by Sean Dooley
I was supposed to go on one more Port Fairy pelagic but a massive low pressure cell with its accompanying gale force winds ensured yet another cancellation and I spent the weekend being blasted by Antarctic winds looking for OBPs with Groober in tow. On the Saturday the wind was so powerful we could barely hold our telescopes upright.
The birds were too sensible to show themselves in weather this bad so I delayed my departure for yet another day and headed out to Point Wilson once more early on Sunday morning. As it plays out in the best of twitching dreams, there was a flock of sixteen neophemas feeding by the side of the road as I arrived. I could hear both Blue-winged and OBPs calling but couldn’t for the life of me pick out an OBP through my bins or scope. The birds started to move off and I was beginning to panic when up into the frame of my scope popped a juvenile Orange-bellied Parrot. It stayed still long enough for me to eliminate the possibility of juvenile Blue-winged Parrot (not an easy task) and I finally had the little mongrel under my belt. I was free to go.
I’ve never been fond of goodbyes. Many’s the dud party I’ve stayed at till the bitter end because I haven’t been able to work out a suitable departure strategy. And now, oddly enough, I was finding it very hard to say goodbye to Melbourne. I think I knew that once I was out the front door, it was crunch time – there’d be no going back. I found reasons to delay my departure. The day before I was due to leave I even found myself in a job interview for head writer of an as yet to be shot comedy series for Channel Seven. The first thing I said when I walked in was that I was leaving the next day for six months on the road birdwatching – a job application technique they had never come across before. The interview went brilliantly, mainly because we didn’t talk about the job; they were so fascinated by the concept of the Big Twitch that they offered to screen updates of my journey over the credits of each week’s show under the imaginative title of ‘Sean’s Crazy Birdwatching Adventures’. I turned them down. Who wants end credits? I insisted on nothing less than my own series. They said they loved the idea and would get back to me. I never heard from them again.
Monday 8 July was D-Day. The Land Cruiser was finally all packed and ready to go. One last supermarket run for fresh supplies and I’d be off. But then I managed to lock myself inside my house. When I came back from the supermarket, the front door slammed shut after I had entered. The whole house was deadlocked, and I couldn’t get out. My keys were on the outside of the door, facing directly onto the street, with my open car, full of gear, parked invitingly across the street. I had to ring my friend Anthony (one of the New Year’s Eve owl impersonators) to come over and free me from my house arrest. By seven that night, a mere three days later than planned, I was finally ready to go.
What a night to head out: eighty-kilometre winds blasted Melbourne, throwing my freshly loaded car all over the freeway. As is often the case, the weather calmed down once I crossed the Great Dividing Range and by the time I reached Bendigo the night was perfectly clear and still with the great swathe of the Milky Way splashed across the inky sky. Just north of Bendigo, at Kamarooka, I flashed past what I thought was a Tawny Frogmouth sitting in a roadside tree. I already had it on the year list but figured I may as well check it out. It turned out to be a Barking Owl, a bird I had dipped out on several on times around Chiltern. It was right on our Twitchathon route but we’d never seen Barking Owl here before despite driving this road dozens of times.
Staring at the owl staring back at me with its intense yellow eyes, I couldn’t help but feel this was a good omen for the trip. I decided to sleep there the night, my first on the road, and as I settled into the sleeping bag in the back seat of the car, I revelled in the glorious stillness of the country at night. The first night away from the city you can feel the tension almost physically draining out of you as you gaze at the achingly beautiful sky and greedily inhale the invigorating fresh scent of the country. My earlier trepidation gone, I now felt like this thing was really happening. I felt alive.
I followed much of our Twitchathon route the next day picking up Mallee species such as Purple-gaped Honeyeater and Shy Heathwren until I eventually arrived at Hattah-Kulkyne National Park with enough time to get out to my site for the star species of the day, the Mallee Emu-wren. These tiny birds with long tails like Emu feathers are in quite a deal of strife. Being so small and such poor flyers they don’t do a great job of escaping bushfires and it might take decades for them to recolonise an area they formerly occupied. In the past this didn’t matter so much as there were always refuge areas from which the population could recover, but with the habitat so fragmented and the frequency of massive high intensity fires increasing, the remaining populations are becoming ever more isolated. South Australia was their stronghold but over eighty-five per cent of the population there has disappeared as a result of fire in the past two decades. The area around Hattah is now crucial to these little birds’ survival, so with a great deal of forethought and sensitivity, the state government has proposed building a toxic waste dump immediately next door on the site of some prime emu-wren habitat. Good one, fellas.
Right on dusk I finally heard one giving its tinny, barely audible squeak of a call. A sure sign of aging is when you can no longer hear an emu-wren. I have stood next to older birders while emu-wrens call their hearts out and they are totally oblivious. Hearing this bird saves me the price of a hearing test for another year. Unfortunately I’ll still need an eye test, as the bird itself didn’t show. Leading me a merry dance in what was probably my tensest birding so far that year, they always managed to stay ahead of me, darting from one clump of impenetrable porcupine grass to another.
