A Van Called Erasmus.
CHAPTER FIVE
Before leaving Adelaide we paid a visit to the Gaganis Brothers warehouse. Gaganis Bros is a Greek Australian company that imports food from all over Europe and there we stocked up on copious quantities of canned, bottled and dried goodies we knew we wouldn’t be seeing for a long time. Gaganis supply restaurants and retail shops all over Australia but at their warehouse you can buy all the things they sell very cheaply without having to buy in multiples. There you can get a tin of Croatian pork liver pate for a dollar and at the other end of the scale, a wine press for twelve hundred dollars. You can also pick up the odd cockroach if you’re not careful.
We emerged from that superb Greek wholesalers with a couple of supermarket trolleys piled high with Hungarian fruit juices, Polish, Turkish and Iranian jams, Greek vacuum packed smoked mackerel and canned calamari, Italian and German cheeses, Greek peas and string beans baked in oil. Stuffed vine leaves from Croatia, Turkish stuffed eggplants and flame roasted red peppers, Lithuanian canned smoked sprats and a whole lot more. All this we dextrously stuffed into crevices in Erasmus along with Turkish and Lebanese dried apricots and dates. We were looking forward to dining in the desert. Gaganis is interesting from the point of view of the customers you get to see in there. We saw an old lady with a concentration camp tattoo. I know that’s what it was because I’d previously seen a few of them when I lived in Poland and I knew somebody who had two of them. There were lots of old Greek women dressed in their black mourning colours and at least thirty elderly Slavs of different nationalities. Two of the short broad shouldered Slavic men in, I guess, their early seventies who were shopping with their wives had fingers missing, which I thought strange. A disproportionate number of these men had obviously made the wrong choice of pets too as they had scars on their faces and bits out of their ears.
But, for the moment, back to the cockroaches. We found one in Erasmus a couple of weeks later up near Alice Springs and I reckon it came from Gaganis Bros warehouse. Clare didn’t agree. She said it was a local cockroach that had just sneaked in at a truck stop. Either way, its life was taken from it by a size nine Nike in a brutal and untimely fashion and its now probably building brain cells in a magpie or something. That’s what I like about Buddhism. There’s no God and what goes around comes around. There’s this sort of universal pool of soul where all living things die, break down and go back to. Then they get recycled so bits of the Gaganis Brothers cockroach could now be a part of John Howard’s scrotum. Well, that’s a bit far fetched really. John Howard hasn’t got any balls and he was already around when I killed the cockroach but that’s roughly how Buddhism works. I’m not a Buddhist though, I’m irreligious.
But the cockroach got me thinking about existentialism. What the fuck is it? Anyway, if this cockroach was really from Adelaide and we took it all the way to Alice Springs, what about flies. Flies travel with us for hundreds of kilometres every day. They drive us nuts. They appear on the windscreen and we keep on swatting at them and they lay low for a bit and then come back and annoy us all over again. When we stop for lunch I usually open the doors and shoo them out but sometimes there are more flies outside waiting to get in. Well, I got to thinking about how an Adelaide fly would get on in, say, Broken Hill if we transported it there. It would be too far to fly home wouldn’t it? And, anyway, it probably wouldn’t know the way.
How would our fly get on with other local flies? What if it landed on a piece of kangaroo shit and a load of other flies came along and shouted “FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF” Like that?
“Sorry, my names Buzz, as in Aldrin. I’m from Adelaide”
“Yeah, well you ain’t getting none of our kangaroo shit ‘cause you ain’t a member of the Great Fly Barrier Industrial Council marsupial shit infection work collective”
“Oh really, might I be allowed to join the Great Fly Barrier…., thingy?”
“No, it’s a closed shop. You gotta be hatched here to join. Fuck off”
“Bzzzzzzz”
“Well done brother, that told the smarmy little prick.”
“OK lads, back to work. We’re on wallaby this afternoon, that means time and a half”
We left Adelaide on a bright, sunny, mid May morning. But hang on – wait for a minute. Sorry, I could be wrong. Clare says it was raining and unbright. Overcast, that’s the word. I’ll have to learn to keep better notes.
We left Adelaide on a - what the hell; you don’t want to know what the weather was like do you? No. We went north through the Clare Valley all autumnal grape vines and European colours. On we went like a rat up a drainpipe and out the other side into a large flat area of expansive fields of boring old stubble. It went on for far too long but there was nothing we could do about it. And then it went on for a whole lot more. About four or five hours later the bloody stuff was still there as if somebody had painted a mural of it on the windscreen. It was all the same.
We went through many an unmemorable town until we came to one we liked. It was called Melrose but by then it was growing dim. We looked for somewhere to park for the night and found the football oval. There was a sign saying camping was permitted which was unusual; we don’t usually park in places where we’re permitted. There were toilets too and water to fill our tanks with. A football game was in full swing. Well, it might have been in half swing for all I know about football. It’s a male sexual thing, a fertility right, the football, isn’t it? I watched a part of a Grand Final a few years ago and all these men broke through this sort of symbolic hymen with the names of the teams written on it. It all took place on an egg shaped patch of grass and like a horde of flagella they proceeded to kick this egg shaped ball into a symbolic womb.
We cruised around the Melrose football oval looking for the most level place to park and then saw a ridge which we just had enough ground clearance to struggle over. We found ourselves on a flat plateau overlooking the football oval right at the foot of a big, tree covered conical thing called Mt. Remarkable. When I awoke in the morning I looked out of the window at Mt. Remarkable. It had a touch of the mist in it as if God had found magnetic candy floss lurking around in the trees there and he was up there with a bloody great magnet pulling the stuff up to heaven. A truly celestial sight it was and I could just imagine an ark being stuck up there somewhere.
I climbed down from the bed and put the kettle on and opened the curtains. As I did so a huge flock of galahs rose from the ground screeching and wheeling away from me in a great pink flapping cloud. I thought I’d scared them with the noise of the curtain track being pulled. Then I heard a voice. It said “Oh shit, not again. When are they goin’ to put a friggin’ fence up.” I peeked out from behind the curtains on the other side of the van. It was then that I realised we were between the sixth and seventh tees of the Melrose golf course. We had a fit of the giggles and didn’t open up Erasmus until the golfers had gone.
After breakfast we went down into the little township. It was neat and tidy and we liked it a lot. Being at the foot of Mount remarkable gives the place a setting that money can’t buy any of the other towns that compete for the tourist dollar along that stretch of road. And if they ever do find an ark up there it will do wonders for the price of real estate.
Now there’s a funny thing, that Noah and the ark. I don’t believe it. In the Adelaide Museum I saw a colossal skeleton of a dinosaur and the description said that even that huge thing wasn’t the biggest type of dinosaur that ever existed. Now, I don’t doubt at all that dinosaurs existed and anyone who doesn’t must be a thicko because there are so many dinosaur skeletons standing around in museums all over the world. This Noah and his missus and the in-laws were supposed to have put a mating pair of everything inside their boat. I don’t know how many days sailing Noah provisioned for but if he’d only stocked it for a week’s supply for the dinosaurs alone there would have to have been a hell of a load of forage. Then there’s the question of poo. There were only four, or was it six of them of them on the boat? Can you imagine how much poo a stegosaurus puts out at a time? One wet fart from a Tyrannosaurus Rex would have filled the scuppers before they could have shovelled it away.
From Melrose we carried on north through more monotonous countryside and a smattering of small towns not worthy of mention. It was dry, parched country with only the odd olive grove to relieve the boredom save for a couple of dry creek beds where fresh looking eucalyptus trees grew. One small town called Wilminton, had an IGA supermarket into which we ventured briefly and wished we hadn’t. The fresh produce counter had only two soup packs of three or four cling wrapped vegetables and there was a solitary parsnip. I picked up the parsnip. It no longer had the strength to stand upright and I sensed that I wasn’t the first customer to have tested it. The next time I saw parsnips was at Ayers Rock. They were fresh and individually wrapped and for sale at $2.45 each.
We were heading for the Flinders ranges and Wilpena Pound. We next alighted from Erasmus in a small town not far from Wilpena called Quorn. The reason we’d stopped is that Clare wanted to see if she could get a prescription order from the chemist. The chemist didn’t have a pharmacist but rang through the order to a chemist in Port Augusta and said that the items would be delivered in two working days. Considering the remoteness of the place I thought the service excellent. We wandered around Quorn to stretch our legs and went into a café where the walls were decorated with movie posters from days gone by. I didn’t take much notice of them until Clare pointed out that all these movies had been made in and around Quorn. They were all Wild West movies and that gave us an idea of the kind of country we would be going into.
There’s a national parks resort at Wilpena with a couple of rather ordinary restaurants, a shop with and gas station and that’s about all apart from the resort’s caravan park. Signs at various intervals along the road had told us that we weren’t allowed to camp anywhere but in the resort caravan park and we were determined not to so we drove around looking for places to stop where the ranger wouldn’t be able to spot us. We found a good place behind a Telstra transformer/relay station in among trees and parked up behind it just on dusk.
We walked into Wilpena pound the next morning and after a coupe of hours trekking Clare realised it was my birthday. That afternoon I sent postcard to my kids telling them that I’d spent my sixtieth birthday in the pound. Wilpena Pound is something special. It’s a massive ring of mountain walls with a big conical hollow inside where the walls slope down to a treed plain of some five kilometres by eleven. It looks like a meteorite crater but was, in fact, formed by a geological process I can neither spell, pronounce or remember. Back around the late 1800s a man found it and realised that there was only one way in or out of it. He fenced off the opening and grazed cattle in it. I can’t imagine a bigger or more secure cattle coral in the world.
We climbed up to the rim of it and saw the sheer immensity of the place. It looks totally impregnable and the walls undulate like the decorative icing around a wedding cake. I suppose the earth, given sufficient millennia, is malleable and geological forces had folded it up like the icing that’s squeezed from one of those cake icing piping bags. Each fold had a little point on it too where that big cake decorator in the sky had put the final glob of icing on. There, that was better that a whole load of geological descriptive crap wasn’t it?
