by white people but that was first achieved by the Americans who took it to Hawaii to develop it.
Now, let us for a minute imagine that there had been a cultivatable, staple crop here in Australia – what would the Aborigines have used to pull the plough? Since 1788 when the white invader settlers first came here to till the land they haven’t domesticated a single Australian animal. Sure, they’ve tamed a few but where are the herds?
Few white Australians have ever stopped to consider that what they will eat over the course of their whole lives will have originated in other continents. Without the animals and plants they brought with them they couldn’t have developed any further than the Aborigines who managed to exploit everything exploitable on the continent.
In Alice Springs we came across a really excellent bookshop that specialises in books about Central and Aboriginal Australia. There were books there that I’d never seen elsewhere and on the subject of Australian Aborigines it had more information on its shelves than the University of Tasmania’s School of Aboriginal Studies. The elderly lady proprietor of the shop also stocks paints for the local Aboriginal artists and she watches them like a hawk as they wander through her premises. Nobody can put one over on this lady and she has eyes in the back of her head. It’s plain to see that she loves her Aboriginal customers and when they talk to her they lift their eyes up rather than staring at the floor as most of them do when they talk to whites outside on the sidewalk. There we bought Bruce Chatwyn’s Songlines, a book largely about the singing up of the country by Aboriginals as they pass through it. That night when Clare opened it she read that Chatwyn had also been in that bookshop when he was researching his book on Aboriginals. He described both the lady and her shop. The following day we were going into town and Clare called in and asked the lady if she was, indeed, the person mentioned in Songlines. “Yes”, she said, and motioning to a chair by the window said “he used to sit over there.” And pointing quite casually to another chair said “Salman Rushdie sits over there when he comes.”
Her daughter was there when we visited her the second time; a lady probably in her mid sixties who, uninvited, sang us If You Ever Go Across The Sea To Ireland and The Rose of Tralee. The second of which she sang to the tune of The Streets of Laredo. While she was wailing away like a tremulous screech owl her mother was perceptibly wincing. She told us that she and her mother were trying to sell the shop and they intended to buy a house in Adelaide with the proceeds. She said “when I’m there I’ll sing for free for those that don’t have anything. There are so many in the world that have so much and then there are those who have nothing. I’ll sing for those poor souls who have nothing.” She didn’t elaborate and I wondered if she intended to actually sing at the poor people or to sing at some poor unfortunate rich people and give the foreign coins, broken eggs and rotten tomatoes thus collected to the poor.
Something we found very strange during our stay in The Alice was the fact that ABC radio didn’t do weather forecasts. They told us what the temperature was or had been in a few places but never once did they hazard a guess as to what tomorrow’s weather might be like. The rain never really gave up during the time we were in and around the place so we left and hurried north. Three experienced travelling couples had told us that once across the Tropic of Capricorn we could put our shorts on and keep them on no matter whether or not it was raining. Everything in Erasmus was feeling cold and damp by this time. Warm rain sounded like a better proposition to us.
Tenant Creek would be the next town where it might be possible to buy a cappuccino and in between were only roadhouses where the instant coffee, made with bore water, tasted like gorilla piss. I was slowly developing a love/hate relationship with the Australian landscape or, at least, this particular part of the Australian landscape. The love was for the two percent of the time spent looking at and walking around truly spectacular natural rock formations, gorges, canyons and such. The hate was for the ninety eight percent of the flat, unending sameness of the plains in between those attractions. The drive from The Alice north towards Tenant Creek though, was different. What made the difference was the rain I’d been complaining about. Much of this stretch of road had wide gutters at each side so that it looked as though the bitumen was on a causeway. The gutters had collected the rain water which was now gone but in its place the grass had greened. We travelled for mile after mile on a black strip flanked by two green strips like a microbe running along the back of a frog.
There was colour too! Some of the dull boring old scrubby things had yellow mimosa-like flowers on them and these contrasted with the rusty red earth – magic. So, there was a black strip flanked by green strips flanked by yellow strips under which was red earth. The whole experience was like getting lost in a box of liquorice allsorts. There were wildflowers as well but at this stage we didn’t know they were there until we stopped Erasmus and walked away from the road. There weren’t enough of them to carpet the land. They were tiny delicate things you had to get close to before you noticed them. I first came across them when we stopped to decorate our first dead cow.
We’ve founded an organisation called “Belated Bovine Makeovers inc.” and its raison detre is to give dead cows a more dignified send off rather than ending up as a standard flattened leather envelope at the side of the road. Our first makeover was DOT who I think was a Hereford. She had been brown and white. Well, she still was but she used to be an altogether more rounded animal. We located her leg bones and put them roughly in place and sprayed them white as we did with the horns. Then we sprayed her name in white along the bit where the spare ribs used to be. We finished her off with gold spray around the edges and teeth. We took before and after photographs and I’m hoping the idea will catch on when this book is published. The photographic essay will appear in book form as soon as I can convince a publisher that it’s a really good idea and that lots of sane people will be queuing up to buy a copy. The book may be called Dead Cows & Dead Cars of the Australian Outback. The reason for this is that we’ve also been taking pictures of the many dead cars we see along the sides of the roads. Were convinced they’re stolen because they’re always behind bushes about thirty metres from the hard shoulder where most car drivers won’t notice the thieves stripping them of their engines and other parts. If we’d been in a normal family car we wouldn’t have seen so many of them but Erasmus is basically a truck and the seats are high off the ground.
One of the roadhouses along the way was at a place called Aileron which I thought was a strange name for a roadhouse. When we got out of the van there was a big, good looking eagle looking at us from the other side of a cyclone wire fence. Its plumage was perfect and it had lovely feet, all clean and wrinkled. He was surrounded by the remains of past meals of kangaroo legs and he had a really soft high pitched chirp which we thought was most un-eaglelike. The guy who served us told me that his name was Bozo and that he was bionic. Bozo the Bionic Eagle sounded great, just like the name of a comic strip. He said that Bozo had seven pins in his right wing, four pins in his left wing and a synthetic chest. I didn’t know what to say in reply to this information. I just said “better not let him get near a magnet then.”
Besides Bozo the Bionic Eagle there was only one attraction worth speaking of between Alice Springs and Tenant Creek. Another unusual and spectacular fucking rock formation. I mean, like, if you’re not into rock formations don’t take a vacation in Outback Australia.
These particular rocks were called The Devils Marbles. Funny how the Devil gets blamed for things like that isn’t it? I think I’ve seen about a score of Devils mountains in various parts of the world. I feel sorry for the old devil sometimes. I think the poor old bugger’s had a very bad press. Everybody who wants to see the Dev’s Marbs tries to get there for sunset and everybody did. The car park was a sea of caravans and grey hair. They all stayed the night sharing their wine casks around their fires and their noisy generators.
The Devils Marbles are made of something geologically unusual or incongruous - you can bet your arse. I didn’t bother reading the information boards but that’s what they would have said for sure. And then there would have been a load more information about how some Rainbow Serpent or Bunyip or some such mythical creature in the Dreamtime dropped all these rounded rocks from the sky when they were infertile because he was being chased by some nasty bastard called Manalargenagooblybum or Wooragglyfingerburnum or whatever. I find myself saying “for Christ’s sake grow up. Don’t you know everything was created in six days out of bugger all by God who had a day off when it was finished? Anyone can see that this is where God used to pick his nose. They’re not the Devils Marbles, they’re God’s Bogies. And as for rainbow Serpents – it’s patently ridiculous.
Now, where was I? Oh yes. Sorry about that. I’ve a feeling I’m becoming obsessed. The marbles, yes, the….marbles. The marbles are a whole bagful of, I suppose, a thousand or more either spherical or rounded lumps of rock that have, through some freak of nature, become precariously balanced one atop the other, over a large chunk of landscape. They could be spread over a square mile or so but I’m not very good at judging these things. They’re very nice to look at especially when you’ve had fuck all else to look at for six hours. Having said that, you’d probably give them the once over if they were on your way to work. And whilst on that subject, how come none of these bloody great Australian rock formations are on the way to work for 99% of Australia’s population? How come there’s nothing like the Olgas or Uluru or the Devils Marbles in the suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne where they could take your mind off the fact that the missus always looks the bleedin’ same when you’re on your way to work in the morning? Perhaps the Devil really did make these things just to inconvenience people. I think it’s pretty Devilish to make people drive all that way to see them.
The Devils Marbles probably just got piled on top of each other by glacier or an iceberg that drifted in when the place was under water and then melted afterwards. I don’t now. It was an iceberg that sank the Titanic though wasn’t it? Bloody Jews – Iceberg, Goldberg, Greenberg what’s the difference? I’ve often wondered whether or not there were any Chinese Jews and I found out last year when Clare and I went to China on vacation. I asked our guide when we were having a smorgasbord breakfast in a hotel we stayed at in Shanghai. “Tell me. Are there any Chinese Jews?” I said. “I don’t fink so no.” He said. “They got up there only the orange jews and pineapple jews.”
Now, the Devils Marbles. Marvellous really, especially at sunset. They’re big and you can walk around them and between them and some have sizeable trees growing in crevices between them. They’re a bit like Uluru and the Olgas of course in that they aren’t jagged at all but rounded and feminine. They’re a bit like Henry More sculptures but without the holes. I suppose they’re more like the exaggerated cannon ball buttocks of some of the Picasso beach paintings. Yes, sort of Earth Mother buttocks, breasts and bellies but not of the ilk of those lollopy, potato fed, Russian women that bask in their nineteen fifties underwear on the banks of the Volga. These are sort of firm and Mediterranean and sun tanned and the bushes that grow in the crevices are like pubes.
For those of you who wish to create the Devils Marbles in the privacy of your own back yards for photographic purposes, here’s what to do.
Take twenty seven kilos of new potatoes washed but not peeled or scraped.
Roast them in cheap Dick Smith canola oil for thirty five minutes at 220 degrees Celsius.
