by David Yeadon
Graeme Macarthur takes occasional two-week Jeep treks down the route from Halls Creek, crossing interminable swaths of dunes, pausing in the shade of rare desert oak forests, passing the vast white salt flats of Lake Disappointment, withstanding dry wells, broken axles, and even broken-spirited passengers, to end up in the isolated little one-pub town of Wiluna. He agrees wholeheartedly with Keith Willey’s (The Drovers) description of the Canning as “unquestionably the loneliest, most difficult and dangerous route in Australia.”
It remains one of the country’s most celebrated outback adventures. Something I’m tempted to try next time.
My eyes were playing tricks. Staring down at the redness below I began to see patterns, strange wild patterns of white dots scattered in lines and curlicues across the desert. I blinked and they remained somehow familiar. Walrus dismissed them as “outcrops and spinifex clumps,” but I’d seen those patterns before…in Sydney…in one of the museums displaying Aboriginal art…. Of course! They were like the ancient dot paintings. One of the most unusual art forms in Australia. Huge ocher-colored works swirled with contrasting reds (the streambeds?) and patterns of white dots (the spiniflex clumps?). But how had the Aborigines seen the patterns on their vast horizontal terrain? Were they visible in such patterned formations from hills and bluffs? Surely from that height they’d look like pretty much just what they were—scraggly clumps of dry vegetation. One could only really see their intricacy from a great height, the height of a plane flying over the land….
I never resolved the mystery. A brief meeting with an Aborigine artist later in my journey only added to my speculation and confusion.
“These are the old pictures,” he told me. “You can see them painted on cave walls. I’m just telling the old stories.”
“Yes, but stories of what?”
“Of the Dreamtime. Of the land.”
“But surely to see these patterns, those pictures, you need to fly.”
“Of course. We know how to tread lightly on the earth.”
“You mean—you did fly?”
A shrug, a twinkle, and a wink from under a prominent brow shadowing dark eyes.
A companion of the artist smiled and said, “Try some pituri, mate, the Aborigine chewing tobacco. You’ll soon be flyin’ yourself.”
It was not a very enlightening exchange. But neither were most of my conversations with Aborigines. Each time I felt I was beginning to understand the ancient concepts of the Dreamtime, the songline webs, the totemic systems of the ancestors, the dread of “dead” unsung lands, the vast tomes of unwritten ritual knowledge, the tales of ancient shell middens, the “bone-pointing” rituals of sorcerers, the strange tjuringa plaques made of mulga wood that were treasured almost more than life itself…each time, another element would be introduced and the kaleidoscope would change once again. New patterns of thought, new perspectives, new ways of seeing all the complex interlockings of stories, songs, beliefs, and rituals.
I began to understand the frustration of your average let’s-get-things-done Australian when faced with endless Aborigine claims of sacred places and talk of honey ant dreamings and lizard dreamings and porcupine dreamings. While it all entranced me and made me dizzy, it makes others angry, impatient, and suspicious of a “big con job.”
Walrus was definitely one of the latter. “I’m sick of the whole bloody rigmarole. We’re bloody fools listenin’ to all this nonsense,” he’d mumbled through his billowing mustache at one point in our flight. “It’s got to stop. Otherwise we might as well give ’em them their bloody country back, pack our bags, and move down to Tasmania. They solved their problems a hundred years back there. Now all they’ve got are a few faggot ‘Greenies’ moanin’ about the forests. We’d soon put ’em right, mate! No worries.”
On and on and on we flew with only the occasional sand devil (“willy-willy” in Strine) to break the monotony below.
We had a brief touchdown at Jiggalong for a mail drop in a rusty, battered oil drum nailed to four fence posts. All around us was a lemon-tinted desert spotted with spinifex. A distant clump of almost leafless gum trees marked a ranch house. There was no one around. No grateful station wife, no wild dingo dogs, no birds. Nothing except a hot wind, scraggly cirrus tails in a blue-lemon sky, and a little girl’s shoe, cracked and torn, at the base of the fence.