The following day, as a birthday present, Clare booked a half hour plane ride over the place and I was extremely taken with it. The pilot took us all the way around it and to have seen all the peaks at shoulder height is an experience I’ll never forget. What really stood out was that there was absolutely nothing around it as far as we could see from our lofty perch. My insignificance hardly counted for anything.
Back on the ground, we met up with a couple of large feral goat herds. All the members of the herd looked far too healthy for words. They obviously thrive on destroying the local ecology. At one small, muddy pool we saw a confrontation between two goats and a large kangaroo. The kangaroo was already drinking when the two goats rocked up. The kangaroo stood its ground until one of the goats stood up threateningly on its hind legs. That was enough for Skippy, he withdrew. We could see that what had been a pristine watering hole was trampled into a muddy mess by hundreds of goat’s hooves.
We saw or first wild emus at Wilpena and got quite excited taking a swag of out of focus photographs. As emus run away from you the great bustle of feathers on their rear ends rolls from side to side. They looked like early Victorian ladies in crinoline dresses doing the hundred metres in stiletto heels. By the third day at Wilpena we’d seen so many emus that we no longer took any notice of them - we’d become emunised. One day as we returned to the Wilpena resort car park we saw a new Subaru with the personalised number plate “OLD BOY.” I can’t stand personalised number plates and I often wonder why people have to make those silly statements about themselves. Mind you, we did see a car in Adelaide with the number plates SHAGU 2 which I thought showed originality. But there in the Wilpena resort car park I just couldn’t help myself. I grabbed an envelope and wrote FART on it with a black marker. Then I stuck it to the guy’s number plate so it read OLD FART and Clare took before and after photographs of it. It just made me feel good.
Another first for both of us was seeing Aboriginal rock paintings. We saw three within twenty minutes driving distance of Wilpena. Two of them at Yourumbulla were located in rock overhangs in stony country almost identical to the terrain of the Aegean coast of Turkey. Both Clare and I have visited that area independently and were both struck with the similarities. We understood nothing about the symbolism of the rock paintings; it was just a good thing to have experienced.
I managed to find a telephone line to connect my laptop to in Wilpena and I found that Neil had been getting quite a few emails from budgerigar owners and our customers looking for advice. One lady in Wisconsin wrote that her budgie was picking feathers out of his rump and that it was looking inflamed. She said that she’d put the budgie’s rear end in luke warm water and some sort of moisturising oil hoping it would cure the problem. However, it created another problem which was that the budgie now had this moisturising oil all over its bum and she wanted to know how to get rid of it. I replied to Neil saying “with a blowlamp” and Neil, being a bit stressed out and tired at the time, made the mistake of sending my reply direct to the customer. At Wilpena I downloaded the email she’d sent us.
“You horrible horrible people. It’s obvious that you don’t really care about our little feathered friends at all. You are nothing better than monsters. I will write to the all budgie clubs and tell them what you’ve done and ask them to boycott your company. I sensed from the start that you didn’t really care.
Sigrid Milington
P.S. My husband says FUCK YOU.
After leaving the Finders ranges we stocked up on food at Port Augusta and after stealing water from a public toilet we slept the night there in the Naval Cadets Club car park and headed off again the next morning still going north. Having made mention of stealing water I suppose I should say a little about the different methods we sometimes used to obtain it. As we didn’t use caravan parks we had to carry a fair amount of water with us for showering and washing up and in some places it wasn’t available. We bought two long hoses, which we could join together if need be along with every type and size of hose fitting available in Australia. Thus equipped we could get water from just about anywhere. It’s easy enough connecting to taps at the back of factories or supermarkets and they don’t mind people taking water but there are some organisations that guard their water. Some, such as sports ovals, bowling clubs and schools have taps with no handles. After striking this situation a couple of times I went into a plumbing shop and asked the guy behind the counter how they opened them. ”With one of these” he said and slapped a tap handle on the counter. “Right” says I. “I’ll have one.” “Or it could be one of these.” He said, slapping a different one on the counter. “How many different types are there?” Says I. “Four” says he. “Right.” Says I. “I’ll have one of each.” “That’ll be eleven bucks even” Says he.
The eleven dollars worth of tap handles was worth its weight in showers and cups of tea a thousand times over but sometimes we came across public toilets with no outside taps. For this we bought flexible rubber universal squeezable uppable things from a hardware store that went around any tap spout, even the rectangular ones. The public toilet taps were often on springs to stop people running too much water at a time but they were easily held open with a stick between the tap and the wall. Another problem sometimes encountered was that of dirty water at roadside stops in arid areas after rain. It runs into the tanks from the gutters of those shade house carport things they erect so that people can get out of the sun when they’re having hot cups of tea. However, the sediment always hangs around at the bottom of the tank near the tap while the water at the top of the tank is clear. When faced with this we drove Erasmus right up to the tank and stood on the bumper from where we could get the hose in the top and siphon the clear water out. You, the reader, will probably never need to know about any of this but I need something to fill this book out so I thought I’d tell you about it.
Absolutely nothing happened the day we left Port Augusta and besides stopping and starting for coffee and lunch the country was so flat I only changed gear twice. At about five in the afternoon. Is five pm afternoon or evening? At about 1700 hours we stopped for the night in a big roadside car park at a place called Hart Lake. It was a salt lake with a couple of centimetres of water in it and the remains of a disused railway track running out to the middle that was once used by salt getters. There was a pair of railway wheels on an axle out in the shallow water that had the setting sun projecting its golden glow upon. The reflection of the wheels in the still water was stunning and I wanted a photograph of them. The sun was going down fast and we grabbed the camera and ran out there as quickly as we could. We got in about ten shots while the light was good and then slowly strolled back to the shore past a large sign which we hadn’t read. A couple on the banks were shouting and hollering at us and Clare could just make out something about “read the sign.”
We turned around and read it. It was a warning by the Department of Defence and read: DANGER. DO NOT VENTURE ONTO THE LAKE SURFACE. LAKE IS A LIVE BOMBING AND AMMUNITION TARGET AREA. UNLOCATED LIVE ORDINANCE IN A CONDITION DANGEROUS TO PERSONNEL MAY BE ON OR JUST UNDER THE LAKE SURFACE. AREA ADMINISTRATOR. WOOMERA.
We slept well and in the morning moved back out onto the asphalt for another day exactly the same as the last. How does one describe absolutely bugger all to the reader? A couple of times I swear I could see the actual curvature of the earth. We didn’t see a solitary native animal in live mode and the highlight of the day was when we saw a fox and a number of eagles tearing lumps off of some poor cow’s defunct thinking apparatus. An hour before dusk Coober Pedy hove into view. Not a lot of Coober Pedy, it must be said, actually hoves because about 95% of it is under the ground where little hoving goes on.
We made our way slowly down the main street. It was a mess. We came to a roundabout and parked on the dust to the left of it and clambered down from Erasmus. A score of Aborigines were sitting around taking in the last rays of the setting sun and a variety of other substances from bottles and cans. There was a lot of bickering going on and one woman was being verbally abused by a man who was probably her partner. She was eating a pie and he made as if to hit her. She took a step back and as he came forward she thrust the pie toward his face. He turned away and it went all down the left hand side of his head. “He must be one of these pie-on-ears I keep hearing about” I said to Clare. She wasn’t amused and kept walking looking straight ahead.
Above ground Coober Pedy is, well, um, ………. a shit hole. Of course, when everybody lives under the ground I guess they don’t care too much for what’s above it. We cruised about looking for somewhere to stop for the night and found ourselves in one of the suburbs. Coober Pedy almost certainly has some of the most original looking suburbs in the world. They consist of white limestone roads flanked by bloody great piles of white, limestone tailings. Apart from a smattering of disused mining machinery that’s about all there is! We parked, possibly in someone’s garden, between two piles of the said white limestone tailings and were scared to venture out after dark for a pee in case we fell down a mineshaft. It was one of the quietest nights we’d spent and the reflection of the moon on the tailings was ghostly.
When, in daylight, we gingerly explored our surroundings we found dwellings everywhere. They weren’t underground in the sense that you had to walk or climb down a slope to get to them. They were set in the sides of cut away hillocks with windows, doors and carports all facing the same way. The odd one had a view (of bloody great heaps of white, limestone tailings) but most looked out onto white cliff faces. It seemed all higgledy piggledy but they must all have known where each others burrows were located.
In the town centre and immediate suburbs some people had managed to grow trees where none had existed before as attested to by the surrounding plains which supported only poor, low lying scrub. Coober Pedy’s first tree was on display as a tourist attraction. It was fabricated in (I think) the 1960s from the metal left over from a truck that had been in a road accident.
Much of the film Mad Max Three was made in Coober Pedy but although it was mentioned in most of the guide books there was no reference to it anywhere that we could find in the town. In the car park of an underground opal sales emporium stood a fantastic sort of truck come aircraft that was used in the movie and tourists were taking photographs of it but there was no notice anywhere to say what it was. Above ground Coober Pedy is only an advert for what’s underground and most of that is about opal sales. Some of the shops are very elegant and boast a constant temperature year round. There are also many places billed as opal museums and displays with free admission that are nothing more than opal shops.
There are five or six underground churches in the town and one we visited was the Serbian Orthodox place of worship. As far as we were concerned it was the best place in town. In the stained glass windows various old Christian religious standards were represented but one scene was of a woman lying on a funeral bier with a bunch of halo wearing apostles around her. One guy was kneeling at the bedside with his hands cut off at the wrists. His bloody hands were both lying on the sheets of the woman’s bed. Standing in the foreground was the culprit, a long haired female Roman centurion with a bloody sword and wings.
