JOURNEYS ACROSS THE DIVIDE

“If you never never go you’ll never never know”,

From the plane the rock is much more upstanding than I expected, but I am learning that this is a land of orogeny, of sudden geological upheavals and hiatus. And so the rock is like a gigantic pebble, turned through ninety degrees on its side and pushed down into a flat monotony of mallee, mulga and spinifex stretching to immense horizons. From the ground the rock has a scaly orange surface. It is really a huge lump of rusty sandstone and ironstone and its porous surface is flaked into huge scabs by winter’s frosts. Its groined and fluted shape is pock-marked like a huge Gruyere cheese and every year half a million people come to see this cheese. Some, insensitive to the wishes of the local aboriginal peoples, invade and photograph its sacred sites and then climb it. Some who climb it forget that its gradient increases parabolically as you go down and if your hat blows off you should not chase it. For Charlie Walkabout it is a mystery why white people climb this rock – no water, no shade tree, no wallaby, no nothing up there. Charlie shows us how to make spears, how to accelerate them with another stick called a woomera, how to ignite dried rabbit dung with two sticks (but eventually, when this didn’t work, with a cigarette lighter), and then how to melt wattle leaves into an ancient form of superglue. Though his majestic craggy face would make a good photo he would rather we didn’t, but “that little rock over there don’t mind his photo taken”. That little rock is currently being climbed by a coach load of Japanese tourists chanting, clicking cameras, and chasing hats.

The owner of the Turkish restaurant on Hartley Street comes from Side so we mumble something like allahasmaladek and talk about the Roman amphitheatre and Greek temple we visited there with Ann and Mary. Notwithstanding Neville Shute’s novel, there can be no town like Alice. The Alice is now a huge transit centre for various kinds of cattle, some travelling steerage in road trains, some in air-conditioned Kings coaches, wearing dark glasses and recently-purchased akubra hats. The Alice operates a unique classroom, the School of the Air, with a classroom the size of central Europe. The Alice is at the centre of a line 36,000 telegraph posts which some of my predecessors in the Postmaster General’s Department once erected across an entire continent. And the Alice holds the only regatta in the world on a perfectly dry creek bed. This event, which was in full flood, so to speak, when we arrived, is far from dry in other respects as indicated by “boat” names such as ‘Pistol Dawn’ and ‘Pistol 2’. Our hotel is on Hartley street and we converse with the receptionist:  Q: Where is the church? A: corner of Hartley. Q: but which corner? A: corner of HARTLEY! (repeat, repeat, fade, exit – evidently Pistol Dawn).

The Sahara Outback four-wheel-drive collects us at 6 a.m. Our driver, guide, medico, safety officer, librarian, chef and shepherd is called Tom, and his flock comes from America, England, France, Switzerland, and Holland as well as from Australia. Clayton, from New York, turns out to be in the same tutorial in UNSW as Kate. Our day one itinerary starts with a revisit to Uluru (Ayers Rock) and then the 36 domes of Kata Tjuta (the Olgas). These are taller than Uluru and, after an hour of sweat and flies, struggling up between two huge domes to the valley of the Winds, even more impressive. Day two and back along the Lasseter Highway then North to our camp at Kings Creek Station where we see a shiny red helicopter. Joan and I try to remember where we left our wills as we strap into the frail thorax of this buzzing insect just in time before it claws its way through trees and over herds of wild camels and brumbies in unexplored valleys. Occasional choppers are the only foreign objects they have ever seen, says the pilot. No longer true thinks I, as I watch my camera case, snatched by the hurricane (there are no sides on this drafty contraption), float down onto a bemused camel. Each afternoon we stop and strap a pile of branches and tree trunks onto the trailer roof for the campfire later. Aleck, a part time fire fighter from Essex who loves fires, has been put in charge of the camp fires. Tonight Tom serves up a choice from four camp ovens which have been nestling in the red embers. Day three and wake-up is at 5 a.m., tent inspection at 5:30 and we are off by 6.