“Shirley usually comes out,” Walrus mumbled, obviously disappointed by the absence of one of his “desert girls.”
“Must be shopping,” I joked.
“Right! Nearest decent store’s four hundred k north of here. On a dirt road that’s likely been washed out in the last wet.” He seemed reluctant to leave.
“Shit!” he shouted finally at the vast blinding nothingness, and we took off in a rage of yellow dust and desert gravel. Looking down I thought I saw someone driving from the ranch across the flats to the mailbox, but I wasn’t sure. I decided not to mention it to a rather morose Walrus.
“Mount Augustus coming up,” Walrus mumbled an hour or so later. “Biggest bleedin’ monocline in the world. The Ayers Rock of the west and twice the size!”
“What’s a monocline?”
“Lord knows. A big rock I suppose.”
Whatever it was, it was indeed a big rock, bare and bold. A 3,350-foot-high surge of billion-year-old Proterozoic sandstone, over five miles long and visible from the air for over a hundred miles. Other ridges and rifts rose through the haze to the south, but Mount Augustus stood alone in a vast red nothingness, the dying sun coating its flanks with crimson.
“At bloody last—stubbie time.” Walrus smiled as he eased the little plane down through the purpling dusk light. We landed with a gentle thump on the dusty runway.
“Welcome to the middle of nowhere,” he shouted as small stones crackled against the wings and fuselage. “Three hundred eighty-six k to Meekatharra, four hundred and fifty k to Carnarvon—and nothing in between.”
A retired couple had recently moved to the Mount Augustus cattle station (“a million acres, give or take a few thousand”) and were trying to attract outback travelers to their collection of simple “trailer rooms” billed in their new brochure as “the finest of holiday accommodation and camping facilities.” With a collective bathroom and toilets two hundred yards from the the rooms, the word “finest” must be treated in its geographical context. However, after my days of camping under the stars in the Bungle Bungle and hour after hour in a hot cramped cockpit, the tiny air-conditioned room smacked of presidential-suite luxury.
I washed and joined Walrus for “a splash of neck oil and yabber” (a beer party) in the camp store cum souvenir shop cum restaurant cum occasional bust-up bar (more Aborigine tales here). Someone else was there too, a large burly man with a mop of ginger hair and a thick, phlegmatic outback drawl. I was introduced to Don Hammerquist, owner of this vast million-acre station, and the evening was filled with his tales of station life and roundups and all the intricate details of his lonely existence in the “Never-Nevers.”
I learned about the work of the itinerant cowboys and cowgirls—the “jackaroos” and the “jillaroos”—during the three-or four-month-long annual musters from June through September when they use four-wheel drive Jeeps, motorbikes, and a Cessna plane to flush out the cattle from remote valleys and canyons. Even the occasional helicopter would be brought in as a kind of aerial roundup pony flying at tree height to drive the steers toward the pens scattered across the ranch at key water holes.
I heard of the rogue bulls that would charge and often overturn the Jeeps, regular visits by Australia’s famous “flying doctors” to tend crippled stockmen, the days of branding when young cattle would be marked, castrated, ear-tagged, and dehorned, and the older ones selected for double-decked road train drives to market.
I learned of Don’s seventy windmills, each of which had to be kept in working order to fill the watering troughs; I was told of the five hundred miles of barbed-wire fences that had to be repaired and rewired constantly, and the
seven huge stockyards spaced out across the vast red emptiness of the station, each with its own pens, bunkhouses, and maintenance facilities.
Surely a man who owned (actually leased from the government for ninety-nine years, like most other station bosses) such a vast spread and so many cattle—over eighty-five hundred (one head per 120 acres)—must indeed be a wealthy individual, a sort of J.R. of Australia.
“Bloody wrong, mate!” bellowed Don. “There’s no bloody South Forks out here in the desert. You passed my ranch house when y’walked in from the landing strip.”
I nodded. I had thought his home was part of the maintenance outbuildings behind the “hotel.”