When we came up out of the church I saw the Serbian Orthodox priest changing the wheel on his 4wD and I asked him what the scene was all about. He said that in their tradition there had been an impious Jew at Mary Magdalene’s death and he’d reached out to push Mary off the bier. The winged
centurioness was actually an angel who popped down from heaven real quick like and saved the day by chopping the poor bugger’s hands off.
When walking around some parts of above ground Coober Pedy you thread your way through a forest of knee high ventilation pipes. Some take the form of forty four gallon drums but most are just six inch diameter pipes with conical hats on top to prevent the rain from entering. Every underground shop or dwelling has to have ventilation pipes but I was surprised that they were so low to the ground. I was almost overcome by a desire to pee down one or bellow in a deep voice “I am the Lord thy God and I want you to take off all your clothes and stand in the window.” Better still would be to paint a picture of Jesus or the Virgin Mary on a circular piece of glass and position it in a ventilator with a light behind it at night and make biblical noises.
Water in this little opal mining town probably comes from underground. I don’t know. There is, however, a waterworks and it was to there that we had to go to fill Erasmus’s tanks. The filling apparatus was attached to the fence outside the waterworks premises and there was a sign telling the waterless that they had to put twenty cents in the slot for thirty litres of the stuff and the water would be available when a green light came on. It also said that campervan owners should attach their own hoses to the waterworks nozzle because the water came out at high pressure and it could burst water tanks. We put twenty cents in the slot and waited but we couldn’t see the green light because the sun was on it. We put another twenty cents in and clicked the nozzle open. It was a nozzle like those found on petrol pumps but, unlike petrol pumps which deliver more the harder you squeeze the trigger, this one was either on or off. We had no way of telling when the green light would have come on if it had been visible but when the water came it delivered the thirty litres in a matter of ten seconds or so and it was a terrifying experience. It so shocked me as it blew back at me from out of Erasmus’s tank that I dropped the nozzle and its flexible pipe on the ground where, in this parched piece of paradise, there was a muddy bog where other people had done the same as me. By the time I regained my composure and washed the mud off the nozzle the invisible green light had gone out and cut off the supply. We put another twenty cents in the slot and this time I waited with the trigger open and the nozzle facing up the road. The jet of water, when it came, reached for more than nine meters which is the length of Erasmus. I’m glad we weren’t just trying to fill the kettle.
When we left Coober Pedy and drove north we could see the extent of the opal mining. It’s no longer guys with picks and shovels doing their own small time thing. It’s a sizeable industry with machinery scattered all over the land as far as the eye can see. Great heaps of white tailings went on for forty kilometres and went back more than a kilometre from the road in some places. It was a disorganised, slapdash looking blot on the landscape and I wondered at a country that has so much land and such a minute population that it allows people to do this without a thought for coming generations who may find a use for it. How can we deserve it if we can’t respect it?
It was in Coober Pedy that I came into the closest contact I had yet had with Aboriginals and I’ve been confused by the thought of them fitting into white society, or otherwise, ever since. I recently completed two years of Aboriginal studies at university and, although I knew that what I did there was all theory I thought I understood more about them than I did. In Coober Pedy I first saw their close affinity with the land in the sense of them wanting to actually sit on it. I was to see this in Alice Springs later where I talked to a group of three middle aged Aborigines (middle age for an Australian Aborigine is ten years younger than that of a white Australian) and they preferred to sit on the earth than on the brand new seats in the park. I think that sitting on the earth is actually part of their attachment to the land.
We embarked on yet another day full of sod all, slowly sneaking inexorably towards Ayres Rock. The highlight of the day was probably crossing the half dozen or so dry creek beds that went under the road. In the creek beds a few good looking trees grow which makes a nice change from the relentless drabness of the scrub. To be fair, the scrub did vary in height from about knee high to something in the order of three metres but I didn’t need a whole day’s worth of it – again. The next day things picked up. The scrub got higher and greener, much greener, due to the rain which fell for most of the day and had been falling for a week before we got there.
But there was something else. Cows. Yes, cows. Not the hollow sounding moohy type cows you see in dairy farmer’s paddocks. No, these were the hollow bodied cows you see at the side of the road after an encounter with a road train. When road trains hit cows they go up in the air and land in all sorts of peculiar attitudes just like you see animals doing in kids cartoons on TV. Sometimes they land with their legs splayed out in four different directions. The last thing that goes through a cows mind before a road rain hits it is often its arse. It’s a most undignified way for a cow to go but no less so than to hear all its buddies in the abattoir being slaughtered as it awaits its own turn. In such a dry climate the cows dry out and are hollow inside. The only native things I’ve seen trying to eat them are the eagles but their beaks are no match for the cows’ hides. Some cows land like the horse in Picasso’s Guernica and I got to thinking about his bulls. Picasso was Spanish by birth and, although he lived in France for most his life, he never could get the bullfight out of his psyche. Bulls crop up again and again in all his periods. I thought that if it was good enough for Picasso to think bulls for extended periods of time it might be good enough for me too and take the boredom out of driving for a while.
I began stopping and taking photographs of them from different angles and wondering how Picasso would have held his digital if it were him. I studied them at night and thought I just might be able to start the next arty photography book craze – empty cows. Yeah…….I’ll call it Holy Cow and go looking for a non vegetarian publisher. Look for it in a book shop near you next year some time.
The next day I went looking for cans of spray paint so that I could sign all these hollow cows with famous artist’s names or write names like daisy or Clarabell on them. Of course it was futile. There were only two roadhouses the next day and neither of them sold spray paint. Still, I wasn’t going to be put off and determined to try in Alice Springs where, I was told, half the population was sniffing cans of the stuff.
I had always imagined that Ayres Rock was just out of Alice Springs by a few kilometres but it’s not. It’s some three hundred kilometres west down the Lasseter Highway and the turn off from the main road is a couple of hundred kilometres before “The Alice.” I was disappointed as it meant a day’s extra tedious driving to get in there and another to get out. Nevertheless, having come this far we couldn’t go past it so we turned left and kept going until we found a roadside stop for the night. For dinner we had kangaroo meat cooked in the pressure cooker for twenty minutes with a little dried rosemary and oregano. It was simply delicious and fell to pieces it was so tender.
I pondered on how unusual it was for any people to be tucking into their national emblems for dinner. Americans don’t eat eagles for dinner do they? Kiwi Kiev doesn’t sound right and try finding a recipe for Unicorn.
A right turn of the Lasseter Highway before Ayres rock brought us to Kings Canyon which we’d never heard of but which the guide books said shouldn’t be missed. We arrived there at about seven thirty in the morning all prepared for a three hour walk preceded by what the Lonely Planet guide book said was a difficult climb up to the canyon rim.
The sight that greeted our eyes was palpably pulchritudinous. Pert pointed pinnacles pugnaciously punched their way through the morning mist that hung in plumes over the primitively pedantic canyon walls.
In the car park a pandemic of puerile pensioners posed for pictures and pointedly poo-poohed the peregrinators pacing the path towards the foot of the hill where the walk began while the punters who partook, purposefully pulled on Paddy Palin ponchos and plodded painfully past the starting post.
Standing resolute, the ramparts of rusty red rocks ran rapturously like raging runnels, receding rapidly into regions unknown. And as far as the eye could see marvellous mesas mellifluously melded magnificent mountains into beautiful buttes. This bloody word processing program gets stuck on words beginning with P sometimes. Anyway, Kings Canyon – shit it was good. Magnificent mountains, gorgeous gorges.
The walk around the rim was stunning and the vertiginous chasms, all in the popular red rock that abounds in those parts, were so deep you could spit and never see where it landed. Isn’t it funny how people like to spit from railway bridges and hotel balconies?
The climb up to the canyon rim was as difficult as the guide books said it would be and most people paused to get their breath back several times during the ascent. The rock wasn’t bouldery or jagged but sort of flakey as though Zeus or the Rainbow Serpent had cast a heap of stone tablets down. Stone tablets, mountains? My mind was off again. I was ahead of Clare as I struggled up over the rim on hands and knees. An elderly couple stood in front of me leaning on sticks. I picked myself up and dusted myself off and looking at the husband said
“Excuse me; you haven’t see God up here have you?”
They stared at me
“You know, he’s a big guy with a beard and long hair”
They didn’t move a muscle
“Only, I have an appointment you see. I’ve got to write out these commandments. Got plenty of stone tablets.”
“No, we haven’t seen……. Anybody unusual.. at all really….have we?” He said looking to her for backup. She nodded and, thinking the action may be misconstrued, shook her head vigorously.
Clare’s head had just emerged over the canyon rim and I yelled to her “I think we’ve got the wrong mountain again” and walked of muttering “I could have sworn this was Sinai.”
We saw the couple three more times as we wandered around up there but each time they made sure to look the other way. In the afternoon we went for another walk but this time on the floor of the canyon following the creek which was flowing with more gusto than its usual trickle owing to the unseasonable rains that had been falling over the previous week or so. The Northern Territory, while we’d been there, had experienced record low temperatures and had had the most rain since 1968. Immediately before the start of our canyon floor walk Clare read one of those notice boards that tells you what kind of shoes to wear and what not to do. Next to it was a blurb about a toad that lives in Central Australia and I read it. When there’s going to be an extended drought this disgusting little sod blows a load of mucus bubbles out of its mouth cocooning itself in a heavy slime and buries itself down deep in the sand. There it goes into a sort of trance-like hibernation where it can stay for years until there’s a big rain. Then it comes up and lays its eggs and another toad fertilises them and the toadpoles hatch and they grow into more little toads and some of them fall prey to snakes and those that don’t, go on to participate in the miracle of life that’s kept these toads doing this for millions of years. On the twenty fourth of May 2005 one of these toads finally emerged above ground to take part in the miracle of life after being buried underground for probably twenty years – and I stood on it! I didn’t mean to. I just stepped back from the notice board and heard it make a small “eek” sound. I looked down and saw it breathing its last under my boot. I didn’t want the people who’d been reading the blurb at the same time as me to see it so I stood there until after they’d gone. Then I took a good look at it and it and positively identified the corpse from the illustrations on the board.