Cardiac Hill. At Kings Canyon Tom mentally calculates our average age and chooses a savagely steep ascent path. Actually, the other one is steeper and therefore named Cardiac Hill. As we climb, the mallee, mulga and desert oaks now give way to the beautiful ghost gums of Namatjira’s watercolours, and occasional cycads, an intermediate between fern and palm that predate the dinosaurs. Namatjira made so much money from his paintings that they made him a citizen, the first aboriginal citizen, so they could tax him. But, being aboriginal, he had already distributed most of his earnings to tribe and friends, leaving him with a tax liability. We have been driving all day through the bottom of what was once a huge inland sea. Fossilised shells and fish had sent the early explorers in search of this sea, but when they arrived they were 100 million years too late. After splitting off from Antarctica, Australia sailed North on its tectonic plate to the equator, acquiring a vast tropical sea before turning south again. Today the remains of that sea is a salt lake in the Amadeus basin where the mallee gums have to drop roots down 50 metres to find what is left of its water.

Now past Gosse Bluff, up North to the Western MacDonnell ranges to our camp at Ormiston gorge and a multi-national sing-song round the camp fire. Somewhere, in this arid desert and “dry” aboriginal settlements, Tom has somehow managed to purchase two slabs (48 cans) of cold beer and I have been appointed tally clerk and debt collector, a busy task. Day four and the library, a large box of travel literature next to the driver, is being well used and we follow the MacDonnells eastwards, for a swim in deep, icy water at Ellery Creek Big Hole, a clamber through Standley Chasm, and a bush tucker walk at the aboriginal settlement at Wallace Rock Hole.

Toyota songlines. Day five and our FWD has been lurching and rolling, like a Chinese junk in a typhoon, along the oldest riverbed in the world. This, the Finke river, no doubt marks the track of one of the myriad of aboriginal song-lines that form a memorised atlas passed down from the “Creation Time”. Soon even the FWD can’t take it and we walk along a red river bed through red cliffs to a grove of red cabbage palms, 25 metres high and unique to this valley. Oliver, a graduate of Oxford but living in Cambridge, is doing some sketching under a shady palm. Then, with half of us pushing and half of us hunched over the axles, the Toyota eventually regains Larapinta Highway and the Alice, and we enjoy hot showers at the hotel. In the Calcutta museum, the last museum I went into, the spares and service section was located, incongruously, in the dinosaur room. Today, in the museum of Central Australia, the dinosaur section, equally incongruously, contains an account of a rocket which took Greg Shoemaker’s ashes into space. Nick and Sally Dyer met Greg in the middle of the Tanami desert while he was hunting for asteroid craters, and shortly after his death the Shoemaker-Levi comet was named after him. Caroline, his wife and fellow astronomer, made good use of Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet) to justify his “burial” in space:

“And when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars. And he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun”

The plane is odd, almost home-made, with drooping wings nearly scraping the tarmac as it hits and blunders along the runway. We had helped two old ladies in the check-in line at Alice airport and in return they had given us Qantas Club visitors cards. Since we couldn’t remember our benefactor’s name, and were being eyed suspiciously by two uniformed amazons, we hid round the corner with the cheese, biscuits and coffee machine until it was time to sneak out. So, this is Broome where we meet Ann and Mary, and I have a momentary apprehension as I remember the intensive shopping expeditions that masqueraded as tourism the last time we four drove together, through Turkey. But Joan has already bought me an akubra and Ann and Mary buy me a beer can cooler to go with it so my defences are down at the start. Broome collects pearls and characters from the sea. “Salty Dog” ran a night club at 19, joined the lugger fleet as a diver and now runs the colourful Sam Male pearling lugger museum.

Freight containers and road trains. After the comfort of our apartment and the luxury of drinks at the Intercontinental Hotel watching the sunset over the Indian ocean, our accommodation at Pardoo Station is basic. I suppose you could call it a lightly furnished freight container, and you would be right. Then we go along the coast to Port Hedland where we shake off the red iron ore dust which covers the town by catching a little boat almost to the horizon to watch some whales. That night we watch the “stairway to the moon”. Sand banks here stretch a mile out to sea and, at full moon and very low tides, the shining stairs of reflected light seem to reach the moon. Next day we turn south towards the Karijini national park where we are meeting John and Kathy. At the Auski roadhouse I photograph a massive road train with three trailers being admired by an incredulous lorry driver from England. Then, having started nearly 1000 kms apart that morning, as we stop at the park entrance to pay, John and Kathy drive right up behind us.