“‘Kings in Grass Castles’—that’s what they call us,” said Don. “And that’s jus’ ’bout right. You gotta work every bloody day, day in and day out, just to break even—me, the wife, the boys, the stock hands—y’never stop. Sometimes I’m off out on the bottom part of the range—the Never-Nevers—over back of Augustus—for four, five days, fixin’ things, chasin’ up the scrub bulls in me bull-buggy, tryin’ to get everything right before the wets. Bloody hard life, mate. Wife gets down to Perth m’be once, twice a year if she’s lucky, for a bit of shoppin’.”
“You don’t go with her?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“You don’t like cities?”
“No. Soon as I get there I start thinkin’ when I’m leavin’…too many people, too much bloody commotion.”
“What about retirement?”
“What about it?” growled Don. “I’ll be doin’ this every day till I drop.”
“And that’s okay with you?”
“Too bloody right, mate—that’s fine with me.”
Walrus decided he’d have a lie-in and “do a few jobs” the following morning so I borrowed the hotel owner’s Jeep and his map and bounced along the thirty-mile track circling the base of Mount Augustus.
Below the surging ridges of this great monocline were little hidden places of pure delight: dry creek beds shaded by huge ghost gums, dark cool pools fed by springs, caves and hollows decorated with some of the earliest Aboriginal wall paintings found in Australia, clefts and gorges littered with house-sized sandstone boulders, worn and rounded to eggshell smoothness….
Walrus was ready for takeoff when I returned. I was tempted to stay awhile longer in this lovely, lonely place, but transport to the nearest town of Carnarvon was rare.
“Don’ be a bloody galah, Dave. Y’could be stuck here a week or more. With me you’ll be in Exmouth in a coupla hours. Lovely sheilas. Beaches. Pubs. Lots of dead ’orse. You’re on your own then.”
“Y’know, Walrus, I really appreciate—”
“Don’t piddle in yer pocket, mate. Jus’ get your clobber and let’s get movin’.”
A couple of hours later, after more dot-speckled, red infinities, we crossed the North West Coastal Highway and eased down across Exmouth Gulf to a small, scattered town on the edge of the surfless blue Indian Ocean.
I quickly realized, after my farewells to Walrus and a brief ride into town, that Exmouth, while still a little outback in appearance, is soon destined to transform itself into a major west coast resort. A couple of new motels, a few new stores, constant rumors of offshore oil fields, and a determination to persuade the U.S. government to maintain its naval communication station in active operation nearby—all combine to give the ambitious little town a sense of concerted momentum toward a bright new future. There’s even a “glass-bottom boat” operation offering trips out to the reefs on the eastern edge of the peninsula. Everything is still pleasantly amateurish and entrepreneurial. A true bootstrap spirit permeates Exmouth, at least until the nationally famous annual game fishing tournaments and boat races, when the place becomes a social hot spot for a brief spell. I liked its spirit.
“Exmouth,” the colorful brochures proclaim, “where it’s summer all year round.” From what I’d heard of the real Australian 120-degree summers, this kind of hook seemed of questionable appeal, but Richard Agar, manager of the Exmouth Coral Coast Tourist Bureau, insisted that constant sea breezes and low humidity made Ningaloo and Exmouth “ideal resort areas.”
The hell with resorts. I’ll take it just the way it is now with emus pecking at the scrub on the edge of town, kangaroos hopping between the water holes on the flats below the craggy clefts and canyons of Cape Range, and utter peace and silence on the white arced beaches of the Ningaloo Coral Coast. Two ospreys floated high above us. Tiny white ghost crabs scattered like surf froth as we walked barefoot on the warm sand. Geckos darted between sprays of spinifex on the low dunes.
Richard drove me south early one morning along a rough gravelly track past the beaches to Yardie Creek, where a narrow inlet of Mediterranean-turquoise water rippled against red and gold sandstone cliffs. We ate an outdoor breakfast of steaks, bacon, eggs, and beans cooked on Richard’s portable “barbie” while he pointed out the wildflowers still sparkling with late spring brilliance among the boulders. I remember some of their lovely, unfamiliar names—kangaroo paws, scarlet feather flowers, smokebushes, elegant-banksias, and deep purple sheens of mulla mullas.