If you’re in a recreational vehicle of any sort in Outback South Australia or the Northern Territory all the other drivers of recreational vehicles wave to you. And there are hundreds of them every day. The further north you get the less enthusiastic the waves but they, or their front passengers, still manage to raise a couple of fingers from the wheel. Sometimes it’s the husbands who do the driving and the wives who do the waving but I just got fed up with doing it. After the first couple of hundred I couldn’t be bothered but you have to keep it up in case you’re on your way out of an attraction like Ayres Rock and you break down after not acknowledging someone who was on their way in. You worry that they may go straight past you without stopping to help you on their way out.
I’ve been working on a clever device for a couple of weeks now that takes all the hard work out of waving and, at the same time, provides entertainment for all the family thus relieving the boredom during long drives. The prototype has four surgical rubber gloves stiffened with varnish in different attitudes. There’s an outthrust palm, a V sign, the finger and a thumbs up sign. These are all aligned along the top of the dashboard and they have 12 volt globes in them. They’re all connected by cable to the cigarette lighter and there’s a four way switch that serves to light up the appropriate hand gesture to suit the occasion. The cable is long enough to be passed to anybody in the car so that all the family can have a go with it.
“Can I give him the finger Dad?”
“No, he’s a road train driver, they’re big blokes son”
“What about this one Dad, shall I give ‘im the wave?”
“No. son, he’s Asian. We give them the finger”
You see, it’s educational as well.
After another mind numbing day’s drive we finally got to Ayres Rock or Uluru as it’s now known. Nothing could have adequately prepared us for it. We walked around the base of it and both agreed that it was one of the best things we’d ever done at home or abroad. Before we walked around it though, we drove around it and quickly saw that ninety percent of all the postcards on sale only show one aspect of it in which it appears as one amorphous blob showing up in different colours.
In actual fact The Rock is a much more interesting lump than these commercial views show it to be. The reason that the popular pictures of it are all taken from one or two aspects is that the sun sets or rises on those two sides of it. The changes of colour are best seen from those angles but Uluru has many different faces and facets that are far more interesting. We didn’t know it had so many large trees at the base of it. These don’t show in commercial photographs because they’re taken at a great distance so as to get the whole of the Rock in the view finder. As we walked around the base of this stupendous red lump it was easy to see why it so impressed the Aborigines that all sorts of creation legends became associated with it. It’s hundreds of kilometres away from anywhere and to get to it they had to walk over country that’s flatter than Kylie Minogue so it absolutely dominates the landscape. The Rainbow Serpent is said by the Aborigines to live in one of the permanent pools at the base of the Rock. I don’t believe it but it makes just as much sense to me as virgin births and blokes feeding five thousand people on five loaves and two small fishes. That reminds me; all of the paintings I’ve seen of the Feeding of the Five Thousand don’t show frying pans or people scraping the scales off fishes. The Japanese eat raw fish but God hadn’t invented the Japanese at that stage. In the paintings of the event you never see a bunch of Jewish chefs at the back slogging away at making Gefilte Fish or anything like that. I reckon four thousand nine hundred and ninety eight of the Jews in the audience would just passed up on the raw fish. “Ta very mooch like but, eh, ahm not really ‘ungry I’ll joost ‘ave a crumb thanks – providin’ it’s kosher like.”
Buses disgorged tourists at an astonishing rate and quite a few of their passengers were climbing up the Rock despite all the notices saying that it was a sacred place and the Aboriginal owners would prefer that they didn’t. I thought it most culturally ignorant to do such a thing. How would they like Aborigines abseiling down the spire of Canterbury Cathedral? I’m an atheist but I wouldn’t dream of climbing up Uluru or abseiling down the spires of cathedrals. The Rock gets back at the tourists though. According to the notice board I read thirty six people have died by either falling from it or having heart attacks whilst attempting to ascend or descend it. It could be they were asphyxiated by Rainbow Serpent breath which, I should imagine, is similar to dragons.
Everything I ever heard or read about the Rock changing colours at the drop of a hat is true. My hat blew off and by the time I’d caught the bloody thing and put it back on my head a cloud had blown away from the sun and it had turned a whiter shade of pale. Well, puce actually. When we first approached it, it looked like an enormous decaying box jellyfish. It had a kind of semi translucent appearance with ill defined dark stripes running down it and a load of black spots where the rot was setting in. Early the next morning though, it looked like a giant red fly agaric toadstool just breaking the ground with the stalk yet to emerge.
When we walked around its base some parts of it looked like a Swiss cheese made from Red Leicester. It’s impossible to take a photograph of Uluru that can be considered typical.
For those of you who wish to re-create an Uluru in the privacy of your own kitchens for photographic purposes – here’s what you do.
1. Take half a kilo of Red Leicester and with warm wet hands smooth it into a mushroom shape.
2. Take a pencil and poke six or seven holes in it with the blunt end.
3. Take a hair brush and give it about four downward strokes from top to bottom.
4. With the back of a carving knife make a couple of downward slashes and paint them with strawberry jam.
5. Take two Malteesers, cut them in half and press them randomly, round end first, into the Red Leicester.
6. Mount on a piece of yellowy brown Masonite (rough side up) sparingly sprinkled with dry lawn clippings and with a macro lens click away.
Filters are the best way to create the changes in colour but if you can’t afford them hang different coloured pieces of cellophane around the kitchen light globe.
One thing struck me about all the geological information on display in large illustrations on notice boards about how Uluru, the Olgas, Kings Canyon etc. were formed. I wondered how it affected what the Aboriginals believed about their creation stories, legends and myths. Their religious beliefs are largely based in the land and its features and how things like Uluru were created. I wondered how their beliefs are standing up to all this scientific, factual information right there in their faces on their own land. Of course, Christians, Muslims and Jews, for example, can choose whether to believe all that stuff about the world being created by God in six days or decide that it’s bunk and believe in evolution. But what of the Aborigines? All this scientific and geological knowledge evolved slowly in the old world but here it has been suddenly thrust upon the Aborigines whose religion and culture are so interwoven that they can’t be separated. Thus, an attack on their religion represents a tandem attack on their culture. Uluru and all the other public attractions in the landscape of the Northern Territory, display information on notice boards blatantly contradicting what the Aboriginal inhabitants have believed for millennia. I wonder what this information does to the social fabric of Aboriginal society when a kid tells his elders that what they believe is a load of crap.
The first night we spent at Uluru we set up at the roadside in a little industrial suburb where the concrete is mixed and the busses repaired. It wasn’t much of a place to be for any length of time but it served our purposes which were to sleep and have breakfast before going out to the Olgas the following day. At one thirty in the morning a security guard came and told us to either go to the Caravan Park or head out of town by a minimum of ten kilometres. I said that he was welcome to fine me but he said that either he would escort me to the caravan park or I would be charged with trespassing first thing in the morning. The whole area of Uluru, he said, was private property owned by the Aboriginals but managed by a company and they were very particular about not having campers and caravanners littering the place. We drove twenty five kilometres out of town before we came to the first roadside stop where we could pull in for the night and we went back there for the next three nights. Under normal circumstances there are thousands of hectares of available camping space at the roadsides but we were visiting the area at a time when high rainfall records were being broken right across the Territory and the edges of the roads were too soft to cross.
One welcome thing about visiting Uluru was being able to catch up on a little civilisation for a brief period. The resort had a decent supermarket, newsagency, post office, bank and all those things that we didn’t know we’d been missing. I’d been missing cappuccinos and seeing younger people.
The Olgas are some fifty kilometres from Uluru on a sealed road and, like Uluru, they dominate their surroundings. As you approach them they seem to stay distant for a long time and then suddenly swell up in front of you in the middle of the road. They’re equally as impressive as the Rock, perhaps more so. They’re unquestionably more interesting in shape and a lot lumpier. There’s a big difference in their make up however. The Rock is a homogeneous thing made from the one substance whereas the Olgas are conglomerate. No, I don’t know what homogeneous means either I was just trying to impress. The Olgas are big and smooth looking but when you get close to them you can see that they’re composed of a load of big stones held together with a red mud that has hardened into rock by a process I don’t understand and, if I could, I’m sure wouldn’t be able to annunciate.
We’d come to the Olgy Poos for the three hour walk which seems to be something of a standard time for advertised walks in the Northern Territory. In the car park a remuda of rambunctious, red necked Rambos rabidly readied themselves for the three hour walk. Oh shit! This word processor’s stuck on Rs now. Maybe the Olgas present a better all round experience than the Rock. They’re different and we were unable to choose between them. The walk around the Rock was flat but with the Olgas walk you get to walk between them, through great chasms of rounded rock and across little streams. Once inside the visitor comes across flowering shrubs and plants in the valleys growing in their own little micro climates. What most impresses one is, again, the sheer immensity of these huge rounded red snot bubbles oozing up from the flatness of the plains. We took over eighty digital photographs on our Olga walk.
For those not fortunate enough to be able to experience the real feel of the Olgas any time soon but still wanting to partake of the same photographic experience we had; here’s what to do:
1. Take five kilos of sweet potatoes and cook with the skins on.
2. Randomly rub away about five percent of the skin and arrange them like a bunch of dahlia tubers on your kitchen table.
3. Finely chop two leaves of red lettuce and poke it into the clefts between the sweet potatoes.
4. Take seven or eight sprigs of fresh dill about a centimetre in length and jam them also into the clefts in the sweet potato tubers.
5. Mount on a piece of yellowy brown Masonite (rough side up) sparingly sprinkled with dry lawn clippings. Use ¼ second at f8 with a paper tissue over the flash to diffuse the light.
For the time being I’d had enough of rocks. It may well have been a geologist’s paradise but there’s a limit to how many phenomenal rock formations I can take in, in any one week. I said to Clare “if I have to put up with one more incredibly riveting rocky experience I’m gonna throw up.”
We girded up our loins and split for Alice Springs.