From our campsite at Dingo Loop we set out each day, clambering up and down colourful cliffs of ironstone and silica. These bands of blue, black, red and occasional ochre, laid down in ancient seas, then compressed into tough, smooth rock, now tower above terraced creek beds which nature has apparently machined into perfect rectangular slabs. Waterfalls have cut deep swimming holes for the benefit of hot hikers, and campers who otherwise need to bring in their own water for cooking and drinking in this stark and arid landscape. After three energetic days we box up, roll, fold and pack like jig-saws our life support systems, and rubbish (there are no bins here) into the backs of cars until the next camp, at North West Cape.

Much of Exmouth was blown flat by cyclone Vance two years ago and it seems to be still blowing. Across on the windward side of North West Cape is the Ningaloo Marine Park, where we will camp on a beach and snorkel at Turquoise Bay and Coral Bay. At Pilgramanna beach the early sun has turned the tip of our tent a golden red so I crawl out, walk through the scrub to the dunny and then on over the sand dunes, watched suspiciously by two wallabies and three crested pigeons. In the distance are some emus sauntering along like ageing ballerinas. From the top of the steep ridge I slalom barefoot down to the beach, sand squelching between the toes, and walk up to a dazzling white sand spit. Comparisons float up in the mind. The wavelets in Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” are too regular and perfect and sharp-edged to be true, yet here are those same little waves dancing and chortling onto the sand while further out a shoal of fish leap in perfect formation, like the flying fish I last saw as a boy. And I compare the view from five feet up, of tidal drainage groining the silica and iron and patterning the weed and rocks, which looks very much like the view from 30,000 feet up, of the arid centre near Lake Eyre. Up there, I remember swirling patterns of salt and red silt, fiery tongues of flame on yellow mud, with networks of olive-green creeks throwing off crescents of stagnant water, frozen in time as billabongs.

Beyond the reef is the Indian ocean and whales. Within the reef is perfectly transparent water as we float above staghorns, fans, green waving forests and fish of every shape and colour. We “drift snorkel” with the current, remembering to turn right to the beach before the current turns left and out through the reef. The gentle zephyrs from Africa have now swung into strong southerlies and we dry off in a twenty knot wind. It is Mary’s birthday and we have a special dinner with French champagne on the beach under the stars. But by bedtime we have tied the guy ropes to posts and large rocks and yet still feel the tent floor lifting in the night. I have heard of the roaring forties, but this is supposed to be latitude 25 and warm westerlies. So, next morning we strike camp and John somehow fits into the back of their wagon all the culinary infrastructure, and even a fridge, things which have made our camping so enjoyable.

We drive all day across a flat arid landscape dotted with millions of ant-hills. At two metres high one wonders at the demography and sociology going on in there, and at the technology transfers across what, to an ant, are vast distances between these spires of architectural identity. Somewhere, over to the East at this point, across the endless scrub and sand, must be the Canning stock route where Nick and Sally Dyer dug their Toyota out from between the rail tracks just in time before the arrival of the Indian Ocean express. After two tent-flapping nights back at Ningaloo reef, we sleep well at Carnarvon and then on down to Denham and Shark Bay. We didn’t see the sea grasses or the dugongs there, but we did see the dolphins swimming in and out of knee-deep tourists at Monkey Mia, At Shell Beach we stood on a 4000 year old accumulation of small shells, 110 kms long and five metres deep, so compressed they can be sawn into building blocks, and we did see the stromatalites. These oxygen generators paved the way for other forms of life 3.5 billion years ago and their design hasn’t changed in that time. The present ones, growing in the salt shallows at one centimetre per thousand years, must be 20,000 years old. Some, in less supersaturated shallows, have had to quit generating and a sign on the protective walkway pleads “may we erode in peace”. We have two nights in Kalbarri, and prepare to relax. But John has other plans for us, and we head for a gruelling commando training exercise round a tortuous loop in the Murchison river, disguised as a pleasant bush walk by the tourist office.