In a hollow above the creek we strolled across an ancient Aboriginal midden of broken shells.
“Y’know, Australians are funny,” Richard said quietly as the shells crunched beneath our feet. “They go tearing off around the world like gypsies—seeing everything—and then finally they wake up to their own country. They get the outback urge and come to places like this to find out what their own country’s all about—what they’re all about.”
He pointed to the high brittle plateaus and gorges of Cape Range rising up from behind the creek. “There’s so many places in there…some of them you have to walk to…hidden places, valleys, canyons…. You can lose yourself for days looking for striped rock wallabies, cave paintings…they’re all in there. And if you drive the track further south to Carnarvon you’ll find some of the best empty camping beaches in the country.”
“What about the reef?”
“Well—they call Ningaloo the Great Barrier Reef of the West Coast, but that’s not really true. It’s nothing like as long—only around two hundred miles. But it’s not known either, so you usually get the whole place to yourself. You can take a boat out there”—he pointed to the line of surf a mile or so out in the ocean—“and its all yours—great spreads of brain coral, cabbage, staghorn, fire coral. You’ll swim out there with mantas, great fat turtles, some sharks, and whale sharks, parrot fish, marlin, eels, sailfish, humpback whales—they’ve recorded more than five hundred species here…. It’s fantastic.”
Exmouth is fortunate to have such an enthusiastic tourist bureau manager. Richard’s love of this remote place made me realize why I was enjoying my ramblings through Australia so much. You feel the country is still largely undiscovered. You can still sense the pioneer spirit of the northwest ranchers and the people living in the little desert towns, hundreds of miles from anywhere. And you can see it in the eyes of citybound Australians from the east who come here to discover the timeless essence of their young country. There’s an adolescence of spirit here, a willingness to keep options open, to keep the dreams alive, to keep exploring, seeking wide-open futures in this enormous, empty land. In an ironic way, the walkabout “singings” of the Aborigines and the bright-eyed wonder of Australians discovering their own country for the first time have a similar and complementary effect—they keep Australia fresh, vigorous, and endlessly enticing. The vast red emptiness of the northwest is laced both by webs of ancient songs and more recent anthems of awe from the new discoverers. It is alive and vital. The land sings its own spirit. And I heard it many times in my journeys….
Journeys which almost came to an abrupt end in the warm floppy ocean off Exmouth.
It was my last day and I decided to join a handful of other travelers on a glass-bottom boat excursion among the colorful reefs of the peninsula’s eastern shore.
For an hour or more
we drifted in the shallows, watching the parrot fish, groupers, red emperors, coral trout, starfish, sea slugs, and enormous turtles among the multicolored explosions of coral heads.
After a while, seeing such sights through thick glass was no longer enough and a number of us decided to go snorkeling. We wanted to float among the fish and lose ourselves for a while in the sun-dappled shadows of the coral forests.
I lost track of time.
Coming to the surface a while later I realized that all the others had gone back to the boat. I could see them perched on the bow in a group, drinking and listening to the skipper telling tales of the reef. They all had their backs to me, music was playing, and no one seemed in any hurry to return to shore.
Five more minutes, I promised myself, and disappeared again into the cool depths, playing with the fish and watching the shards of sunlight undulate over the coral formations.
Then something rather odd began to happen. As I lay motionless close to the surface I noticed that the coral was drifting past me. Slowly at first and then with increasing speed. A rather pleasant sensation—like peering through the window of a moving train. Only I sensed I was being pulled farther and farther away from the boat.
I came to the surface again. I was indeed being carried away from the boat. I could see my fellow snorkelers still drinking and listening to the skipper’s tales, but they were smaller now and the boat was a good quarter of a mile away.
No problem. Time to swim back and join in the fun.
Only the swimming didn’t seem to work. I increased my pace, but the boat came no closer. Something was carrying me farther out into the ocean. The water was noticeably colder too. And waves were forming in a breeze that had not been there before. Small waves at first, hardly chin height. And then a little bigger.