CHAPTER FIVE
Before leaving Adelaide we paid a visit to the Gaganis Brothers warehouse. Gaganis Bros is a Greek Australian company that imports food from all over Europe and there we stocked up on copious quantities of canned, bottled and dried goodies we knew we wouldn’t be seeing for a long time. Gaganis supply restaurants and retail shops all over Australia but at their warehouse you can buy all the things they sell very cheaply without having to buy in multiples. There you can get a tin of Croatian pork liver pate for a dollar and at the other end of the scale, a wine press for twelve hundred dollars. You can also pick up the odd cockroach if you’re not careful.
We emerged from that superb Greek wholesalers with a couple of supermarket trolleys piled high with Hungarian fruit juices, Polish, Turkish and Iranian jams, Greek vacuum packed smoked mackerel and canned calamari, Italian and German cheeses, Greek peas and string beans baked in oil. Stuffed vine leaves from Croatia, Turkish stuffed eggplants and flame roasted red peppers, Lithuanian canned smoked sprats and a whole lot more. All this we dextrously stuffed into crevices in Erasmus along with Turkish and Lebanese dried apricots and dates. We were looking forward to dining in the desert. Gaganis is interesting from the point of view of the customers you get to see in there. We saw an old lady with a concentration camp tattoo. I know that’s what it was because I’d previously seen a few of them when I lived in Poland and I knew somebody who had two of them. There were lots of old Greek women dressed in their black mourning colours and at least thirty elderly Slavs of different nationalities. Two of the short broad shouldered Slavic men in, I guess, their early seventies who were shopping with their wives had fingers missing, which I thought strange. A disproportionate number of these men had obviously made the wrong choice of pets too as they had scars on their faces and bits out of their ears.
But, for the moment, back to the cockroaches. We found one in Erasmus a couple of weeks later up near Alice Springs and I reckon it came from Gaganis Bros warehouse. Clare didn’t agree. She said it was a local cockroach that had just sneaked in at a truck stop. Either way, its life was taken from it by a size nine Nike in a brutal and untimely fashion and its now probably building brain cells in a magpie or something. That’s what I like about Buddhism. There’s no God and what goes around comes around. There’s this sort of universal pool of soul where all living things die, break down and go back to. Then they get recycled so bits of the Gaganis Brothers cockroach could now be a part of John Howard’s scrotum. Well, that’s a bit far fetched really. John Howard hasn’t got any balls and he was already around when I killed the cockroach but that’s roughly how Buddhism works. I’m not a Buddhist though, I’m irreligious.
But the cockroach got me thinking about existentialism. What the fuck is it? Anyway, if this cockroach was really from Adelaide and we took it all the way to Alice Springs, what about flies. Flies travel with us for hundreds of kilometres every day. They drive us nuts. They appear on the windscreen and we keep on swatting at them and they lay low for a bit and then come back and annoy us all over again. When we stop for lunch I usually open the doors and shoo them out but sometimes there are more flies outside waiting to get in. Well, I got to thinking about how an Adelaide fly would get on in, say, Broken Hill if we transported it there. It would be too far to fly home wouldn’t it? And, anyway, it probably wouldn’t know the way.
How would our fly get on with other local flies? What if it landed on a piece of kangaroo shit and a load of other flies came along and shouted “FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF” Like that?
“Sorry, my names Buzz, as in Aldrin. I’m from Adelaide”
“Yeah, well you ain’t getting none of our kangaroo shit ‘cause you ain’t a member of the Great Fly Barrier Industrial Council marsupial shit infection work collective”
“Oh really, might I be allowed to join the Great Fly Barrier…., thingy?”
“No, it’s a closed shop. You gotta be hatched here to join. Fuck off”
“Bzzzzzzz”
“Well done brother, that told the smarmy little prick.”
“OK lads, back to work. We’re on wallaby this afternoon, that means time and a half”
We left Adelaide on a bright, sunny, mid May morning. But hang on – wait for a minute. Sorry, I could be wrong. Clare says it was raining and unbright. Overcast, that’s the word. I’ll have to learn to keep better notes.
We left Adelaide on a - what the hell; you don’t want to know what the weather was like do you? No. We went north through the Clare Valley all autumnal grape vines and European colours. On we went like a rat up a drainpipe and out the other side into a large flat area of expansive fields of boring old stubble. It went on for far too long but there was nothing we could do about it. And then it went on for a whole lot more. About four or five hours later the bloody stuff was still there as if somebody had painted a mural of it on the windscreen. It was all the same.
We went through many an unmemorable town until we came to one we liked. It was called Melrose but by then it was growing dim. We looked for somewhere to park for the night and found the football oval. There was a sign saying camping was permitted which was unusual; we don’t usually park in places where we’re permitted. There were toilets too and water to fill our tanks with. A football game was in full swing. Well, it might have been in half swing for all I know about football. It’s a male sexual thing, a fertility right, the football, isn’t it? I watched a part of a Grand Final a few years ago and all these men broke through this sort of symbolic hymen with the names of the teams written on it. It all took place on an egg shaped patch of grass and like a horde of flagella they proceeded to kick this egg shaped ball into a symbolic womb.
We cruised around the Melrose football oval looking for the most level place to park and then saw a ridge which we just had enough ground clearance to struggle over. We found ourselves on a flat plateau overlooking the football oval right at the foot of a big, tree covered conical thing called Mt. Remarkable. When I awoke in the morning I looked out of the window at Mt. Remarkable. It had a touch of the mist in it as if God had found magnetic candy floss lurking around in the trees there and he was up there with a bloody great magnet pulling the stuff up to heaven. A truly celestial sight it was and I could just imagine an ark being stuck up there somewhere.
I climbed down from the bed and put the kettle on and opened the curtains. As I did so a huge flock of galahs rose from the ground screeching and wheeling away from me in a great pink flapping cloud. I thought I’d scared them with the noise of the curtain track being pulled. Then I heard a voice. It said “Oh shit, not again. When are they goin’ to put a friggin’ fence up.” I peeked out from behind the curtains on the other side of the van. It was then that I realised we were between the sixth and seventh tees of the Melrose golf course. We had a fit of the giggles and didn’t open up Erasmus until the golfers had gone.
After breakfast we went down into the little township. It was neat and tidy and we liked it a lot. Being at the foot of Mount remarkable gives the place a setting that money can’t buy any of the other towns that compete for the tourist dollar along that stretch of road. And if they ever do find an ark up there it will do wonders for the price of real estate.
Now there’s a funny thing, that Noah and the ark. I don’t believe it. In the Adelaide Museum I saw a colossal skeleton of a dinosaur and the description said that even that huge thing wasn’t the biggest type of dinosaur that ever existed. Now, I don’t doubt at all that dinosaurs existed and anyone who doesn’t must be a thicko because there are so many dinosaur skeletons standing around in museums all over the world. This Noah and his missus and the in-laws were supposed to have put a mating pair of everything inside their boat. I don’t know how many days sailing Noah provisioned for but if he’d only stocked it for a week’s supply for the dinosaurs alone there would have to have been a hell of a load of forage. Then there’s the question of poo. There were only four, or was it six of them of them on the boat? Can you imagine how much poo a stegosaurus puts out at a time? One wet fart from a Tyrannosaurus Rex would have filled the scuppers before they could have shovelled it away.
From Melrose we carried on north through more monotonous countryside and a smattering of small towns not worthy of mention. It was dry, parched country with only the odd olive grove to relieve the boredom save for a couple of dry creek beds where fresh looking eucalyptus trees grew. One small town called Wilminton, had an IGA supermarket into which we ventured briefly and wished we hadn’t. The fresh produce counter had only two soup packs of three or four cling wrapped vegetables and there was a solitary parsnip. I picked up the parsnip. It no longer had the strength to stand upright and I sensed that I wasn’t the first customer to have tested it. The next time I saw parsnips was at Ayers Rock. They were fresh and individually wrapped and for sale at $2.45 each.
We were heading for the Flinders ranges and Wilpena Pound. We next alighted from Erasmus in a small town not far from Wilpena called Quorn. The reason we’d stopped is that Clare wanted to see if she could get a prescription order from the chemist. The chemist didn’t have a pharmacist but rang through the order to a chemist in Port Augusta and said that the items would be delivered in two working days. Considering the remoteness of the place I thought the service excellent. We wandered around Quorn to stretch our legs and went into a café where the walls were decorated with movie posters from days gone by. I didn’t take much notice of them until Clare pointed out that all these movies had been made in and around Quorn. They were all Wild West movies and that gave us an idea of the kind of country we would be going into.
There’s a national parks resort at Wilpena with a couple of rather ordinary restaurants, a shop with and gas station and that’s about all apart from the resort’s caravan park. Signs at various intervals along the road had told us that we weren’t allowed to camp anywhere but in the resort caravan park and we were determined not to so we drove around looking for places to stop where the ranger wouldn’t be able to spot us. We found a good place behind a Telstra transformer/relay station in among trees and parked up behind it just on dusk.
We walked into Wilpena pound the next morning and after a coupe of hours trekking Clare realised it was my birthday. That afternoon I sent postcard to my kids telling them that I’d spent my sixtieth birthday in the pound. Wilpena Pound is something special. It’s a massive ring of mountain walls with a big conical hollow inside where the walls slope down to a treed plain of some five kilometres by eleven. It looks like a meteorite crater but was, in fact, formed by a geological process I can neither spell, pronounce or remember. Back around the late 1800s a man found it and realised that there was only one way in or out of it. He fenced off the opening and grazed cattle in it. I can’t imagine a bigger or more secure cattle coral in the world.
We climbed up to the rim of it and saw the sheer immensity of the place. It looks totally impregnable and the walls undulate like the decorative icing around a wedding cake. I suppose the earth, given sufficient millennia, is malleable and geological forces had folded it up like the icing that’s squeezed from one of those cake icing piping bags. Each fold had a little point on it too where that big cake decorator in the sky had put the final glob of icing on. There, that was better that a whole load of geological descriptive crap wasn’t it?