The Batavia Coast saw heavy European traffic, and many shipwrecks, long before Cook poked his way up the East Coast. For example, a Portuguese map is dated 1602, Dirk Hartog landed here in 1616 and Dampier did a bit of pirating around 1699. The Dutch Batavia, named after what we now know as Jakarta and actually headed there, ran aground on the Abrolhos islands (Portuguese?) here in 1629. Some survivors rebuilt a lifeboat and somehow sailed it as far as Jakarta in search of rescue. From Kalbarri John’s and Kathy’s itinerary diverges, while we head for Geraldton. We skirt the edge of what looks like a giant chemical spill from a cosmetics factory. Hutt lagoon owes its astonishingly bright pink water to naturally-occurring beta-carotene. From Geraldton to Cervantes we stop at Greenough historic hamlet, a museum of settlers cottages drowsing in harmony with a peaceful, rolling landscape. Cervantes is named, not after a Spanish galleon, but an American whaler wrecked off shore. From Cervantes to Toodyay where we overnight in a cottage made of straw bales. On the veranda we breakfast as usual on fruit and toast while the birds in the casuarinas along the river Avon kick up a racket – maybe they are clamorous reed warblers, or chiming wedgebills, or just chattering chats. Yesterday we had stopped at New Norcia, a 19^th century Spanish Benedictine missionary settlement, massive baroque churches and monasteries, and even a large boarding school, all erupting incongruously out of a landscape of eucalypts. On our journeys, each caravan or cabin we stay in has different combinations and qualities of rooms, single, double and bunk beds, usually with a choice of a 15 watt globe in the ceiling or a searchlight at pillow level, all making for an undignified scramble as we unlock the door and stake our claims.

From Toodyay, stopping at Houghton and Sandalford vineyards to taste the wines, though not enough to see any apparitions. One ghost had been reported at Bullsbrook a while back and we call in at the newsagent. “There are some pretty strange people in this little town” he says, “But I ain’t never seen any apparition.”   Maybe it had simply materialised into one of the locals. We lunch, as usual on bread, fruit and the lovely tomatoes that grow down this coast, perched on the top of Kings Park, with views over the Swan river, explaining why people like to live in Perth. Four years ago we kept bumping into Ted and Philippa  in Folegandros, Santorini and Norwich, and we have kept in touch since. They have kindly found beds for the four of us, and next morning Ted drives Mary to the airport and Philippa drives Ann, Joan and me to the ferry for Rottnest Island. Western Australia is a very rich state and (some) Westralians spend their wealth on Swan river real estate overlooking their yachts and cruisers, one boat for every three Perth families. On Rottnest the Bayseeker Bus shuttles us round the island where we snorkel among shoals of large and friendly fish. Lunch is the fruit loaf we bought in the museum at new Norcia which, appropriately, is now past its due date. On the return voyage we race a large shoal of dolphins round a bend in the Swan River. In England successful crooks who are fortunate enough to reach retirement age often have their crimes rewarded in knighthoods by some real estate profiteers called the Windsors. In Perth, Alan Bond’s real estate swindles elevated him to the status of a national hero, though he did spend some of his retirement in jail. Philippa has checked the ferry times and, just in case, drives past on her way home from work just as we step off the ferry. Ted has organised a BBQ on their large Italianate terrace which overlooks his riotous garden of vegies, fruit, grapes and chickens. Having learned to read documents upside down way back in the world of academic politics, I note a paper on the uses of medieval artillery in fourteenth century Norwich sitting on Philippa’s desk. Philippa is an associate professor in history and, as we found in Santorini, can answer questions on the whole of human history and much else. However, her specialisation, at the University of Western Australia, is social relationships in medieval Norfolk.