When cooled take six boxes of cheap Dick Smith Dick Head matches and push them half way into half the potatoes.
Take the other half of the potatoes and join them in random bunches to the first half utilising the half matches that are protruding.
Push the joined potatoes together in twenty seven random heaps
Take a few sprigs of parsley and press these into the cleavages between the roast spuds.
Place the whole installation on seventeen rusty flattened forty four gallon drums sprinkled with lawn clippings.
We stayed the night at the Devils Marbles and managed to get away before the rush for the iron lung started. We continued in an upwardly direction towards the elusive Darwin stopping at Tenant Creek which was only a couple of hours up the road. On the way into town we saw a sign inviting us to real coffee and culture so we stopped. The place was called the Nyinkka Nyunyu………No, me neither, but that’s got sod all to do with it.
After the flat whites in the very appealing little bistro set in a desert garden, we tried the cultural bit. That was at eleven in the morning and we didn’t get out of the place until four thirty in the afternoon. Their museum and art gallery was superb. And before you go thinking that I should have said were superb; the museum and art gallery was all in the one room. That’s the way it were.
It was run by the Waramunga people. They’re Aborigines. Waramunga means something if you’re born Waramunga but not to me. There were a couple of continually running videos in which the Waramungas? Waramungese? Waramungwegians? Waramungooses? Warra warra…fuck it, these Aborigines, explained their culture. They did it by going out into the bush and actually doing things like dancing, cutting up and cooking kangaroos, finding underground water, collecting food and honey, using sign language and all sorts of really cool stuff. The videos together with the displays and written information were all first class and it was so good that we lost track of time. The Aborigines were doing a great job in Tenant Creek and, by comparison, their counterparts in Alice Springs were a sad looking bunch. The Tenant Creek guys had dignity and stood upright, wore clean clothes and looked you in the eye. They still sat in the dirt. They needed to. It felt right.
The next two days were, to use Americas Cup parlance, Lay Days. We were fed up with so much driving and found the Tenant Creek water reservoir and stopped there and read books. It was a beautiful green oasis with toilets and showers. Clare painted a little and I wrote there words I’m writing at the moment. Yes folks, these words are fresh. I don’t think I ever read a totally fresh word in a book before have you? I’m right here sitting in the back of Erasmus in my shorts with my half drunk cup of coffee and a saucer full of prune pits and I’m going to give you a fresh word. Priapism – hows that? Like it? Want another? OK, Wapenshaw. Good eh?
I was sitting outside typing one day last week when a grey haired guy with an overdose of hair cream and a small dog on a lead came up to me and said “excuse me, can I have a quick word?” I said “sure I’ll type you one right away. How about velocity? ” He looked at me a little vacantly. “OK” I said “speed, that’s a quick word.” I smiled. He didn’t and he asked me if I knew any free camping spots in Darwin. I didn’t. He left.
I walked around the Tenant Creek reservoir. Judging by the lack of tracks I don’t think many people have been silly enough to do it before me. What started out as a pleasant little stroll became decidedly unpleasant the further I walked. The little inlets were enchanting and I surprised flocks of wild ducks and solitary white egrets that took to the wing in front of me as I stumbled through the spiky Spinifex. I had to stumble through the spiky Spinifex that grew back from the water’s edge because down near the water were thousands of the fattest bodied spiders I’d ever encountered. The long gossamer strands that anchored their webs to the ground or the low scrub stretched up to around three meters in length and were very tough. The problem with them was that they formed colonies of fifty or so spiders and spun their webs overlapping each other. Despite keeping a keen eye out for them a couple of times I walked into these horrid bundles and it frightened me. I stopped at one point and threw heavy twigs into one of these communal webs and came to the conclusion that they would easily trap a small bird the size of a sparrow. Somebody told me later that they were called St. Andrews spiders because the way they hang in the webs is in the shape of a St. Andrews cross.
It was about five hours out of Tenant Creek at a place called Renners Springs that we pulled out of a roadhouse after refuelling and a road train ran us off the road. It was quite deliberate and from what I’ve heard road train drivers really do regard all other traffic as lesser life forms – they’re the kings. This came a day after our hearing on the news that somebody had been killed in an accident with a road train near Katherine some four hundred kilometres north of where we struck our little problem. We pulled out of the refuelling stop about a kilometre ahead of a huge Volvo road train pulling three or four (in panic we couldn’t count them) trailers. A car was coming towards us about two kilometres away and the road train driver pulled out to overtake us. He could see that the car coming towards us was going at a fast pace but he wasn’t going to slow down and hang in behind us. I watched in the rear view mirror as he pulled out and before his cab was even alongside us he put his left hand indicator on to let me know he was coming in on us. This he did as soon as his cab was past us. He just swung in forcing us off the road with his trailers. We managed to pull up but it was a scary experience and if there’d been a hole in the hard shoulder or it had been soft from all the rain we’d had recently we’d have gone over.
Needless to say, we couldn’t catch him to take a photo of his number plate and he wasn’t stopping. I was somewhat incensed and wanted to report the incident to the police but found them virtually non existent. We called into three police stations along the way and they were all unmanned with telephone numbers to call in emergencies. Stacked up against the murder of Peter Falconio and the like we figured we didn’t rate as an emergency and so it wasn’t until we got to Katherine, a few hundred kilometres further on that I found a manned police station that was able to register our complaint. Services in the bush, it seems to me, don’t need to be that primitive in this day and age. I’d hate to be a lone policeman up here facing some nutter outside the station with a complaint and a gun. It would be hours before you could get help.
When we arrived in Daly Waters, a small settlement on the road north with a famous pub, we began to realise that travelling around Australia was becoming something of a procession. It was at two thirty in the afternoon and most people had already set up camp for the night. The Daly Waters pub was large. The bar itself was quite spacious and decorated with the usual memorabilia in these parts which included Overland Telegraph leftover junk and bits left over from the American military visits of WWII. Above the bar hung various items of female underwear discoloured by cigarette smoke and fly shit. Around the bar were a few open air courtyards where people sat at trestle tables sipping beer. It was a much better pub than most that we’d struck and outside sat a man burning people’s names into ready made slices of wood to hang on their bedroom and toilet doors. It was very popular with the caravanners who marvelled at his skills with the hot bent wire.
To one side of the pub was a caravan park of sorts with a couple of hundred caravans, tents and campervans already set up for the night. When we pulled into it we straight away decided that we’d go look for somewhere else for the night but we stopped the engine and walked over to the pub through the regimented lines of campervans. As in most caravan parks we’d seen the caravans were parked within three metres of each other where the occupants could easily hear one another break wind in the night. As we threaded our way between them six or seven people we’d seen before in roadside stops along the way waved at us. We waved back not sure whether they were just waving flies way or trying to be friendly.
Once in the pub we recognised a few more couples we’d seen before too. When we thought about it we realised that we were all in a grand procession from one beauty spot, or place of interest, to the next. Without a four wheel drive vehicle there are so few places to visit in Outback Australia that everybody is heading where you’re heading and you know you’ll see them again soon. The large capacity water tanks, the generator and the big batteries in Erasmus allowed us to stay away from civilisation for up to five days and sometimes, when we came back into the fold, we’d join the next procession. Wave after wave of white haired pensioners like plagues of rats are out there moving doggedly through the landscape all the time.
This gregarious camaraderie is what people with white hair seek. There’s a security in knowing a bunch of other white haired travellers; kindred spirits on what could possibly be life’s last, or perhaps first, big trip. I reflected on what a wonderful way it was to spend one’s retirement compared with the life of elderly people in most other parts of the world where to retire is to sit around waiting for death whilst being supported by one’s family.
It was also a very different experience to travelling in Europe and the Middle East where, in a past life, I lived in a campervan for a couple of years. There we hardly ever saw anyone at a campsite or place of interest that we’d come across before. There was so much to do and so many interesting places to visit that, although there were many more people travelling around, they went in many more different directions; crossed borders into other countries and so on. The Australian experience, by contrast, involves people travelling much greater distances and visiting far fewer places – natural attractions as opposed to cathedrals, bridges, ancient cities. The camaraderie this Australian way of travelling generates is a bonding thing. People meet other people and become life long friends through it and visit each other in their respective States afterwards.
North from Daly Waters we called in at Mataranka, the next place in the line. A few stragglers from the last procession were pulling out of the car park as we pulled in and I gave them the salutary wave. Mataranka is a special place – and here comes the word. Wait for it. Ready? “Geomorphologically.” I bet you’re impressed. But enough of that shit for the time being. Adjacent to it is a replica of the log cabin that was built to feature in the film We Of The Never Never. I’d heard of it but I always thought it was about hire purchase debt collectors. The film was, however, based on a book by Jeannie Gunn who signed herself Mrs. Aeneas Gunn. Had I been her I would have stuck to the Jeannie. Aeneas Gunn sounds like some surface to air heat seeking suppository device to me. Anyway, starting in 1902 Mrs. Gunn lived for a whole year at Elsey Station which then incorporated what is now known as Mataranka. Her book, We of the Never Never, in which she related her experiences in the Territory, became famous and sold millions of copies. After the year at Elsey Station her husband died and she returned to Melbourne and died there nearly sixty years later. She was a lousy writer but her subject matter was unique at the time and her book became required reading for a generation of Australian schoolchildren. In it she makes mention of the “nigger hunts” her husband. “a kindly man” used to go on.
At the replica of her homestead I read the historical facts on the walls.
“1905-1909 The Arafura company organized hunting parties to kill Aboriginals occupying country wanted for cattle. First missionaries at Roper river (1908) report on whites shooting Aboriginals ”just for fun.”…”
I reference to Aboriginal women it said “Sometimes relations with white men were forced upon them, but there were also enduring and compassionate unions between white men and black women. Children born to these relationships were almost always taken to compulsory Government institutions, to be brought up without family contact.”