The following day, as a birthday present, Clare booked a half hour plane ride over the place and I was extremely taken with it. The pilot took us all the way around it and to have seen all the peaks at shoulder height is an experience I’ll never forget. What really stood out was that there was absolutely nothing around it as far as we could see from our lofty perch. My insignificance hardly counted for anything.
Back on the ground, we met up with a couple of large feral goat herds. All the members of the herd looked far too healthy for words. They obviously thrive on destroying the local ecology. At one small, muddy pool we saw a confrontation between two goats and a large kangaroo. The kangaroo was already drinking when the two goats rocked up. The kangaroo stood its ground until one of the goats stood up threateningly on its hind legs. That was enough for Skippy, he withdrew. We could see that what had been a pristine watering hole was trampled into a muddy mess by hundreds of goat’s hooves.
We saw or first wild emus at Wilpena and got quite excited taking a swag of out of focus photographs. As emus run away from you the great bustle of feathers on their rear ends rolls from side to side. They looked like early Victorian ladies in crinoline dresses doing the hundred metres in stiletto heels. By the third day at Wilpena we’d seen so many emus that we no longer took any notice of them - we’d become emunised. One day as we returned to the Wilpena resort car park we saw a new Subaru with the personalised number plate “OLD BOY.” I can’t stand personalised number plates and I often wonder why people have to make those silly statements about themselves. Mind you, we did see a car in Adelaide with the number plates SHAGU 2 which I thought showed originality. But there in the Wilpena resort car park I just couldn’t help myself. I grabbed an envelope and wrote FART on it with a black marker. Then I stuck it to the guy’s number plate so it read OLD FART and Clare took before and after photographs of it. It just made me feel good.
Another first for both of us was seeing Aboriginal rock paintings. We saw three within twenty minutes driving distance of Wilpena. Two of them at Yourumbulla were located in rock overhangs in stony country almost identical to the terrain of the Aegean coast of Turkey. Both Clare and I have visited that area independently and were both struck with the similarities. We understood nothing about the symbolism of the rock paintings; it was just a good thing to have experienced.
I managed to find a telephone line to connect my laptop to in Wilpena and I found that Neil had been getting quite a few emails from budgerigar owners and our customers looking for advice. One lady in Wisconsin wrote that her budgie was picking feathers out of his rump and that it was looking inflamed. She said that she’d put the budgie’s rear end in luke warm water and some sort of moisturising oil hoping it would cure the problem. However, it created another problem which was that the budgie now had this moisturising oil all over its bum and she wanted to know how to get rid of it. I replied to Neil saying “with a blowlamp” and Neil, being a bit stressed out and tired at the time, made the mistake of sending my reply direct to the customer. At Wilpena I downloaded the email she’d sent us.
“You horrible horrible people. It’s obvious that you don’t really care about our little feathered friends at all. You are nothing better than monsters. I will write to the all budgie clubs and tell them what you’ve done and ask them to boycott your company. I sensed from the start that you didn’t really care.
Sigrid Milington
P.S. My husband says FUCK YOU.
After leaving the Finders ranges we stocked up on food at Port Augusta and after stealing water from a public toilet we slept the night there in the Naval Cadets Club car park and headed off again the next morning still going north. Having made mention of stealing water I suppose I should say a little about the different methods we sometimes used to obtain it. As we didn’t use caravan parks we had to carry a fair amount of water with us for showering and washing up and in some places it wasn’t available. We bought two long hoses, which we could join together if need be along with every type and size of hose fitting available in Australia. Thus equipped we could get water from just about anywhere. It’s easy enough connecting to taps at the back of factories or supermarkets and they don’t mind people taking water but there are some organisations that guard their water. Some, such as sports ovals, bowling clubs and schools have taps with no handles. After striking this situation a couple of times I went into a plumbing shop and asked the guy behind the counter how they opened them. ”With one of these” he said and slapped a tap handle on the counter. “Right” says I. “I’ll have one.” “Or it could be one of these.” He said, slapping a different one on the counter. “How many different types are there?” Says I. “Four” says he. “Right.” Says I. “I’ll have one of each.” “That’ll be eleven bucks even” Says he.
The eleven dollars worth of tap handles was worth its weight in showers and cups of tea a thousand times over but sometimes we came across public toilets with no outside taps. For this we bought flexible rubber universal squeezable uppable things from a hardware store that went around any tap spout, even the rectangular ones. The public toilet taps were often on springs to stop people running too much water at a time but they were easily held open with a stick between the tap and the wall. Another problem sometimes encountered was that of dirty water at roadside stops in arid areas after rain. It runs into the tanks from the gutters of those shade house carport things they erect so that people can get out of the sun when they’re having hot cups of tea. However, the sediment always hangs around at the bottom of the tank near the tap while the water at the top of the tank is clear. When faced with this we drove Erasmus right up to the tank and stood on the bumper from where we could get the hose in the top and siphon the clear water out. You, the reader, will probably never need to know about any of this but I need something to fill this book out so I thought I’d tell you about it.
Absolutely nothing happened the day we left Port Augusta and besides stopping and starting for coffee and lunch the country was so flat I only changed gear twice. At about five in the afternoon. Is five pm afternoon or evening? At about 1700 hours we stopped for the night in a big roadside car park at a place called Hart Lake. It was a salt lake with a couple of centimetres of water in it and the remains of a disused railway track running out to the middle that was once used by salt getters. There was a pair of railway wheels on an axle out in the shallow water that had the setting sun projecting its golden glow upon. The reflection of the wheels in the still water was stunning and I wanted a photograph of them. The sun was going down fast and we grabbed the camera and ran out there as quickly as we could. We got in about ten shots while the light was good and then slowly strolled back to the shore past a large sign which we hadn’t read. A couple on the banks were shouting and hollering at us and Clare could just make out something about “read the sign.”
We turned around and read it. It was a warning by the Department of Defence and read: DANGER. DO NOT VENTURE ONTO THE LAKE SURFACE. LAKE IS A LIVE BOMBING AND AMMUNITION TARGET AREA. UNLOCATED LIVE ORDINANCE IN A CONDITION DANGEROUS TO PERSONNEL MAY BE ON OR JUST UNDER THE LAKE SURFACE. AREA ADMINISTRATOR. WOOMERA.
We slept well and in the morning moved back out onto the asphalt for another day exactly the same as the last. How does one describe absolutely bugger all to the reader? A couple of times I swear I could see the actual curvature of the earth. We didn’t see a solitary native animal in live mode and the highlight of the day was when we saw a fox and a number of eagles tearing lumps off of some poor cow’s defunct thinking apparatus. An hour before dusk Coober Pedy hove into view. Not a lot of Coober Pedy, it must be said, actually hoves because about 95% of it is under the ground where little hoving goes on.
We made our way slowly down the main street. It was a mess. We came to a roundabout and parked on the dust to the left of it and clambered down from Erasmus. A score of Aborigines were sitting around taking in the last rays of the setting sun and a variety of other substances from bottles and cans. There was a lot of bickering going on and one woman was being verbally abused by a man who was probably her partner. She was eating a pie and he made as if to hit her. She took a step back and as he came forward she thrust the pie toward his face. He turned away and it went all down the left hand side of his head. “He must be one of these pie-on-ears I keep hearing about” I said to Clare. She wasn’t amused and kept walking looking straight ahead.
Above ground Coober Pedy is, well, um, ………. a shit hole. Of course, when everybody lives under the ground I guess they don’t care too much for what’s above it. We cruised about looking for somewhere to stop for the night and found ourselves in one of the suburbs. Coober Pedy almost certainly has some of the most original looking suburbs in the world. They consist of white limestone roads flanked by bloody great piles of white, limestone tailings. Apart from a smattering of disused mining machinery that’s about all there is! We parked, possibly in someone’s garden, between two piles of the said white limestone tailings and were scared to venture out after dark for a pee in case we fell down a mineshaft. It was one of the quietest nights we’d spent and the reflection of the moon on the tailings was ghostly.
When, in daylight, we gingerly explored our surroundings we found dwellings everywhere. They weren’t underground in the sense that you had to walk or climb down a slope to get to them. They were set in the sides of cut away hillocks with windows, doors and carports all facing the same way. The odd one had a view (of bloody great heaps of white, limestone tailings) but most looked out onto white cliff faces. It seemed all higgledy piggledy but they must all have known where each others burrows were located.
In the town centre and immediate suburbs some people had managed to grow trees where none had existed before as attested to by the surrounding plains which supported only poor, low lying scrub. Coober Pedy’s first tree was on display as a tourist attraction. It was fabricated in (I think) the 1960s from the metal left over from a truck that had been in a road accident.
Much of the film Mad Max Three was made in Coober Pedy but although it was mentioned in most of the guide books there was no reference to it anywhere that we could find in the town. In the car park of an underground opal sales emporium stood a fantastic sort of truck come aircraft that was used in the movie and tourists were taking photographs of it but there was no notice anywhere to say what it was. Above ground Coober Pedy is only an advert for what’s underground and most of that is about opal sales. Some of the shops are very elegant and boast a constant temperature year round. There are also many places billed as opal museums and displays with free admission that are nothing more than opal shops.
There are five or six underground churches in the town and one we visited was the Serbian Orthodox place of worship. As far as we were concerned it was the best place in town. In the stained glass windows various old Christian religious standards were represented but one scene was of a woman lying on a funeral bier with a bunch of halo wearing apostles around her. One guy was kneeling at the bedside with his hands cut off at the wrists. His bloody hands were both lying on the sheets of the woman’s bed. Standing in the foreground was the culprit, a long haired female Roman centurion with a bloody sword and wings.