It is pretty obvious that we had already forgotten Ted’s explicit street directions when, instead of cruising in  Ann’s air-conditioned comfort onto the expressway out of Perth, we find ourselves in a dead end street facing a large sign which says “NO WORM DIGGING”. We don’t dig the sign or the worms and eventually head south. At Margaret River our path crosses with John and Kathy again and we meet at a Thai restaurant run by a Japanese chef and called the Arc of Iris. Next day, our last with Ann, we head through forests of trees called Tuarts, down to Australia’s most south-west point, Cape Leeuwin lighthouse. There we turn around (the only option) and head back through forests of giant jarrah to Perth, leaving Ann to face the crossing of the Nullabor Plain alone. Now we are back to the political reality of the 21^st century as my cabin bag fails the X-ray check at airport security and I have to break off the nail file from my nail clippers and hand it over. Finally, Joan and I catch the “red-eye express”, Ted’s name for the midnight flight to Sydney, and we find a cheerful black South African taxi driver who actually knows where Morton Street is.

THE TOP END

Now, a year later, we have flown to Broome. If we had come earlier (in the last ice age) we could have walked across to Indonesia. Instead, we drive along an obstacle course called the Gibb River Road in a 12-seater armoured car in seats designed for Japanese tourists. To stretch our backs we tour the Ord river (Lake Argyle contains the equivalent of 68 Sydney Harbours or Sid ‘Arbs as they are called), catch a chopper ride over and round the banded sandstone Bungle Bungle mountains, then we walk into the range and under a Bungle into a vast natural amphitheatre. “Tread carefully, one handful of this earth contains four billion micro organisms” says the sign on the trail back to the armoured car. Not exactly my sentiments at 4 a.m. as I try to stomp on the mouse under our tent and hear the dingos howl. Now in the Kakadu, we stop for fuel and queue up behind an ultralight that has simply landed, as one does up here, on the Arnhem highway. We hear it take off while we have coffee at a place called Humpty-Doo, but by now nothing surprises us. And so we cross the West, South and East Alligator rivers, even though there are no alligators in Australia. There are crocodiles, however. You can’t walk on the lush grass here because it floats two metres above the bottom, and below the surface  lurk some three metre crocs, according to our guide. Aboriginal rock art occupies much of our last day. Earliest examples (the Bradshaws) are by different people altogether, say the aborigines, and some later, “contact art”, shows contact with sailing boats, and a Dutchman with a cigar. It is hot up here and Joan is using the payphone inside a fridge. The other photo is of the Bungle Bungles taken from our helicopter.

SALT LAKES 

Mendooran doesn’t seem to change much. Aged 101, Mrs Dinsdale is still playing cards at the Bowling Club, along with Barry McDonald, and Mrs Gibbs, who used to let us in to the swimming pool 42 years ago. After a visit to the cemetery, our next stop is Cobar, a town built on copper but with a very good Chinese restaurant. If Cobar was built on copper Broken Hill seems to have been built on every other mineral. So we are staying two nights on Chloride, between Oxide and Sulphide streets. Across Argent Street is an enormous slag heap, and cantilevered out from its top edge is a modern restaurant with a fabulous view of the whole town.

Dreamings and Daydreams, On the road out from Cobar we had turned off to Mount Grenfell and were the only visitors at a sacred aboriginal site. There we had wandered up a peaceful valley between rock overhangs decorated with ancient paintings. Now, on the Barrier Highway heading west from Broken Hill, our first turnoff is to Daydream Mine. Here Cornishmen, only four feet high and with 4000 years experience of angle shaft construction, had led the way underground to dig silver. And here today our guide advises us: “Women first, so you can see ahead and if you slip you have something soft to fall on”. We adjust our helmets and lamps and slither and slide through level one down to level two.  There we get the drill. You hold the chisel while two others take turns swinging sledge hammers. He who misses and removes your knuckle gets to be the next to hold the chisel. Back upstairs, so to speak, the landscape looks like a war zone on the surface of the moon.  Here and there rubble had been collected into bleak windswept huts each shared by two men.  While one worked below for 12 hours the other slept, sitting up because otherwise emphysemia and psyllichosis would seal his lungs. Though the pay was good life expectancy was 40. Few wives joined the men though there was an extraordinary photo of a woman and two children perched high on a camel setting off to church in Broken Hill. Some daydream! For reasons that the fruit fly inspector was unable to make clear we have twice had to throw away delicious fresh tomatoes and apples at the state border. Not everyone complies willingly, he explains. “Why do you want my pasties?” they say. “Because it is the law, and because it’s near my lunch time.”  He replies.