“Compassionate” seems not to have extended to the kids of these white men who, by all accounts, didn’t object to the government taking them. Not a grave or memorial exists to any of those “slain for the fun of it” but we did visit the We of the Never Never graveyard. There we saw the graves of most of the characters in Mrs. Gunn’s book as well as a splendid memorial to the lady herself. Some of the white people from the book had been exhumed and re-interred in the graveyard in the interests, I presume, of creating a more fulfilling experience for the tourists; most of whom are of the generation that had the book as a compulsory part of their education and know full well that we Australians don’t need to see niggers graves on our holidays.
Mataranka is a big drawcard in the Northern Territory but Elsey Station is only a part of it. There’s a resort there and it also has a geomorphological wonder going for it. There in the middle of what I think was nowhere there’s an underground spring that pushes up five million gallons of crystal clear hot water every day – even on Sundays. And, it hits the air at thirty four degrees Celsius! I loved it because here was a major attraction that wasn’t a rock formation. We walked down the palm covered walkway. Hundreds of tall, shady Livingstonia palms blocked out the harsh rays of the midday sun. They were absolutely jam packed with hanging fruit bats numbering in their thousands and we hadn’t walked fifty metres into this little forest before Clare had bat shit on her arms. She ran for shelter but I was intrigued at how these big bats hanging upside down could shit on somebody below them without getting it all over themselves. I looked through the zoom lens of the camera at them. I wanted to see if their eyelids were covered in poo or whether they turned right way up, poohed, and then went back to the hanging position again. I didn’t find out before I had to move on too. The Kodak CX6330 digital camera is a fine piece of equipment but once you get a dose of bat excrement on the retractable lens it takes hours to get rid of.
After a short walk we stood beside the thermal pool. My sunglasses misted up immediately and as I squinted through them I thought the resort was doing its washing in there. When I took them off I realised that it was full of people the colour of sheets and badly in need of ironing. We walked on through the forest following the hot stream and came to a landing on a river for swimmers. To get to it you had to go through a little gate on which was a notice from The Parks and Wildlife, Northern Territory. It read: CAUTION, FRESH WATER CROCODILES INHABIT THIS AREA. THEY CAN BECOME AGGRESSIVE AND CAUSE INJURY IF DISTURBED. PLEASE DO NOT APPROACH OR INTERFERE WITH THESE ANIMALS.
I hate signs telling me what to do but I was prepared to go along with it. I hate being told what not to do even more. When I receive those Government forms that say “please do not write in this space” I smear butter on them. If I can’t write on them I’ll make sure no other bugger does.
On the return walk we had to run the gauntlet through batsville again and his time I wanted a picture of one of these big fruit bats in flight because I knew the wings were transparent against the sun and they’d look like rats with wings. We stood around for a couple of minutes waiting for one to take to the air but without luck. Impatiently I picked up a big dead tree branch and asked Clare to hold onto the camera while I beat the trunk of a tree that was full of bats. I hit the trunk once and was about to hit it a second time when all hell broke loose.
Screeching rent the air (not a bad expression that?) and the bats from all the trees took off together. The heavens opened as the runny bat shit rained from the skies like a biblical plague. Pensioners ran shrieking in all directions and we ran, and ran, and ran until we got to the van and took off. It was fully a month later that we pulled into a national park and as we drove towards a gaggle of pensioners and I saw a woman point to us and explain that we were the people who had cause it to rain bat shit. She was pointing up and then at us and then wiping her arms and they all turned to look at us.
We hired a canoe at Mataranka in the late that afternoon and paddled down the Roper River. We left at the same time as a pleasure boat that stopped at various points while the guide explained things that we too were interested in and we hung around his boat like a bad smell getting all the free information. The passengers thought it highly amusing that every time they stopped we’d drift in behind them after a couple of minutes and listen. The guide though, was highly pissed off. After about an hour the pleasure boat turned around and went at a fast lick downstream away from us and put about a kilometre between us. They then disembarked and had their evening refreshments on the river bank. Just as they were getting back into their boat we rocked up and they all began to grin. We paddled up alongside and I hailed the guide. “Excuse me” I said, “do you happen to have a pair of water skis we can borrow? Now that I’m loosened up the missus would like to have a bit of a ski on the way back.” They all laughed so much that the guide had to pretend that he thought it was funny too. The Roper River was lovely, quite exciting. It was lined with pandanus palms and it felt very exotic like going down some great African river hippopotamically challenged though it was. Crocodillically challenged, though, it was not. As we rounded one bend in the river we came upon a big long cage thing. It was very sturdy looking and we paddled up to it to get a better look. At the back of it was hanging a big leg of some animal like, say, a cow. It was a crocodile trap and we were a little concerned that we’d end up vertically challenged if we met up with a crocodile.
When we got back to the kiosk where we’d hired the canoe I asked the ranger about the crocodile trap. He said that in the dry season (winter in these parts) there are only the “timid, harmless” freshwater crocodiles around but when they get to about six feet long they worry the tourists and so they catch them and move them somewhere else. He said that after each wet season they patrolled the river catching any of the dangerous, human eating, crocodiles and removed them to a human-less environment.
Katherine is the next stop in the south to north procession and everybody (there are no exceptions save for locals and truck drivers) goes there to see the Katherine Gorge which is a rock formation with water running through it. On the way there we stopped at the much advertised Cutta Cutta Caves. The brochures made it sound good. These caves are home to thousands of little red flying foxes which have a name like Orange Horseshoe Bats or something similar. We’d just arrived and were reading the information board when a ranger type woman came out of the office and told us that a cave tour had started and that she’d radio the guide who was just outside the cave entrance and get him to hold the tour if we wanted to join them.
We said we did and paid our sixteen dollars each. Once in the cave it turned out to be the worst hole in the ground either of us had ever been in – and in Turkey I once helped a friend to dig a grave! It was just plain boring with hardly any stalag thingies that point up and down and who gives a toss which is which anyway? Something it did have though was common brown tree snakes. We only saw one but the guide assured us that the ceiling and upper walls were thick with them. I couldn’t see why because there were no common brown trees in the cave for a start. About half way through the cave he stopped and said “see those roots hanging from the ceiling, can anybody guess what they are?” “Yes”, I said. “I think they’re the common brown tree roots from up above us.” He then went into a lengthy explanation for my benefit as to why the snake was called what it was.
Now, your common brown tree snake is a wily little devil. A few hundred thousand years ago, when Liberal Party politicians first began wallowing in the primeval slime from which they were never to emerge, brown tree snakes ventured into the Cutta Cutta Caves. There they acquired a taste for the little red flying foxes that cruise through the cave system twice a day at thirty kilometres an hour on their way to and from work. Today, the common brown tree snakes that live in these caves never venture out. They hang off the walls and ceiling with their mouths open catching bats for their meals. It’s a limited diet but one that seems to suffice. Now, can you imagine what it’s like being hit in the mouth with a dinner that’s travelling at thirty kilometres an hour every day? Make your neck ache wouldn’t it? You’d be absolutely starving but still shitting yourself at the thought of having to lean out and grab your next evening meal. To get an idea of what the procurement of the day’s sustenance is like for a common brown tree snake in Cuta Cutta Caves a Japanese restaurant is the place to go - one with a sushi train. There you should get the proprietor to tie your hands behind your back (in the ritual beheading position), turn the sushi train up to maximum speed and suspend your head two centimetres above the belt. Then have the cook place a thirty five kilo lump of hump backed whale meat on a plate and send it in your direction.
The Cutta Cutta Caves tour we went on was a rip off and they can try sueing me for saying so in print. Not only was it a lousy guided tour in the lousiest cave imaginable led by an inane driveller of a guide and there were no bats. I don’t know where or when the bats appear but the lady who conned us into impulse buying the tickets didn’t mention that we wouldn’t be seeing them. Compared with all other attractions we’d so far visited this was the worst value for money rock formation around.
Having wasted our time in the Cutta Cutta Caves we arrived in Katherine a little later than planned and knew we wouldn’t have time to find a free camping spot in the bushes before sundown so we stopped just long enough to steal a tankful of water from the historic railway station. There was a certain type of Aborigine occupying pavement space in Katherine, a particularly attractive type. He’s the fifty or sixty year old long slim, slightly bow legged guy with cowboy boots, a cowboy hat and a neatly trimmed white beard. They’re probably ex stockmen. These guys look so cool I envy them. Like they’d wandered into town to shoot up the Sheriff and were just sitting on the pavement waiting for him to step out of the saloon. When these guys walk they saunter. Anybody who’s seen Lee Marvin in his role as the gunslinger in Cat Ballou can easily bring to mind this kind of guy. Six or seven of them, each to himself, sat easily on the Katherine pavements, the odd one had a piece of grass between his teeth …..reaaaal coool like.
Katherine Gorge was a pleasant surprise for us. We’d pictured it as a big chasm with water in it where you could swim and maybe walk around it. Something we thought would be maybe half a kilometre long. When we finally got there we found it comprised thirteen interconnected gorges that went on for almost twenty kilometres. We took a look at the options before us for the next day and decided it was impossible to choose between two hour, four hour and eight hour cruises plus a number of walks, some going on for days. There were canoes for hire too and some of the canoe trails lasted for three or four days. There was nowhere to park Erasmus but for the national park campground but we managed to get a site away from the madding crowd and turned in early.
As dusk approached we saw flights of fruit bats going past in battalions or batteries or whatever the collective name for bats is. They were going off hunting for the night and we wished them well as the mosquitoes were biting. At precisely four thirty in the morning they returned to their roost. It was in the trees around the toilet block. There they screeched as such a volume that we couldn’t sleep. I looked through the window and saw that everybody else had their lights on too. They’d woken the whole camp. They smelled awfully and they kept up their screeching all day only quieting down just before going out again the next evening. Up to that point it was easily the noisiest camp site we’d been in and we would think twice before going back there. In fact we have thought twice and we’re not. The flying foxes were ruining the trees around the campground but the rangers said they were protected and so would just go on ruining the area to the detriment of campers and, I think eventually, the national park’s income.