When we came up out of the church I saw the Serbian Orthodox priest changing the wheel on his 4wD and I asked him what the scene was all about. He said that in their tradition there had been an impious Jew at Mary Magdalene’s death and he’d reached out to push Mary off the bier. The winged
centurioness was actually an angel who popped down from heaven real quick like and saved the day by chopping the poor bugger’s hands off.
When walking around some parts of above ground Coober Pedy you thread your way through a forest of knee high ventilation pipes. Some take the form of forty four gallon drums but most are just six inch diameter pipes with conical hats on top to prevent the rain from entering. Every underground shop or dwelling has to have ventilation pipes but I was surprised that they were so low to the ground. I was almost overcome by a desire to pee down one or bellow in a deep voice “I am the Lord thy God and I want you to take off all your clothes and stand in the window.” Better still would be to paint a picture of Jesus or the Virgin Mary on a circular piece of glass and position it in a ventilator with a light behind it at night and make biblical noises.
Water in this little opal mining town probably comes from underground. I don’t know. There is, however, a waterworks and it was to there that we had to go to fill Erasmus’s tanks. The filling apparatus was attached to the fence outside the waterworks premises and there was a sign telling the waterless that they had to put twenty cents in the slot for thirty litres of the stuff and the water would be available when a green light came on. It also said that campervan owners should attach their own hoses to the waterworks nozzle because the water came out at high pressure and it could burst water tanks. We put twenty cents in the slot and waited but we couldn’t see the green light because the sun was on it. We put another twenty cents in and clicked the nozzle open. It was a nozzle like those found on petrol pumps but, unlike petrol pumps which deliver more the harder you squeeze the trigger, this one was either on or off. We had no way of telling when the green light would have come on if it had been visible but when the water came it delivered the thirty litres in a matter of ten seconds or so and it was a terrifying experience. It so shocked me as it blew back at me from out of Erasmus’s tank that I dropped the nozzle and its flexible pipe on the ground where, in this parched piece of paradise, there was a muddy bog where other people had done the same as me. By the time I regained my composure and washed the mud off the nozzle the invisible green light had gone out and cut off the supply. We put another twenty cents in the slot and this time I waited with the trigger open and the nozzle facing up the road. The jet of water, when it came, reached for more than nine meters which is the length of Erasmus. I’m glad we weren’t just trying to fill the kettle.
When we left Coober Pedy and drove north we could see the extent of the opal mining. It’s no longer guys with picks and shovels doing their own small time thing. It’s a sizeable industry with machinery scattered all over the land as far as the eye can see. Great heaps of white tailings went on for forty kilometres and went back more than a kilometre from the road in some places. It was a disorganised, slapdash looking blot on the landscape and I wondered at a country that has so much land and such a minute population that it allows people to do this without a thought for coming generations who may find a use for it. How can we deserve it if we can’t respect it?
It was in Coober Pedy that I came into the closest contact I had yet had with Aboriginals and I’ve been confused by the thought of them fitting into white society, or otherwise, ever since. I recently completed two years of Aboriginal studies at university and, although I knew that what I did there was all theory I thought I understood more about them than I did. In Coober Pedy I first saw their close affinity with the land in the sense of them wanting to actually sit on it. I was to see this in Alice Springs later where I talked to a group of three middle aged Aborigines (middle age for an Australian Aborigine is ten years younger than that of a white Australian) and they preferred to sit on the earth than on the brand new seats in the park. I think that sitting on the earth is actually part of their attachment to the land.
We embarked on yet another day full of sod all, slowly sneaking inexorably towards Ayres Rock. The highlight of the day was probably crossing the half dozen or so dry creek beds that went under the road. In the creek beds a few good looking trees grow which makes a nice change from the relentless drabness of the scrub. To be fair, the scrub did vary in height from about knee high to something in the order of three metres but I didn’t need a whole day’s worth of it – again. The next day things picked up. The scrub got higher and greener, much greener, due to the rain which fell for most of the day and had been falling for a week before we got there.
But there was something else. Cows. Yes, cows. Not the hollow sounding moohy type cows you see in dairy farmer’s paddocks. No, these were the hollow bodied cows you see at the side of the road after an encounter with a road train. When road trains hit cows they go up in the air and land in all sorts of peculiar attitudes just like you see animals doing in kids cartoons on TV. Sometimes they land with their legs splayed out in four different directions. The last thing that goes through a cows mind before a road rain hits it is often its arse. It’s a most undignified way for a cow to go but no less so than to hear all its buddies in the abattoir being slaughtered as it awaits its own turn. In such a dry climate the cows dry out and are hollow inside. The only native things I’ve seen trying to eat them are the eagles but their beaks are no match for the cows’ hides. Some cows land like the horse in Picasso’s Guernica and I got to thinking about his bulls. Picasso was Spanish by birth and, although he lived in France for most his life, he never could get the bullfight out of his psyche. Bulls crop up again and again in all his periods. I thought that if it was good enough for Picasso to think bulls for extended periods of time it might be good enough for me too and take the boredom out of driving for a while.
I began stopping and taking photographs of them from different angles and wondering how Picasso would have held his digital if it were him. I studied them at night and thought I just might be able to start the next arty photography book craze – empty cows. Yeah…….I’ll call it Holy Cow and go looking for a non vegetarian publisher. Look for it in a book shop near you next year some time.
The next day I went looking for cans of spray paint so that I could sign all these hollow cows with famous artist’s names or write names like daisy or Clarabell on them. Of course it was futile. There were only two roadhouses the next day and neither of them sold spray paint. Still, I wasn’t going to be put off and determined to try in Alice Springs where, I was told, half the population was sniffing cans of the stuff.
I had always imagined that Ayres Rock was just out of Alice Springs by a few kilometres but it’s not. It’s some three hundred kilometres west down the Lasseter Highway and the turn off from the main road is a couple of hundred kilometres before “The Alice.” I was disappointed as it meant a day’s extra tedious driving to get in there and another to get out. Nevertheless, having come this far we couldn’t go past it so we turned left and kept going until we found a roadside stop for the night. For dinner we had kangaroo meat cooked in the pressure cooker for twenty minutes with a little dried rosemary and oregano. It was simply delicious and fell to pieces it was so tender.
I pondered on how unusual it was for any people to be tucking into their national emblems for dinner. Americans don’t eat eagles for dinner do they? Kiwi Kiev doesn’t sound right and try finding a recipe for Unicorn.
A right turn of the Lasseter Highway before Ayres rock brought us to Kings Canyon which we’d never heard of but which the guide books said shouldn’t be missed. We arrived there at about seven thirty in the morning all prepared for a three hour walk preceded by what the Lonely Planet guide book said was a difficult climb up to the canyon rim.
The sight that greeted our eyes was palpably pulchritudinous. Pert pointed pinnacles pugnaciously punched their way through the morning mist that hung in plumes over the primitively pedantic canyon walls.
In the car park a pandemic of puerile pensioners posed for pictures and pointedly poo-poohed the peregrinators pacing the path towards the foot of the hill where the walk began while the punters who partook, purposefully pulled on Paddy Palin ponchos and plodded painfully past the starting post.
Standing resolute, the ramparts of rusty red rocks ran rapturously like raging runnels, receding rapidly into regions unknown. And as far as the eye could see marvellous mesas mellifluously melded magnificent mountains into beautiful buttes. This bloody word processing program gets stuck on words beginning with P sometimes. Anyway, Kings Canyon – shit it was good. Magnificent mountains, gorgeous gorges.
The walk around the rim was stunning and the vertiginous chasms, all in the popular red rock that abounds in those parts, were so deep you could spit and never see where it landed. Isn’t it funny how people like to spit from railway bridges and hotel balconies?
The climb up to the canyon rim was as difficult as the guide books said it would be and most people paused to get their breath back several times during the ascent. The rock wasn’t bouldery or jagged but sort of flakey as though Zeus or the Rainbow Serpent had cast a heap of stone tablets down. Stone tablets, mountains? My mind was off again. I was ahead of Clare as I struggled up over the rim on hands and knees. An elderly couple stood in front of me leaning on sticks. I picked myself up and dusted myself off and looking at the husband said
“Excuse me; you haven’t see God up here have you?”
They stared at me
“You know, he’s a big guy with a beard and long hair”
They didn’t move a muscle
“Only, I have an appointment you see. I’ve got to write out these commandments. Got plenty of stone tablets.”
“No, we haven’t seen……. Anybody unusual.. at all really….have we?” He said looking to her for backup. She nodded and, thinking the action may be misconstrued, shook her head vigorously.
Clare’s head had just emerged over the canyon rim and I yelled to her “I think we’ve got the wrong mountain again” and walked of muttering “I could have sworn this was Sinai.”
We saw the couple three more times as we wandered around up there but each time they made sure to look the other way. In the afternoon we went for another walk but this time on the floor of the canyon following the creek which was flowing with more gusto than its usual trickle owing to the unseasonable rains that had been falling over the previous week or so. The Northern Territory, while we’d been there, had experienced record low temperatures and had had the most rain since 1968. Immediately before the start of our canyon floor walk Clare read one of those notice boards that tells you what kind of shoes to wear and what not to do. Next to it was a blurb about a toad that lives in Central Australia and I read it. When there’s going to be an extended drought this disgusting little sod blows a load of mucus bubbles out of its mouth cocooning itself in a heavy slime and buries itself down deep in the sand. There it goes into a sort of trance-like hibernation where it can stay for years until there’s a big rain. Then it comes up and lays its eggs and another toad fertilises them and the toadpoles hatch and they grow into more little toads and some of them fall prey to snakes and those that don’t, go on to participate in the miracle of life that’s kept these toads doing this for millions of years. On the twenty fourth of May 2005 one of these toads finally emerged above ground to take part in the miracle of life after being buried underground for probably twenty years – and I stood on it! I didn’t mean to. I just stepped back from the notice board and heard it make a small “eek” sound. I looked down and saw it breathing its last under my boot. I didn’t want the people who’d been reading the blurb at the same time as me to see it so I stood there until after they’d gone. Then I took a good look at it and it and positively identified the corpse from the illustrations on the board.