Sidney Nolan was good at painting ghost towns and Silverton looks exactly like one of his paintings. Once at 3000, today’s population is 60. Most blocks are wasteland with one house or a small church on each and, in the Gaol Museum, the story of how it all happened. Leaving Nolan’s townscapes behind we now follow Namatjira’s watercolour landscapes, low black hills in the morning, red where they are angled to the sun and, in the afternoon, gold and orange. All morning we have been following the Benda Range to the south and, after working though some unexpected little towns and green hills, we are back in a brown craggy land and heading north to Hawker. To the west, sharp scards of cloud have been etched, as with a stiletto knife, above the low blue horizon. To the east, the beginnings of the Flinders Ranges, a purple serrated line of castellations stand stark against the horizon. To the north is an unsealed road which fortunately today is labelled OPEN.

Lake Eyre. At Marree we have booked a kind of demountable cupboard with ensuite for two nights at a dry dusty caravan park euphemistically called “The Oasis “.The continental breakfast is a packet of cocopops but for $10 there is an excellent chicken cacciatore at the BBQ, and the modern equivalent of song-lines as we grey nomads from Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Perth exchange intersecting experiences and advice. Though the railway has ceased to be useful here its sleepers have not. So, while two logs burn in the camp fire, about 20 form a stockade against the wind and others provide tables and benches around which experiences and advice become less coherent the more the beer flows. Marree is a slightly less well-to-do version of Mendooran, but it has a yacht club which opens when the lake is full, very rarely, and there is a diesel loco for sale in the middle of the desert.  A twelve-year-old in a white uniform taxies the Cessna over to our car and introduces himself as the pilot. He rackets us up off the airstrip, climbs through light turbulence causing the giant in front of me to use a Sic Sac, and then drops down to skim the lake for photos at 500 feet. On the way back we pass over Marree Man, a 4 kilometre long outline of an aboriginal man of uncertain origin. Some cynics say it was done with a plough and a Sat Nav. We alight and thank the twelve-year-old.

 

 

Wilpena Pound. The road to Blinman is unsealed but it does cut off a corner as we head for Wilpena Pound Resort. Laz (Lazarus), a hotel management trainee from Mumbai , fixes our tours for tomorrow and we relax in unaccustomed luxury. Laz knew what he was doing advising us to fly at 7:30 a.m. So, with mist in the valleys and a low angle sun blazing on the Pound’s ramparts we circle the huge natural amphitheatre. Breakfast and then just time to do a 2-hour trek to the Hills Homestead and Wangara lookout before the 4-hour 4WD geology excursion. Jaz, an encyclopedia on legs, bombards us with the taxonomies of geology, flora and fauna as we scribble on our notepads. Three days earlier at Hawker we had seen a placard announcing a recently discovered geological era, the Ediacara. It turns out that until 2004 all animal life (multi-cellular) was supposed to have started in the Cambrian era. But, as Jaz pours some water over a pre-Cambian Ediacaran rock, there in front of us is an amazing pattern of reef sponge fossils glittering on the surface.

Adelaide. At Marree, with the temperature at 31, the back of the car was piled with the arctic gear we started out with. Now, approaching Adelaide with driving icy rain and gale warnings, we are now back in arctic gear. Since ferries to Kangaroo Island are uncertain, we do the museum and art gallery and head out east to Hahndorf to find out about some boat people. In 1838 captain Hahn landed at Port Misery, appropriately named since his sails were ripped and 11 had died on the voyage. However, the refugees, from Silesia, found a rural paradise, called it Hahndorf, and settled. We stay overnight there, buying cheeses and sausages from their descendents .  We dine out in this quaint German hamlet as follows. Joan: Slow cooked meaty pork hock served with Rhine potatoes and a sweet cider glaze with German mustard. David: Rindsrouladen aged beef, rolled and filled with wood smoked bacon, mustard gherkin, onion, matured cheese, poached in Cooper’s stout, served on a bed of sauerkraut, accompanied by Rhine potatoes. Later, we are to pass a place where several Chinese jumped ship to avoid the poll tax and walked all the way to the gold fields to seek their fortune.