We took a four hour cruise which started at eleven am and were glad we hadn’t hired a canoe. There was a very strong head wind whistling up the gorge that would have made hard work of paddling and the guide said that it started at the same time every day. The cruise took us through three of the gorges making it necessary to disembark from our boat and embark on another at two points where the water was low. Richie the guide was an Aboriginal in his early thirties and although he wasn’t of the Jarwon tribe that owned the gorge he’d learned the stories associated with it and kept us entertained. He told us the legends, showed us Aboriginal rock paintings, stopped occasionally and took a leaf from a tree and told us what it was that Aboriginals used it for. He was fun too. He stopped at a number of places and told us the Aboriginal legends of how they were created. He sounded utterly convinced and convincing as he related these stories and then he’d give us the scientific version of events. They weren’t half as romantic. His knowledge of plants was impressive. He knew all the Latin names for them and the chemical substances they contained.
He related to us how, when he was a kid, he and his playmates were on top of a cliff overlooking the Katherine River wishing they could swim in it but knowing their parents had forbidden them to. A couple of horses came down to the bank to drink and suddenly a huge saltwater crocodile lunged out of the water and with a couple of shakes tore one of the horses heads off. Katherine Gorge was a great rock formation, well worth stopping off at. It was basically a vast twisting and turning gash in the landscape about seventy metres across; a towering canyon with a slow moving river running through it. Long spindly Livingstone palms grew in clefts in the canyon walls and here and there were beaches that the canoers stopped at to rest and swim. Richie said that the water was extremely cold and that people jumping into it to cool off sometimes developed cramps and drowned. What was hard to envision was that this great gash actually filled up sometimes during the wet season. I couldn’t have designed a better drain. When the wet approaches the waters rise and the gorge becomes continuous. Then the park rangers are able to get all the boats back to base across the rocky obstructions that divide it into thirteen gorges and moor them safely on land.
We left the gorge after two nights and went into Katherine town to catch up with our emails, buy camera batteries, draw money from the ATM and all those things that you wish you didn’t have to do in order to keep going. We met an Aboriginal girl sitting on a park bench with her two week old baby. He was very cute and I asked his name because I don’t know many Aboriginal names. “He’s Brian” said his mum.
Next stop, Edith falls on the Edith River. It was another rock formation with water. The toilets were good though. Right now I wouldn’t mind seeing a cathedral or something. Australia is empty. We’re not using it. I don’t want to describe another rock formation. I’ll look for something else.
At Edith Falls I decided to charge up the camera batteries but there were no powered sites. The only power point I could find was in the toilet and I plugged in the charger there. I’m red/green colour blind and the charger light glows red until the batteries are fully charged when it switches to green. Sometimes it takes hours to charge all four batteries up and this was one such occasion. I plugged it in before dinner during daylight but visited it a few times and didn’t think the light had changed to green. Clare wasn’t too keen on visiting the men’s toilets with me so I went down there on my own again at about half past nine which was way after dark. I still couldn’t make out what colour the light was and I was walking out of the loo when I spotted a guy walking between caravans.
“Excuse me” I said “Would you do me a favour?”
“I’ll try” he said
“I wonder could you come in here for a minute and see if my charger’s still red.”
He had a London accent and he replied “don’t worry; you’ll go blind before that happens.”
CHAPTER SIX
From Uluru to Alice Springs was another dayful of bugger all. Calling upon all my descriptive powers I could never make this tedious, repetitive scenery into anything readable although I’m sure many authors are capable of doing just that. With the exceptional amount of rain the countryside had soaked up over the past two weeks things were greening. Perhaps the red earth would soon be more lookable if the emerging green tinge would carry on emerging. The James ranges which we drove through would have maybe seemed worth looking at if we hadn’t already seen so much in a similar vein. It had been a full fortnight since we’d seen a native animal from the cab although Clare had seen two camels. People told us that when there was plenty of feed following the rains the animals didn’t venture near the road. They weren’t missing anything.
The bush (there are actually several of them) was undergoing a regenerative phase. I had spoken to a ranger back at the Olgas who told me that the native shrubs and trees have big lignotubers under the ground. I was impressed. I thought they were woodwind instruments. According to Mr Ranger Sir what you see above ground with these plants is only two thirds of the whole planty scheme of things. They’re designed by David Bellamy (or was it the Rainbow Serpent?) so that the top can burn and the real heart of the thing, which is underground, just carries on as though nothing has happened. These ligno what’sits are big. Mr. Ranger Sir said they can be “about as big as …oooh let me see…half a small car I suppose?” When we stopped for a pee and tea break in a place utterly indistinguishable from anywhere we’d seen in the past eight hours of driving, we could see the old lignos at work. We’d come past hundreds of kilometres of dead shrubs varying in height between a metre and three times that. Now, as we looked at the bases of these shrubs almost every one was sprouting anew from under the ground. I think that if we’d made our trip perhaps a fortnight after Lignotuber Revival Week we’d have seen a vastly different panorama.
Through the swish of the windscreen wipers Alice Springs came into view slowly. It wasn’t like the Olgas that suddenly sprang out at us from behind the nothingness. The Alice is not a small place. It has a permanent population of twenty five thousand souls, the overwhelming majority of which are attached to bodies.
We drove around town looking for a Laundromat. The weather had been so wet that we hadn’t been able to do any washing for a long time and I’d taken to marking my underpants with Textas on all the sides I’d used – right way round, back to front, inside out front and back. The town seldom sees rain and suffers from temperatures in excess of forty degrees Celsius for weeks on end. Drying the washing in this climate doesn’t normally present a problem but on this day all the people who didn’t have dryers were in the Laundromat. Some were from cattle stations and came with ten bin liners full of washing. There was segregation in the laundrette too. Grey nomad travellers occupied one corner patiently waiting to use the dryers. At the opposing end were the aboriginal women hypnotically watching their washing spin around. The middle ground was held by the white cattle station wives with kids that found it necessary to kick and punch each other. Their mums, used to the wide open spaces where sound doesn’t echo, shouted at them at the tops of their voices and smacked the backs of their legs. It took us three hours to get our meagre odds and ends washed and back in place but it was worth it just to be able to go to sleep with the smell of washing detergent again.
Alice Springs is a surprisingly sophisticated place and I’d like to take the population of Coober Pedy there so they could see what could be done with the shit hole they inhabit. If Coober Pedy is about opals then Alice Springs is about Aboriginal art. The town is covered in it. Some of it good, some excellent but most “mediochre.” We could probably have stayed there for a couple of weeks going out on day trips and have filled every day. It has a good pedestrian mall with upmarket shops and restaurants where you can sit outside and enjoy a coffee with a little people watching thrown in. We didn’t actually see any little people though. The tourists come from all points of the globe and wander up and down the mall threading themselves in and out between the local Aboriginal populations.
Some of the art shops - and there are many - are stylish. They sell three thousand dollar paintings, expensive didgeridoos and necklaces and so forth and the goods are top class. To authenticate some of the more expensive items they have the artist visit the shop and have their photograph taken with the piece they’ve created; often pictured actually signing the back of the painting. As you go through the paintings the artist’s picture is attached to each one. I was struck by three things. The first being that the Aborigines, who have created all these paintings and object d’art, aren’t the one’s selling them. There’s a lot of money changing hands in the art shops of Alice Springs but it’s all done by white people and not necessarily by Australians. I heard a variety of accents among the art shop proprietors there.
I don’t get it. I don’t see why Aborigines aren’t in the shops selling their own wares in upmarket, sophisticated surroundings. Perhaps they don’t want to but if that’s not the case what if they all went on strike? If they cut off supply a lot of Alice Springs would have to go into immediate hibernation. The whole town sells itself on its Aboriginality. Hoardings everywhere invite the visitor to buy Aboriginal, to take trips to places with names like ‘Corroboree Rock” etc. etc. Book shops sell books about Aboriginal art, customs and bush tucker ad infinitum but it’s all being done by whites.
The second thing that struck me was the subservient attitude of the Aboriginal artists when they entered the shops to sell their paintings and the patronising attitude that was returned to them by the shop owners. I heard shop owners speaking to their colleagues and customers about the artists as though the person standing in front of them wasn’t there and using expressions such as “bless her.” The third thing in relation to the art scene in Alice Springs was the number of female artists photographs I saw attached to paintings depicting the artist with a split lip or a black eye.
In the shopping centre we had to pay fifty cents each to use the toilet. The purpose behind the high price was to put this rather pedestrian pee-hole out of the range of the Aboriginals. I used the internet service at the library while we were in town and was charged six dollars per hour for it. South Australian libraries offer the service free! We also visited the Alice Springs Desert Park. It’s crap – don’t go there. The small trees, shrubs and plants in the place looked identical to the stuff we’d been driving through and, in my case, peeing into for days. I couldn’t tell the difference.
This town that Neville Shute wrote so lovingly of sits in the middle of the east and west McDonnell ranges which are just another long line of craggy hills for geologists to get excited about and for people like me to drive past. The McDonnells are thin, two dimensional mountains rather like the backs of stegosaurs. From some angles, and at some times of day, they look like a nose to tail procession of marine iguanas with the fins on their backs erect. Those of you wishing to replicate the McDonnells at home should:
1 Take a fresh Swiss Roll and squash it between your hands, making a pointed ridge at the top.
2 With your fingers splayed, push down a little on the ridge so that you end up with a series of fairly uniform humps and hollows.
3 Airbrush the bottom half of the Swiss Roll with a little Indian Red.
4 Mount your Swiss Roll in the middle of a flattened, rusty forty four gallon drum sprinkled with dried grass clippings
You’ll find the strata thus created by the jam in the Swiss Roll is nigh on an exact replica of the McDonnell Ranges. The difference in size between the Swiss roll and the flattened forty four gallon drum will give you an idea of the size ratio of the ranges to the plains they reluctantly inhabit.