If you’re in a recreational vehicle of any sort in Outback South Australia or the Northern Territory all the other drivers of recreational vehicles wave to you. And there are hundreds of them every day. The further north you get the less enthusiastic the waves but they, or their front passengers, still manage to raise a couple of fingers from the wheel. Sometimes it’s the husbands who do the driving and the wives who do the waving but I just got fed up with doing it. After the first couple of hundred I couldn’t be bothered but you have to keep it up in case you’re on your way out of an attraction like Ayres Rock and you break down after not acknowledging someone who was on their way in. You worry that they may go straight past you without stopping to help you on their way out.
I’ve been working on a clever device for a couple of weeks now that takes all the hard work out of waving and, at the same time, provides entertainment for all the family thus relieving the boredom during long drives. The prototype has four surgical rubber gloves stiffened with varnish in different attitudes. There’s an outthrust palm, a V sign, the finger and a thumbs up sign. These are all aligned along the top of the dashboard and they have 12 volt globes in them. They’re all connected by cable to the cigarette lighter and there’s a four way switch that serves to light up the appropriate hand gesture to suit the occasion. The cable is long enough to be passed to anybody in the car so that all the family can have a go with it.
“Can I give him the finger Dad?”
“No, he’s a road train driver, they’re big blokes son”
“What about this one Dad, shall I give ‘im the wave?”
“No. son, he’s Asian. We give them the finger”
You see, it’s educational as well.
After another mind numbing day’s drive we finally got to Ayres Rock or Uluru as it’s now known. Nothing could have adequately prepared us for it. We walked around the base of it and both agreed that it was one of the best things we’d ever done at home or abroad. Before we walked around it though, we drove around it and quickly saw that ninety percent of all the postcards on sale only show one aspect of it in which it appears as one amorphous blob showing up in different colours.
In actual fact The Rock is a much more interesting lump than these commercial views show it to be. The reason that the popular pictures of it are all taken from one or two aspects is that the sun sets or rises on those two sides of it. The changes of colour are best seen from those angles but Uluru has many different faces and facets that are far more interesting. We didn’t know it had so many large trees at the base of it. These don’t show in commercial photographs because they’re taken at a great distance so as to get the whole of the Rock in the view finder. As we walked around the base of this stupendous red lump it was easy to see why it so impressed the Aborigines that all sorts of creation legends became associated with it. It’s hundreds of kilometres away from anywhere and to get to it they had to walk over country that’s flatter than Kylie Minogue so it absolutely dominates the landscape. The Rainbow Serpent is said by the Aborigines to live in one of the permanent pools at the base of the Rock. I don’t believe it but it makes just as much sense to me as virgin births and blokes feeding five thousand people on five loaves and two small fishes. That reminds me; all of the paintings I’ve seen of the Feeding of the Five Thousand don’t show frying pans or people scraping the scales off fishes. The Japanese eat raw fish but God hadn’t invented the Japanese at that stage. In the paintings of the event you never see a bunch of Jewish chefs at the back slogging away at making Gefilte Fish or anything like that. I reckon four thousand nine hundred and ninety eight of the Jews in the audience would just passed up on the raw fish. “Ta very mooch like but, eh, ahm not really ‘ungry I’ll joost ‘ave a crumb thanks – providin’ it’s kosher like.”
Buses disgorged tourists at an astonishing rate and quite a few of their passengers were climbing up the Rock despite all the notices saying that it was a sacred place and the Aboriginal owners would prefer that they didn’t. I thought it most culturally ignorant to do such a thing. How would they like Aborigines abseiling down the spire of Canterbury Cathedral? I’m an atheist but I wouldn’t dream of climbing up Uluru or abseiling down the spires of cathedrals. The Rock gets back at the tourists though. According to the notice board I read thirty six people have died by either falling from it or having heart attacks whilst attempting to ascend or descend it. It could be they were asphyxiated by Rainbow Serpent breath which, I should imagine, is similar to dragons.
Everything I ever heard or read about the Rock changing colours at the drop of a hat is true. My hat blew off and by the time I’d caught the bloody thing and put it back on my head a cloud had blown away from the sun and it had turned a whiter shade of pale. Well, puce actually. When we first approached it, it looked like an enormous decaying box jellyfish. It had a kind of semi translucent appearance with ill defined dark stripes running down it and a load of black spots where the rot was setting in. Early the next morning though, it looked like a giant red fly agaric toadstool just breaking the ground with the stalk yet to emerge.
When we walked around its base some parts of it looked like a Swiss cheese made from Red Leicester. It’s impossible to take a photograph of Uluru that can be considered typical.
For those of you who wish to re-create an Uluru in the privacy of your own kitchens for photographic purposes – here’s what you do.
1. Take half a kilo of Red Leicester and with warm wet hands smooth it into a mushroom shape.
2. Take a pencil and poke six or seven holes in it with the blunt end.
3. Take a hair brush and give it about four downward strokes from top to bottom.
4. With the back of a carving knife make a couple of downward slashes and paint them with strawberry jam.
5. Take two Malteesers, cut them in half and press them randomly, round end first, into the Red Leicester.
6. Mount on a piece of yellowy brown Masonite (rough side up) sparingly sprinkled with dry lawn clippings and with a macro lens click away.
Filters are the best way to create the changes in colour but if you can’t afford them hang different coloured pieces of cellophane around the kitchen light globe.
One thing struck me about all the geological information on display in large illustrations on notice boards about how Uluru, the Olgas, Kings Canyon etc. were formed. I wondered how it affected what the Aboriginals believed about their creation stories, legends and myths. Their religious beliefs are largely based in the land and its features and how things like Uluru were created. I wondered how their beliefs are standing up to all this scientific, factual information right there in their faces on their own land. Of course, Christians, Muslims and Jews, for example, can choose whether to believe all that stuff about the world being created by God in six days or decide that it’s bunk and believe in evolution. But what of the Aborigines? All this scientific and geological knowledge evolved slowly in the old world but here it has been suddenly thrust upon the Aborigines whose religion and culture are so interwoven that they can’t be separated. Thus, an attack on their religion represents a tandem attack on their culture. Uluru and all the other public attractions in the landscape of the Northern Territory, display information on notice boards blatantly contradicting what the Aboriginal inhabitants have believed for millennia. I wonder what this information does to the social fabric of Aboriginal society when a kid tells his elders that what they believe is a load of crap.
The first night we spent at Uluru we set up at the roadside in a little industrial suburb where the concrete is mixed and the busses repaired. It wasn’t much of a place to be for any length of time but it served our purposes which were to sleep and have breakfast before going out to the Olgas the following day. At one thirty in the morning a security guard came and told us to either go to the Caravan Park or head out of town by a minimum of ten kilometres. I said that he was welcome to fine me but he said that either he would escort me to the caravan park or I would be charged with trespassing first thing in the morning. The whole area of Uluru, he said, was private property owned by the Aboriginals but managed by a company and they were very particular about not having campers and caravanners littering the place. We drove twenty five kilometres out of town before we came to the first roadside stop where we could pull in for the night and we went back there for the next three nights. Under normal circumstances there are thousands of hectares of available camping space at the roadsides but we were visiting the area at a time when high rainfall records were being broken right across the Territory and the edges of the roads were too soft to cross.
One welcome thing about visiting Uluru was being able to catch up on a little civilisation for a brief period. The resort had a decent supermarket, newsagency, post office, bank and all those things that we didn’t know we’d been missing. I’d been missing cappuccinos and seeing younger people.
The Olgas are some fifty kilometres from Uluru on a sealed road and, like Uluru, they dominate their surroundings. As you approach them they seem to stay distant for a long time and then suddenly swell up in front of you in the middle of the road. They’re equally as impressive as the Rock, perhaps more so. They’re unquestionably more interesting in shape and a lot lumpier. There’s a big difference in their make up however. The Rock is a homogeneous thing made from the one substance whereas the Olgas are conglomerate. No, I don’t know what homogeneous means either I was just trying to impress. The Olgas are big and smooth looking but when you get close to them you can see that they’re composed of a load of big stones held together with a red mud that has hardened into rock by a process I don’t understand and, if I could, I’m sure wouldn’t be able to annunciate.
We’d come to the Olgy Poos for the three hour walk which seems to be something of a standard time for advertised walks in the Northern Territory. In the car park a remuda of rambunctious, red necked Rambos rabidly readied themselves for the three hour walk. Oh shit! This word processor’s stuck on Rs now. Maybe the Olgas present a better all round experience than the Rock. They’re different and we were unable to choose between them. The walk around the Rock was flat but with the Olgas walk you get to walk between them, through great chasms of rounded rock and across little streams. Once inside the visitor comes across flowering shrubs and plants in the valleys growing in their own little micro climates. What most impresses one is, again, the sheer immensity of these huge rounded red snot bubbles oozing up from the flatness of the plains. We took over eighty digital photographs on our Olga walk.
For those not fortunate enough to be able to experience the real feel of the Olgas any time soon but still wanting to partake of the same photographic experience we had; here’s what to do:
1. Take five kilos of sweet potatoes and cook with the skins on.
2. Randomly rub away about five percent of the skin and arrange them like a bunch of dahlia tubers on your kitchen table.
3. Finely chop two leaves of red lettuce and poke it into the clefts between the sweet potatoes.
4. Take seven or eight sprigs of fresh dill about a centimetre in length and jam them also into the clefts in the sweet potato tubers.
5. Mount on a piece of yellowy brown Masonite (rough side up) sparingly sprinkled with dry lawn clippings. Use ¼ second at f8 with a paper tissue over the flash to diffuse the light.
For the time being I’d had enough of rocks. It may well have been a geologist’s paradise but there’s a limit to how many phenomenal rock formations I can take in, in any one week. I said to Clare “if I have to put up with one more incredibly riveting rocky experience I’m gonna throw up.”
We girded up our loins and split for Alice Springs.