The Great Ocean Road was approached by way of the Coorong, a 135 kilometre wooded sand spit enclosing a lagoon where the film Stormboy was shot, and we will leave it at Geelong after a detour to watch a surfer catch a ten-footer at Bells Beach. The remnants of the gale are still lashing Port Nelson and Port Fairy where we stop for two nights, but the lee side of Griffiths Island is calm and two surfers tell us to look for whales. We will find them later at Lorne, where our motel room will command a fine view of a mother and two babies lazing along the bay. But meanwhile we pull in to the edges of cliffs to view London Bridge, The Arches, and the huge limestone pillars called the Twelve Apostles.

Beechworth is Ned Kelly country and, appropriately, we have been listening to John’s CD, The Armed Man by Karl Jenkins. The Kelly gang’s armour in the courthouse museum is crude and heavy but it kept the police at bay a long time. Why are national heroes always law-breakers? The miners at the Eureka Stockade were tax dodgers, Robin Hood was a robber, and Guy Faulkes a terrorist. But the police always get their man. At a town appropriately named Bookham, a policeman is taking down details from a man who apparently didn’t notice the speed sign.

SNOW 

Snow fight at Hotham.  Ten years earlier, after crossing into Victoria we had climbed slowly through lush country to Mount Hotham, 6,109 feet. The freak snowfall of two days earlier had melted but we found a snow drift and Joan got me in the back as I tried to escape. Now downhill to Dinner Plain, a ski resort at 5,200 feet, where Mike Toogood and Maureen his new wife from England, Mike’s sister Libby and husband from Perth, and Sally and Nick from everywhere else, welcomed us for dinner, at Dinner Plain. Across the ridges is a place with a name which has always intrigued me: the “Valley of the Mitta Mitta” and I often wonder who or what the Mitta Mitta were or are. But nearby is Mount Bogong to which the Bogong moths migrate from Queensland every spring. I don’t know how they got through the snowstorm but our chalet was full of them.

Up here in the Snowy Mountains names are literal rather than poetic. We are now spending a week in a ski lodge near Mount Perisher. The mountain to the west is called ‘The Paralyser’ and, near Mount Crackenback is to be found ‘Frostbite Kiosk’. Twelve years ago, when we were last here, a snowdrift was feeding the top end of the Blue Lake. So when we emerged from a ten-second swim we were sympathetically blue with cold. Last week Perisher was well above an unexpectedly sudden and unseasonable ‘snow-line’ with a fall of two inches. This week the temperature reached 30 centigrade and swarms of flies indicated that Perisher was well below the ‘fly-line’. We had to climb up to the mountain ridge before the flies gave up following. In the cool before breakfast Joan and I walk through forests of snow-gums to ‘The Porcupine’, an escarpment edged with ‘glacial erratics’, a line of pointed rocks each the size of a three-storey house. Eucalypt leaves contain oil, not water, nature’s anti-freeze, and the leaves of the gnarled and stunted snow gums here are snow-covered six months of the year. Today, there is mist in each valley, and the mountain ridges, one behind the other, seem to go on for ever.

Below the Porcupine is the Thredbo valley to which, later, we all drive for a picnic, and then we take the chairlift 1700 feet up to the top. Unlike Joan, Shivaji is not at all nervous, as we sail silently up between the tree tops. There is a trail at the top, leading to a gurgling stream where the children strip and splash and the adults cool off their hot feet. Thankfully there is no television at the ski lodge and in the evenings 12 of us, depending on age, doze, read, solve the world’s problems, or just play with toys. Eskys and huge boxes of food have networked their way out of Sydney and up to the ski lodge. And tireless chefs in the kitchen produce delicious Thai, Indian, and Moroccan dishes, and we eat well.

JOURNEYS OF THE MIND – THE OUTBACK

Outback names and numbers.  Why was that mountain in the Hamersleys called Mount Nameless when the aborigines probably had a name for it 20,000 years ago? And what are the stories behind Lake Disappointment, Desperation Bay, and Useless Loop? The population of the Northern Territory is 200,000 people and 100,000 wild camels. Road trains can be 50 metres long and iron ore trains 2.2 kms long. Some station hands we met had just finished mustering cattle on a 2.5 million acre station. And Western Australia has 8000 species of wild flowers. MYA means millions of years ago, and the MacDonnells and other orogenies were formed 430 mya down in Antarctica, before Australia broke off relations with Gondwanaland and floated north some 290 mya.