Alice Springs was for us a stop where we could load up at the supermarket and get a few things done that hadn’t been possible for a few weeks due to the lack of goods and services in the fairly remote places we’d been passing though. I went to the hairdressers and got myself a number seven. I can’t keep up with things like numbers for haircuts. It wasn’t that long ago when, if you’d walked into a hairdresser’s and said you wanted a number two, they’d have told you to bugger off or shown you to the toilet. I suppose the numbers start at zero and anything below that would mean having skin taken off your scalp? I have no idea where the numbers end. What number would a Rastafarian haircut be? Probably about ninety I reckon. I know I’m not allowed to ask for a sixty nine but I’ve still got a lot to learn. I seem to remember a thirty seven from years ago though; for some reason I associate it with lychees and ice cream. Now there’s an idea. Chinese restaurants could get together with hairdressers and offer mystery nights where you can buy tickets with numbers from one to ten. You’d buy a number seven ticket which you’d present at each establishment and compare the experience with your mates down at the hospital afterwards.
By now the weather was raining so consistently that we decided we’d have to use The Alice as a base for a while and go out on two day sojourns coming back in when if the weather really got bad and roads became impassable due to creeks in flood. We stocked up with food at Woolworths and headed for the East MacDonnells. The fairly regular dips in the ridges of this long line of mountains has, in a few places, been broken by rivers forming the famous gorges that became sacred site for the Aboriginals and, later still, tourists attractions for everyone else.
There are probably about a dozen of them all told and I guess we went to half of them. Each had an entirely different ambience and none were a disappointment. They’re mostly in national parks with names like Simpsons Gap or Glen Helen Gorge but the odd one is on private property and they charge an entrance fee. One such was called Standley Chasm where I asked the woman behind the counter “how much would you charge an old man to look at your chasm?” She looked at me stony faced and said “We don’t ‘ave no concessions ‘ere.”
I shouldn’t gloss over the gorges with frivolity. They’re all spectacular and they all have different types of rock formations. Their sandy bottoms have taken millions of years to create by slowly wearing down the rocks in the ranges. This, all the more mind boggling when one considers that some of the rivers that wore the rocks down only flow for a few days a year. That makes them much older than God and … just as wrinkled.
Hermannsburg Mission is out that way. An incongruous dispersal of whitewashed, German stone buildings; they looked as if they’d just fallen from the sky onto the wrong continent. It was a Lutheran mission that set out to civilise the Central Australian Aborigines back in the 1870s. A small procession of German pastors had worked themselves ragged in their misguided callings for decades to no real, lasting avail. Pastor Albrecht, who came in the early 1920s was, I think, the last. Albrecht was born, educated and raised to a debatable maturity in Russian occupied Poland and so would have been familiar, no doubt, with what the job west of Alice Springs entailed.
He was lame and his peer group didn’t seem to want to have much to do with him. He was a social misfit who did badly at school and was crazy about God. Seven other pastors had refused the Hermannsburg position before Albrecht applied for it. They were glad to get him – or anyone. He was a thoroughly nice man who believed implicitly that he was engaged in his God’s calling. He never once stopped to consider that he could have got it wrong; he didn’t need to, he knew he had it right - God told him. He was guilty of blinkered vision and universally, across space and time, should be roundly condemned for his failure to use the brain his God so thoughtlessly furnished him with. He was guilty of not bothering to think about or question what he was doing. His religion was, in his mind, right and the religions of the Aboriginals wrong. The conceited prick.
These days the Mission is a tourist attraction. It’s very attractive and the whitewashed Germanic church and outbuildings set among gum trees and date palms provides some rare photo opportunities. In the early 1980s the Mission and the land were handed back to the rightful owners who now employ white staff to manage it and earn them money from it. It’s fenced off and the windows are all barred to stop the owners getting into it and, presumably, despoiling it. I can’t see why the Aborigines can’t run it themselves. There’s a little village full of Aborigines at Hermannsburg where their parents and grandparents were born and I’m sure that tourists would like to be shown around by people whose forefathers had built the place and tended its gardens and sung the German version of All things Bright and Beautiful. There are reasons why the Aborigines at Hermannsburg don’t run their own show just as there are reasons why we didn’t see Aborigines employed on the land they own at Uluru in anything but menial positions. I just don’t know what they are. Is it that the system has failed to give them the right sort of education? Is it that the present crop of parents isn’t very good at parenting because they were stolen from their parents? Is it because they just don’t want to? Why is it that in the USA so many black people occupy such high positions in government or as film stars, entertainers, mayors of cities, presidential candidates etc. and Australian Aborigines here in their own country don’t.
Something in the back of my mind has been nagging me on this subject for a long time. Just why it is that American Negroes, the descendants of slaves, have done so well in comparison to our Aborigines? Perhaps we’ve killed our Aborigines with kindness? By this I mean welfare kindness. The white Americans gave their black Negro population little in the way of welfare compared with white Australians. American blacks had to fight for what they got and through fighting retained, and indeed further developed, a sense of pride through gaining in adversity. The majority of Australian Aborigines, by contrast, received at least their subsistence for doing nothing. Where was the incentive to get up off their butts and grow?
This is all my own home baked theory with a little bit of education on the subject thrown in. It’s a political hot potato and I’ll be pulled to bits for saying what I’ve said. It’s unthinkable to many that anyone should say that the invading marauding whites have killed the Aboriginals with kindness. Nevertheless I think it may be true. There are far more questions on the subject than answers out there. I hope by the end of our trip that Clare and I will have found some answers to these questions.
A few weeks back a fellow traveller told me that there was something basically wrong and deficient in a people who had lived on a continent for forty thousand years and didn’t have a single pyramid [or something of a similar ilk] to show for it. He was as guilty of not thinking as was pastor Albrecht. Had the Aborigines built a pyramid, what would they have done with it? They could have sat around it and starved to death but that’s all. The fact is that all civilisations that build fixed settlements are unable to do so until they can grow more than they can eat. When that can be done the surplus allows for a sedentary way of life where people can build things they couldn’t have carried with them when they were nomads.
What could the Aborigines have grown? So far the white invader settlers have failed to locate a single Australian staple crop. Nothing on the Australian continent is cultivatable to the point where a settled population can exist on what it grows let alone put a surplus in store for harvest failures. So far the Macadamia nut is the only Australian crop commercially cultivated by white people but that was first achieved by the Americans who took it to Hawaii to develop it.
Now, let us for a minute imagine that there had been a cultivatable, staple crop here in Australia – what would the Aborigines have used to pull the plough? Since 1788 when the white invader settlers first came here to till the land they haven’t domesticated a single Australian animal. Sure, they’ve tamed a few but where are the herds?
Few white Australians have ever stopped to consider that what they will eat over the course of their whole lives will have originated in other continents. Without the animals and plants they brought with them they couldn’t have developed any further than the Aborigines who managed to exploit everything exploitable on the continent.
In Alice Springs we came across a really excellent bookshop that specialises in books about Central and Aboriginal Australia. There were books there that I’d never seen elsewhere and on the subject of Australian Aborigines it had more information on its shelves than the University of Tasmania’s School of Aboriginal Studies. The elderly lady proprietor of the shop also stocks paints for the local Aboriginal artists and she watches them like a hawk as they wander through her premises. Nobody can put one over on this lady and she has eyes in the back of her head. It’s plain to see that she loves her Aboriginal customers and when they talk to her they lift their eyes up rather than staring at the floor as most of them do when they talk to whites outside on the sidewalk. There we bought Bruce Chatwyn’s Songlines, a book largely about the singing up of the country by Aboriginals as they pass through it. That night when Clare opened it she read that Chatwyn had also been in that bookshop when he was researching his book on Aboriginals. He described both the lady and her shop. The following day we were going into town and Clare called in and asked the lady if she was, indeed, the person mentioned in Songlines. “Yes”, she said, and motioning to a chair by the window said “he used to sit over there.” And pointing quite casually to another chair said “Salman Rushdie sits over there when he comes.”
Her daughter was there when we visited her the second time; a lady probably in her mid sixties who, uninvited, sang us If You Ever Go Across The Sea To Ireland and The Rose of Tralee. The second of which she sang to the tune of The Streets of Laredo. While she was wailing away like a tremulous screech owl her mother was perceptibly wincing. She told us that she and her mother were trying to sell the shop and they intended to buy a house in Adelaide with the proceeds. She said “when I’m there I’ll sing for free for those that don’t have anything. There are so many in the world that have so much and then there are those who have nothing. I’ll sing for those poor souls who have nothing.” She didn’t elaborate and I wondered if she intended to actually sing at the poor people or to sing at some poor unfortunate rich people and give the foreign coins, broken eggs and rotten tomatoes thus collected to the poor.
Something we found very strange during our stay in The Alice was the fact that ABC radio didn’t do weather forecasts. They told us what the temperature was or had been in a few places but never once did they hazard a guess as to what tomorrow’s weather might be like. The rain never really gave up during the time we were in and around the place so we left and hurried north. Three experienced travelling couples had told us that once across the Tropic of Capricorn we could put our shorts on and keep them on no matter whether or not it was raining. Everything in Erasmus was feeling cold and damp by this time. Warm rain sounded like a better proposition to us.
Tenant Creek would be the next town where it might be possible to buy a cappuccino and in between were only roadhouses where the instant coffee, made with bore water, tasted like gorilla piss. I was slowly developing a love/hate relationship with the Australian landscape or, at least, this particular part of the Australian landscape. The love was for the two percent of the time spent looking at and walking around truly spectacular natural rock formations, gorges, canyons and such. The hate was for the ninety eight percent of the flat, unending sameness of the plains in between those attractions. The drive from The Alice north towards Tenant Creek though, was different. What made the difference was the rain I’d been complaining about. Much of this stretch of road had wide gutters at each side so that it looked as though the bitumen was on a causeway. The gutters had collected the rain water which was now gone but in its place the grass had greened. We travelled for mile after mile on a black strip flanked by two green strips like a microbe running along the back of a frog.