Outback creatures. At Sinclair Street Joan had been terrified by the blue-tongued lizard, not in Jurassic Park, but in our laundry. Poking out from under the twin-tub, it had offered friendship, attempting to lick her toes. But something inherited from my hunter-gatherer past told me to dispose of it, which I did that evening. And after that, some sentiment acquired long since we hunted and gathered, made us regret that sudden response. Poor old Bluey. At Morton Street, under the concrete slab I was lifting, crouched the hideous, black, shiny funnel-web spider. And this time, nothing in my genes or sentiments prevented me from slamming it with the back of my spade before it could jump. Then there were the trapeze artists, possums that walk the electric tightrope from the street pole to our roof gable. Turn on the porch light at night and mother and baby freeze halfway along. They must wait there till we go to bed. Sometimes, collecting the newspaper in the morning, I see a headless possum torso, left on the grass by Ruffles, our predatory cat. All along the East Coast are the Angopheras, or red gums. Related to the Eucalypts, their smooth dimpled skins range from streaky grey to orange, while their contorted limbs rest on any convenient slab of rock. In spring their skin flakes off in huge scabs, great kindling for any barbecue. At Blackfellows Point, friendly wallabies had invaded the camp site, to the delight of children. To the west, in the Flinders Ranges we found the magnificent red river gums of Hans Heysen’s famous paintings. To the south, in the Snowy Mountains, were the stunted, twisted Snow Gums. The same eucalypt oil that stops trees drying out in intense heat also prevents freezing and splitting at sub-zero. Over in the west, we walked up the line of stopped cars to find out what the holdup was. A Dutch tourist was delaying 10 cars while he took endless photo shots of the Thorny Devil, a bizarre, multi-coloured piece of holly, trying to cross the road on tiny legs. And now, back at home in the East, the wrens have had babies and, every day, we pile our bread crumbs onto the little bird table Shivaji made. We have also had two visits from a water dragon. About a metre long, forelegs spayed wide, he cranes his head up high and looks around until I tell him it is time to go.

Outback humour. Len Beadell’s job, as a surveyor, was to build access highways for the Woomera rocket range in South Australia. Told to discuss requirements with a visiting British Air Vice Marshall, he asks how he could find him. “Eight foot tall and seven inches in diameter. You can’t miss him” “So I saw him walking down a street in Adelaide, went over, and tapped him on the knee.” Later, he describes surveying with a mate. “Anything the matter, Bill?”  “No, why?” “Because you haven’t said anything since February”. He lets the matter rest until October, then asks Bill again, who replies “Why are you always picking on me?”

So who really discovered Australia?  For about 150 years before James Cook, the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and French had explored our coasts. Long before that were visits from Indonesia and China, and, by European reckoning, aborigines had crossed into and started to settle here some 40-60,000 years ago. But at least one aboriginal source sets this date back a further 130 million years. A line of Anangu women were dancing across the sky along a path which we now call the Milky Way when a baby fell from its mother’s coolamon (bark cradle) and landed in what we now call Gosse Bluff. But a literature search of the library as the Toyota bumps along past the Bluff reveals the claim that this 20 km diameter indentation was created by a massive ball of frozen carbon dioxide. Unbelievable! I prefer the aboriginal explanation, which leads me to the Dreamtime.

JOURNEYS OF THE SOUL – THE DREAMING 

In the Dream Time, before the arrival of man, there were Sky Heroes who lived in the river of dead souls that we call the Milky Way.  The Karadji, or aboriginal tribal leaders, could converse with these heroes. From them they learned techniques of map-making, called song-lines, and the rules of totemic marriage that ensured social harmony and long term stability. They learned that the landscape they inherited was to be handed down in the same pristine condition. All this can be explained by modern anthropologists. But what anthropologists have difficulties in explaining are the inbuilt aborigine compass, and creation myths that include ice age stories similar to that of Noah’s Ark, and that appear to explain large meteorite impacts that pre-date humanity.