There was colour too! Some of the dull boring old scrubby things had yellow mimosa-like flowers on them and these contrasted with the rusty red earth – magic. So, there was a black strip flanked by green strips flanked by yellow strips under which was red earth. The whole experience was like getting lost in a box of liquorice allsorts. There were wildflowers as well but at this stage we didn’t know they were there until we stopped Erasmus and walked away from the road. There weren’t enough of them to carpet the land. They were tiny delicate things you had to get close to before you noticed them. I first came across them when we stopped to decorate our first dead cow.
We’ve founded an organisation called “Belated Bovine Makeovers inc.” and its raison detre is to give dead cows a more dignified send off rather than ending up as a standard flattened leather envelope at the side of the road. Our first makeover was DOT who I think was a Hereford. She had been brown and white. Well, she still was but she used to be an altogether more rounded animal. We located her leg bones and put them roughly in place and sprayed them white as we did with the horns. Then we sprayed her name in white along the bit where the spare ribs used to be. We finished her off with gold spray around the edges and teeth. We took before and after photographs and I’m hoping the idea will catch on when this book is published. The photographic essay will appear in book form as soon as I can convince a publisher that it’s a really good idea and that lots of sane people will be queuing up to buy a copy. The book may be called Dead Cows & Dead Cars of the Australian Outback. The reason for this is that we’ve also been taking pictures of the many dead cars we see along the sides of the roads. Were convinced they’re stolen because they’re always behind bushes about thirty metres from the hard shoulder where most car drivers won’t notice the thieves stripping them of their engines and other parts. If we’d been in a normal family car we wouldn’t have seen so many of them but Erasmus is basically a truck and the seats are high off the ground.
One of the roadhouses along the way was at a place called Aileron which I thought was a strange name for a roadhouse. When we got out of the van there was a big, good looking eagle looking at us from the other side of a cyclone wire fence. Its plumage was perfect and it had lovely feet, all clean and wrinkled. He was surrounded by the remains of past meals of kangaroo legs and he had a really soft high pitched chirp which we thought was most un-eaglelike. The guy who served us told me that his name was Bozo and that he was bionic. Bozo the Bionic Eagle sounded great, just like the name of a comic strip. He said that Bozo had seven pins in his right wing, four pins in his left wing and a synthetic chest. I didn’t know what to say in reply to this information. I just said “better not let him get near a magnet then.”
Besides Bozo the Bionic Eagle there was only one attraction worth speaking of between Alice Springs and Tenant Creek. Another unusual and spectacular fucking rock formation. I mean, like, if you’re not into rock formations don’t take a vacation in Outback Australia.
These particular rocks were called The Devils Marbles. Funny how the Devil gets blamed for things like that isn’t it? I think I’ve seen about a score of Devils mountains in various parts of the world. I feel sorry for the old devil sometimes. I think the poor old bugger’s had a very bad press. Everybody who wants to see the Dev’s Marbs tries to get there for sunset and everybody did. The car park was a sea of caravans and grey hair. They all stayed the night sharing their wine casks around their fires and their noisy generators.
The Devils Marbles are made of something geologically unusual or incongruous - you can bet your arse. I didn’t bother reading the information boards but that’s what they would have said for sure. And then there would have been a load more information about how some Rainbow Serpent or Bunyip or some such mythical creature in the Dreamtime dropped all these rounded rocks from the sky when they were infertile because he was being chased by some nasty bastard called Manalargenagooblybum or Wooragglyfingerburnum or whatever. I find myself saying “for Christ’s sake grow up. Don’t you know everything was created in six days out of bugger all by God who had a day off when it was finished? Anyone can see that this is where God used to pick his nose. They’re not the Devils Marbles, they’re God’s Bogies. And as for rainbow Serpents – it’s patently ridiculous.
Now, where was I? Oh yes. Sorry about that. I’ve a feeling I’m becoming obsessed. The marbles, yes, the….marbles. The marbles are a whole bagful of, I suppose, a thousand or more either spherical or rounded lumps of rock that have, through some freak of nature, become precariously balanced one atop the other, over a large chunk of landscape. They could be spread over a square mile or so but I’m not very good at judging these things. They’re very nice to look at especially when you’ve had fuck all else to look at for six hours. Having said that, you’d probably give them the once over if they were on your way to work. And whilst on that subject, how come none of these bloody great Australian rock formations are on the way to work for 99% of Australia’s population? How come there’s nothing like the Olgas or Uluru or the Devils Marbles in the suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne where they could take your mind off the fact that the missus always looks the bleedin’ same when you’re on your way to work in the morning? Perhaps the Devil really did make these things just to inconvenience people. I think it’s pretty Devilish to make people drive all that way to see them.
The Devils Marbles probably just got piled on top of each other by glacier or an iceberg that drifted in when the place was under water and then melted afterwards. I don’t now. It was an iceberg that sank the Titanic though wasn’t it? Bloody Jews – Iceberg, Goldberg, Greenberg what’s the difference? I’ve often wondered whether or not there were any Chinese Jews and I found out last year when Clare and I went to China on vacation. I asked our guide when we were having a smorgasbord breakfast in a hotel we stayed at in Shanghai. “Tell me. Are there any Chinese Jews?” I said. “I don’t fink so no.” He said. “They got up there only the orange jews and pineapple jews.”
Now, the Devils Marbles. Marvellous really, especially at sunset. They’re big and you can walk around them and between them and some have sizeable trees growing in crevices between them. They’re a bit like Uluru and the Olgas of course in that they aren’t jagged at all but rounded and feminine. They’re a bit like Henry More sculptures but without the holes. I suppose they’re more like the exaggerated cannon ball buttocks of some of the Picasso beach paintings. Yes, sort of Earth Mother buttocks, breasts and bellies but not of the ilk of those lollopy, potato fed, Russian women that bask in their nineteen fifties underwear on the banks of the Volga. These are sort of firm and Mediterranean and sun tanned and the bushes that grow in the crevices are like pubes.
For those of you who wish to create the Devils Marbles in the privacy of your own back yards for photographic purposes, here’s what to do.
Take twenty seven kilos of new potatoes washed but not peeled or scraped.
Roast them in cheap Dick Smith canola oil for thirty five minutes at 220 degrees Celsius.
When cooled take six boxes of cheap Dick Smith Dick Head matches and push them half way into half the potatoes.
Take the other half of the potatoes and join them in random bunches to the first half utilising the half matches that are protruding.
Push the joined potatoes together in twenty seven random heaps
Take a few sprigs of parsley and press these into the cleavages between the roast spuds.
Place the whole installation on seventeen rusty flattened forty four gallon drums sprinkled with lawn clippings.
We stayed the night at the Devils Marbles and managed to get away before the rush for the iron lung started. We continued in an upwardly direction towards the elusive Darwin stopping at Tenant Creek which was only a couple of hours up the road. On the way into town we saw a sign inviting us to real coffee and culture so we stopped. The place was called the Nyinkka Nyunyu………No, me neither, but that’s got sod all to do with it.
After the flat whites in the very appealing little bistro set in a desert garden, we tried the cultural bit. That was at eleven in the morning and we didn’t get out of the place until four thirty in the afternoon. Their museum and art gallery was superb. And before you go thinking that I should have said were superb; the museum and art gallery was all in the one room. That’s the way it were.
It was run by the Waramunga people. They’re Aborigines. Waramunga means something if you’re born Waramunga but not to me. There were a couple of continually running videos in which the Waramungas? Waramungese? Waramungwegians? Waramungooses? Warra warra…fuck it, these Aborigines, explained their culture. They did it by going out into the bush and actually doing things like dancing, cutting up and cooking kangaroos, finding underground water, collecting food and honey, using sign language and all sorts of really cool stuff. The videos together with the displays and written information were all first class and it was so good that we lost track of time. The Aborigines were doing a great job in Tenant Creek and, by comparison, their counterparts in Alice Springs were a sad looking bunch. The Tenant Creek guys had dignity and stood upright, wore clean clothes and looked you in the eye. They still sat in the dirt. They needed to. It felt right.
The next two days were, to use Americas Cup parlance, Lay Days. We were fed up with so much driving and found the Tenant Creek water reservoir and stopped there and read books. It was a beautiful green oasis with toilets and showers. Clare painted a little and I wrote there words I’m writing at the moment. Yes folks, these words are fresh. I don’t think I ever read a totally fresh word in a book before have you? I’m right here sitting in the back of Erasmus in my shorts with my half drunk cup of coffee and a saucer full of prune pits and I’m going to give you a fresh word. Priapism – hows that? Like it? Want another? OK, Wapenshaw. Good eh?
I was sitting outside typing one day last week when a grey haired guy with an overdose of hair cream and a small dog on a lead came up to me and said “excuse me, can I have a quick word?” I said “sure I’ll type you one right away. How about velocity? ” He looked at me a little vacantly. “OK” I said “speed, that’s a quick word.” I smiled. He didn’t and he asked me if I knew any free camping spots in Darwin. I didn’t. He left.
I walked around the Tenant Creek reservoir. Judging by the lack of tracks I don’t think many people have been silly enough to do it before me. What started out as a pleasant little stroll became decidedly unpleasant the further I walked. The little inlets were enchanting and I surprised flocks of wild ducks and solitary white egrets that took to the wing in front of me as I stumbled through the spiky Spinifex. I had to stumble through the spiky Spinifex that grew back from the water’s edge because down near the water were thousands of the fattest bodied spiders I’d ever encountered. The long gossamer strands that anchored their webs to the ground or the low scrub stretched up to around three meters in length and were very tough. The problem with them was that they formed colonies of fifty or so spiders and spun their webs overlapping each other. Despite keeping a keen eye out for them a couple of times I walked into these horrid bundles and it frightened me. I stopped at one point and threw heavy twigs into one of these communal webs and came to the conclusion that they would easily trap a small bird the size of a sparrow. Somebody told me later that they were called St. Andrews spiders because the way they hang in the webs is in the shape of a St. Andrews cross.
It was about five hours out of Tenant Creek at a place called Renners Springs that we pulled out of a roadhouse after refuelling and a road train ran us off the road. It was quite deliberate and from what I’ve heard road train drivers really do regard all other traffic as lesser life forms – they’re the kings. This came a day after our hearing on the news that somebody had been killed in an accident with a road train near Katherine some four hundred kilometres north of where we struck our little problem. We pulled out of the refuelling stop about a kilometre ahead of a huge Volvo road train pulling three or four (in panic we couldn’t count them) trailers. A car was coming towards us about two kilometres away and the road train driver pulled out to overtake us. He could see that the car coming towards us was going at a fast pace but he wasn’t going to slow down and hang in behind us. I watched in the rear view mirror as he pulled out and before his cab was even alongside us he put his left hand indicator on to let me know he was coming in on us. This he did as soon as his cab was past us. He just swung in forcing us off the road with his trailers. We managed to pull up but it was a scary experience and if there’d been a hole in the hard shoulder or it had been soft from all the rain we’d had recently we’d have gone over.
Needless to say, we couldn’t catch him to take a photo of his number plate and he wasn’t stopping. I was somewhat incensed and wanted to report the incident to the police but found them virtually non existent. We called into three police stations along the way and they were all unmanned with telephone numbers to call in emergencies. Stacked up against the murder of Peter Falconio and the like we figured we didn’t rate as an emergency and so it wasn’t until we got to Katherine, a few hundred kilometres further on that I found a manned police station that was able to register our complaint. Services in the bush, it seems to me, don’t need to be that primitive in this day and age. I’d hate to be a lone policeman up here facing some nutter outside the station with a complaint and a gun. It would be hours before you could get help.
When we arrived in Daly Waters, a small settlement on the road north with a famous pub, we began to realise that travelling around Australia was becoming something of a procession. It was at two thirty in the afternoon and most people had already set up camp for the night. The Daly Waters pub was large. The bar itself was quite spacious and decorated with the usual memorabilia in these parts which included Overland Telegraph leftover junk and bits left over from the American military visits of WWII. Above the bar hung various items of female underwear discoloured by cigarette smoke and fly shit. Around the bar were a few open air courtyards where people sat at trestle tables sipping beer. It was a much better pub than most that we’d struck and outside sat a man burning people’s names into ready made slices of wood to hang on their bedroom and toilet doors. It was very popular with the caravanners who marvelled at his skills with the hot bent wire.
To one side of the pub was a caravan park of sorts with a couple of hundred caravans, tents and campervans already set up for the night. When we pulled into it we straight away decided that we’d go look for somewhere else for the night but we stopped the engine and walked over to the pub through the regimented lines of campervans. As in most caravan parks we’d seen the caravans were parked within three metres of each other where the occupants could easily hear one another break wind in the night. As we threaded our way between them six or seven people we’d seen before in roadside stops along the way waved at us. We waved back not sure whether they were just waving flies way or trying to be friendly.
Once in the pub we recognised a few more couples we’d seen before too. When we thought about it we realised that we were all in a grand procession from one beauty spot, or place of interest, to the next. Without a four wheel drive vehicle there are so few places to visit in Outback Australia that everybody is heading where you’re heading and you know you’ll see them again soon. The large capacity water tanks, the generator and the big batteries in Erasmus allowed us to stay away from civilisation for up to five days and sometimes, when we came back into the fold, we’d join the next procession. Wave after wave of white haired pensioners like plagues of rats are out there moving doggedly through the landscape all the time.
This gregarious camaraderie is what people with white hair seek. There’s a security in knowing a bunch of other white haired travellers; kindred spirits on what could possibly be life’s last, or perhaps first, big trip. I reflected on what a wonderful way it was to spend one’s retirement compared with the life of elderly people in most other parts of the world where to retire is to sit around waiting for death whilst being supported by one’s family.
It was also a very different experience to travelling in Europe and the Middle East where, in a past life, I lived in a campervan for a couple of years. There we hardly ever saw anyone at a campsite or place of interest that we’d come across before. There was so much to do and so many interesting places to visit that, although there were many more people travelling around, they went in many more different directions; crossed borders into other countries and so on. The Australian experience, by contrast, involves people travelling much greater distances and visiting far fewer places – natural attractions as opposed to cathedrals, bridges, ancient cities. The camaraderie this Australian way of travelling generates is a bonding thing. People meet other people and become life long friends through it and visit each other in their respective States afterwards.
North from Daly Waters we called in at Mataranka, the next place in the line. A few stragglers from the last procession were pulling out of the car park as we pulled in and I gave them the salutary wave. Mataranka is a special place – and here comes the word. Wait for it. Ready? “Geomorphologically.” I bet you’re impressed. But enough of that shit for the time being. Adjacent to it is a replica of the log cabin that was built to feature in the film We Of The Never Never. I’d heard of it but I always thought it was about hire purchase debt collectors. The film was, however, based on a book by Jeannie Gunn who signed herself Mrs. Aeneas Gunn. Had I been her I would have stuck to the Jeannie. Aeneas Gunn sounds like some surface to air heat seeking suppository device to me. Anyway, starting in 1902 Mrs. Gunn lived for a whole year at Elsey Station which then incorporated what is now known as Mataranka. Her book, We of the Never Never, in which she related her experiences in the Territory, became famous and sold millions of copies. After the year at Elsey Station her husband died and she returned to Melbourne and died there nearly sixty years later. She was a lousy writer but her subject matter was unique at the time and her book became required reading for a generation of Australian schoolchildren. In it she makes mention of the “nigger hunts” her husband. “a kindly man” used to go on.
At the replica of her homestead I read the historical facts on the walls.
“1905-1909 The Arafura company organized hunting parties to kill Aboriginals occupying country wanted for cattle. First missionaries at Roper river (1908) report on whites shooting Aboriginals ”just for fun.”…”
I reference to Aboriginal women it said “Sometimes relations with white men were forced upon them, but there were also enduring and compassionate unions between white men and black women. Children born to these relationships were almost always taken to compulsory Government institutions, to be brought up without family contact.”
“Compassionate” seems not to have extended to the kids of these white men who, by all accounts, didn’t object to the government taking them. Not a grave or memorial exists to any of those “slain for the fun of it” but we did visit the We of the Never Never graveyard. There we saw the graves of most of the characters in Mrs. Gunn’s book as well as a splendid memorial to the lady herself. Some of the white people from the book had been exhumed and re-interred in the graveyard in the interests, I presume, of creating a more fulfilling experience for the tourists; most of whom are of the generation that had the book as a compulsory part of their education and know full well that we Australians don’t need to see niggers graves on our holidays.
Mataranka is a big drawcard in the Northern Territory but Elsey Station is only a part of it. There’s a resort there and it also has a geomorphological wonder going for it. There in the middle of what I think was nowhere there’s an underground spring that pushes up five million gallons of crystal clear hot water every day – even on Sundays. And, it hits the air at thirty four degrees Celsius! I loved it because here was a major attraction that wasn’t a rock formation. We walked down the palm covered walkway. Hundreds of tall, shady Livingstonia palms blocked out the harsh rays of the midday sun. They were absolutely jam packed with hanging fruit bats numbering in their thousands and we hadn’t walked fifty metres into this little forest before Clare had bat shit on her arms. She ran for shelter but I was intrigued at how these big bats hanging upside down could shit on somebody below them without getting it all over themselves. I looked through the zoom lens of the camera at them. I wanted to see if their eyelids were covered in poo or whether they turned right way up, poohed, and then went back to the hanging position again. I didn’t find out before I had to move on too. The Kodak CX6330 digital camera is a fine piece of equipment but once you get a dose of bat excrement on the retractable lens it takes hours to get rid of.
After a short walk we stood beside the thermal pool. My sunglasses misted up immediately and as I squinted through them I thought the resort was doing its washing in there. When I took them off I realised that it was full of people the colour of sheets and badly in need of ironing. We walked on through the forest following the hot stream and came to a landing on a river for swimmers. To get to it you had to go through a little gate on which was a notice from The Parks and Wildlife, Northern Territory. It read: CAUTION, FRESH WATER CROCODILES INHABIT THIS AREA. THEY CAN BECOME AGGRESSIVE AND CAUSE INJURY IF DISTURBED. PLEASE DO NOT APPROACH OR INTERFERE WITH THESE ANIMALS.
I hate signs telling me what to do but I was prepared to go along with it. I hate being told what not to do even more. When I receive those Government forms that say “please do not write in this space” I smear butter on them. If I can’t write on them I’ll make sure no other bugger does.
On the return walk we had to run the gauntlet through batsville again and his time I wanted a picture of one of these big fruit bats in flight because I knew the wings were transparent against the sun and they’d look like rats with wings. We stood around for a couple of minutes waiting for one to take to the air but without luck. Impatiently I picked up a big dead tree branch and asked Clare to hold onto the camera while I beat the trunk of a tree that was full of bats. I hit the trunk once and was about to hit it a second time when all hell broke loose.
Screeching rent the air (not a bad expression that?) and the bats from all the trees took off together. The heavens opened as the runny bat shit rained from the skies like a biblical plague. Pensioners ran shrieking in all directions and we ran, and ran, and ran until we got to the van and took off. It was fully a month later that we pulled into a national park and as we drove towards a gaggle of pensioners and I saw a woman point to us and explain that we were the people who had cause it to rain bat shit. She was pointing up and then at us and then wiping her arms and they all turned to look at us.
We hired a canoe at Mataranka in the late that afternoon and paddled down the Roper River. We left at the same time as a pleasure boat that stopped at various points while the guide explained things that we too were interested in and we hung around his boat like a bad smell getting all the free information. The passengers thought it highly amusing that every time they stopped we’d drift in behind them after a couple of minutes and listen. The guide though, was highly pissed off. After about an hour the pleasure boat turned around and went at a fast lick downstream away from us and put about a kilometre between us. They then disembarked and had their evening refreshments on the river bank. Just as they were getting back into their boat we rocked up and they all began to grin. We paddled up alongside and I hailed the guide. “Excuse me” I said, “do you happen to have a pair of water skis we can borrow? Now that I’m loosened up the missus would like to have a bit of a ski on the way back.” They all laughed so much that the guide had to pretend that he thought it was funny too. The Roper River was lovely, quite exciting. It was lined with pandanus palms and it felt very exotic like going down some great African river hippopotamically challenged though it was. Crocodillically challenged, though, it was not. As we rounded one bend in the river we came upon a big long cage thing. It was very sturdy looking and we paddled up to it to get a better look. At the back of it was hanging a big leg of some animal like, say, a cow. It was a crocodile trap and we were a little concerned that we’d end up vertically challenged if we met up with a crocodile.
When we got back to the kiosk where we’d hired the canoe I asked the ranger about the crocodile trap. He said that in the dry season (winter in these parts) there are only the “timid, harmless” freshwater crocodiles around but when they get to about six feet long they worry the tourists and so they catch them and move them somewhere else. He said that after each wet season they patrolled the river catching any of the dangerous, human eating, crocodiles and removed them to a human-less environment.
Katherine is the next stop in the south to north procession and everybody (there are no exceptions save for locals and truck drivers) goes there to see the Katherine Gorge which is a rock formation with water running through it. On the way there we stopped at the much advertised Cutta Cutta Caves. The brochures made it sound good. These caves are home to thousands of little red flying foxes which have a name like Orange Horseshoe Bats or something similar. We’d just arrived and were reading the information board when a ranger type woman came out of the office and told us that a cave tour had started and that she’d radio the guide who was just outside the cave entrance and get him to hold the tour if we wanted to join them.
We said we did and paid our sixteen dollars each. Once in the cave it turned out to be the worst hole in the ground either of us had ever been in – and in Turkey I once helped a friend to dig a grave! It was just plain boring with hardly any stalag thingies that point up and down and who gives a toss which is which anyway? Something it did have though was common brown tree snakes. We only saw one but the guide assured us that the ceiling and upper walls were thick with them. I couldn’t see why because there were no common brown trees in the cave for a start. About half way through the cave he stopped and said “see those roots hanging from the ceiling, can anybody guess what they are?” “Yes”, I said. “I think they’re the common brown tree roots from up above us.” He then went into a lengthy explanation for my benefit as to why the snake was called what it was.
Now, your common brown tree snake is a wily little devil. A few hundred thousand years ago, when Liberal Party politicians first began wallowing in the primeval slime from which they were never to emerge, brown tree snakes ventured into the Cutta Cutta Caves. There they acquired a taste for the little red flying foxes that cruise through the cave system twice a day at thirty kilometres an hour on their way to and from work. Today, the common brown tree snakes that live in these caves never venture out. They hang off the walls and ceiling with their mouths open catching bats for their meals. It’s a limited diet but one that seems to suffice. Now, can you imagine what it’s like being hit in the mouth with a dinner that’s travelling at thirty kilometres an hour every day? Make your neck ache wouldn’t it? You’d be absolutely starving but still shitting yourself at the thought of having to lean out and grab your next evening meal. To get an idea of what the procurement of the day’s sustenance is like for a common brown tree snake in Cuta Cutta Caves a Japanese restaurant is the place to go - one with a sushi train. There you should get the proprietor to tie your hands behind your back (in the ritual beheading position), turn the sushi train up to maximum speed and suspend your head two centimetres above the belt. Then have the cook place a thirty five kilo lump of hump backed whale meat on a plate and send it in your direction.
The Cutta Cutta Caves tour we went on was a rip off and they can try sueing me for saying so in print. Not only was it a lousy guided tour in the lousiest cave imaginable led by an inane driveller of a guide and there were no bats. I don’t know where or when the bats appear but the lady who conned us into impulse buying the tickets didn’t mention that we wouldn’t be seeing them. Compared with all other attractions we’d so far visited this was the worst value for money rock formation around.
Having wasted our time in the Cutta Cutta Caves we arrived in Katherine a little later than planned and knew we wouldn’t have time to find a free camping spot in the bushes before sundown so we stopped just long enough to steal a tankful of water from the historic railway station. There was a certain type of Aborigine occupying pavement space in Katherine, a particularly attractive type. He’s the fifty or sixty year old long slim, slightly bow legged guy with cowboy boots, a cowboy hat and a neatly trimmed white beard. They’re probably ex stockmen. These guys look so cool I envy them. Like they’d wandered into town to shoot up the Sheriff and were just sitting on the pavement waiting for him to step out of the saloon. When these guys walk they saunter. Anybody who’s seen Lee Marvin in his role as the gunslinger in Cat Ballou can easily bring to mind this kind of guy. Six or seven of them, each to himself, sat easily on the Katherine pavements, the odd one had a piece of grass between his teeth …..reaaaal coool like.
Katherine Gorge was a pleasant surprise for us. We’d pictured it as a big chasm with water in it where you could swim and maybe walk around it. Something we thought would be maybe half a kilometre long. When we finally got there we found it comprised thirteen interconnected gorges that went on for almost twenty kilometres. We took a look at the options before us for the next day and decided it was impossible to choose between two hour, four hour and eight hour cruises plus a number of walks, some going on for days. There were canoes for hire too and some of the canoe trails lasted for three or four days. There was nowhere to park Erasmus but for the national park campground but we managed to get a site away from the madding crowd and turned in early.
As dusk approached we saw flights of fruit bats going past in battalions or batteries or whatever the collective name for bats is. They were going off hunting for the night and we wished them well as the mosquitoes were biting. At precisely four thirty in the morning they returned to their roost. It was in the trees around the toilet block. There they screeched as such a volume that we couldn’t sleep. I looked through the window and saw that everybody else had their lights on too. They’d woken the whole camp. They smelled awfully and they kept up their screeching all day only quieting down just before going out again the next evening. Up to that point it was easily the noisiest camp site we’d been in and we would think twice before going back there. In fact we have thought twice and we’re not. The flying foxes were ruining the trees around the campground but the rangers said they were protected and so would just go on ruining the area to the detriment of campers and, I think eventually, the national park’s income.
We took a four hour cruise which started at eleven am and were glad we hadn’t hired a canoe. There was a very strong head wind whistling up the gorge that would have made hard work of paddling and the guide said that it started at the same time every day. The cruise took us through three of the gorges making it necessary to disembark from our boat and embark on another at two points where the water was low. Richie the guide was an Aboriginal in his early thirties and although he wasn’t of the Jarwon tribe that owned the gorge he’d learned the stories associated with it and kept us entertained. He told us the legends, showed us Aboriginal rock paintings, stopped occasionally and took a leaf from a tree and told us what it was that Aboriginals used it for. He was fun too. He stopped at a number of places and told us the Aboriginal legends of how they were created. He sounded utterly convinced and convincing as he related these stories and then he’d give us the scientific version of events. They weren’t half as romantic. His knowledge of plants was impressive. He knew all the Latin names for them and the chemical substances they contained.
He related to us how, when he was a kid, he and his playmates were on top of a cliff overlooking the Katherine River wishing they could swim in it but knowing their parents had forbidden them to. A couple of horses came down to the bank to drink and suddenly a huge saltwater crocodile lunged out of the water and with a couple of shakes tore one of the horses heads off. Katherine Gorge was a great rock formation, well worth stopping off at. It was basically a vast twisting and turning gash in the landscape about seventy metres across; a towering canyon with a slow moving river running through it. Long spindly Livingstone palms grew in clefts in the canyon walls and here and there were beaches that the canoers stopped at to rest and swim. Richie said that the water was extremely cold and that people jumping into it to cool off sometimes developed cramps and drowned. What was hard to envision was that this great gash actually filled up sometimes during the wet season. I couldn’t have designed a better drain. When the wet approaches the waters rise and the gorge becomes continuous. Then the park rangers are able to get all the boats back to base across the rocky obstructions that divide it into thirteen gorges and moor them safely on land.
We left the gorge after two nights and went into Katherine town to catch up with our emails, buy camera batteries, draw money from the ATM and all those things that you wish you didn’t have to do in order to keep going. We met an Aboriginal girl sitting on a park bench with her two week old baby. He was very cute and I asked his name because I don’t know many Aboriginal names. “He’s Brian” said his mum.
Next stop, Edith falls on the Edith River. It was another rock formation with water. The toilets were good though. Right now I wouldn’t mind seeing a cathedral or something. Australia is empty. We’re not using it. I don’t want to describe another rock formation. I’ll look for something else.
At Edith Falls I decided to charge up the camera batteries but there were no powered sites. The only power point I could find was in the toilet and I plugged in the charger there. I’m red/green colour blind and the charger light glows red until the batteries are fully charged when it switches to green. Sometimes it takes hours to charge all four batteries up and this was one such occasion. I plugged it in before dinner during daylight but visited it a few times and didn’t think the light had changed to green. Clare wasn’t too keen on visiting the men’s toilets with me so I went down there on my own again at about half past nine which was way after dark. I still couldn’t make out what colour the light was and I was walking out of the loo when I spotted a guy walking between caravans.
“Excuse me” I said “Would you do me a favour?”
“I’ll try” he said
“I wonder could you come in here for a minute and see if my charger’s still red.”
He had a London accent and he replied “don’t worry; you’ll go blind before that happens.”