Next morning I was out at the same spot at dawn. With the clear night skies, the temperature was literally freezing and though gloved my hands still kept getting stuck to the metal handle of my camera’s tripod. Amazingly these birds, weighing only six grams, were already out and about. Six grams – it would take four Mallee Emu-wrens to equal the amount of fat in a single Big Mac – and there they were keeping ahead of me out in the scrub. Normally I would probably have given up looking after an hour but not that year. I couldn’t afford for the birds to win these games of chasey. The adrenaline was pumping and each unsatisfactory half-glimpse only raised the stakes higher. It wasn’t until the gold wash of the sun hit the red ridge of the sand dune that a Mallee Emu-wren finally poked its head up from a porcupine grass clump long enough for me to tick it off. The relief at seeing this little bird was physically palpable and I felt a surge of pure exhilaration. Unfortunately this triumphal rush only lasted a few minutes and it was on to the next bird for the next fix.
I’d brought a football along with me for company – a bit like the volleyball in that annoying Tom Hanks movie Castaway. Getting the footy out for a kick is actually a good ice-breaker when travelling – it’s amazing who will join in with a game of kick to kick when you produce the pill at some remote Outback roadhouse. For some reason I decided I’d kick the footy across the border every time I drove into a new state. The first opportunity for such an interstate kick came as I headed into South Australia along the Surt Highway, an occasion that met with near disaster. After I’d booted a nice looking drop punt across the border, it took a sharp leg-break and bounced precariously close to the wheels of an oncoming road train.
First stop in South Australia was a return to Gluepot where I could visit in a slightly more leisurely fashion than I had in March – and as an added bonus, this time I arrived with my finger unban-daged. Gluepot, so named because when it rains the dirt turns to a boggy, gluey consistency, is a superb wilderness experience, yet I suspect it will never attract the sort of eco-tourism numbers that will ensure its long-term economic future. Even though there are probably as many endangered species here as somewhere like Kruger National Park, you just aren’t going to get the punters lining up en masse to look at Striated Grasswrens and Legless Lizards. The lack of dudes in safari trucks was a bonus for me, however, as I virtually had the entire reserve to
myself and spent a glorious couple of days rambling through the place.
My prime target was the Black-eared Miner. A rather large, drab honeyeater, the Black-eared was damned by the invention of the stump jump plough. This icon of Aussie ingenuity was invented for the purpose of dealing with the large mallee roots that remained embedded in the soil long after the trees had been knocked down. It successfully opened up vast swathes of Black-eared Miner country, to their detriment. Gluepot is about the only place you get them these days.
For many the Mallee woodlands are unrelentingly drab and oppressive places – the worst the miserable Australian bush has to offer. ‘Mallee’ is the name given to a couple of dozen eucalypt species that grow in clumps on the poor sandy soils of the inland. Their thin, multi-stemmed trunks reach only to about three or four metres, too short to be terribly impressive, but just high enough to obscure the horizon. Particularly on a cloudy day, the Mallee is the easiest habitat in the world to get lost in. Despite having a compass I’ve become hopelessly disoriented in this habitat after walking just one hundred metres in from the road. The trees seem to close in on you and you barely have a sense of which way is up, let alone east or west. Even when you can scramble to a slight rise for a vista, for as far as you can see there is nothing but the uniform khaki of mallee-clad dunes. It is the sort of country that can infuriate, overwhelm and send people insane. Reassuringly I had a GPS unit with me this time, so as long as I remembered to log my starting point I shouldn’t have any trouble.
I loved it. Not only are there great birds to be found in the Mallee but if you look closely enough the scene changes with every step you take. The Mallee operates on two dimensions of scale: the overwhelming enormity of the landscape and the intricacies of a lichen colony; a shred of peeling bark exposing the flesh-coloured limb of an ancient mallee tree; the parallel dapples of a set of lizard footprints in the soft sand; the hollowed-out centre of a ring of old growth porcupine grass.
Eventually I came across a party of twenty miners feeding loudly amongst one of the few flowering mallee trees on the reserve. Once the Black-eared Miner’s territory was opened up it allowed the closely related open country species, the Yellow-throated Miner, to move in. They have genetically swamped the Black-eareds, hybridising with them to the point that now there are very few pure Black-eareds left. Most of this flock were ‘mongrel’ miners but there was one outstanding dark specimen that had enough distinctive features to allow me to distinguish it as a pure Black-eared Miner. Another of the really difficult birds out of the way.
So it was on to Adelaide where I dropped in on John Cox to see what was around and to pick up my toiletry bag that I had left there back in March. After three months it was nice to be able to brush my hair again. Also there was Dave Harper and we finalised our rendezvous point on the Strzelecki Track for three weeks’ time. Dave was still way too confident about finding Grey Falcon for my liking. He maintained he had never dipped out on it at his special site but I couldn’t share his confidence, especially as this time he’d have me tagging along to jinx him. With any luck I would pick up a Grey Falcon somewhere in the Centre, for in the next three weeks I’d be travelling some three and a half thousand kilometres through the core range of this elusive species.
The next morning in Port Augusta I took a quick detour down to the seashore. The next time I’d see the ocean would be in five weeks’ time, on Cape York Peninsula on the opposite side of the country. Providing a farewell guard of honour, a small pod of Bottle-nosed Dolphins broke the surface right in front of me. I made my way to the Arid Lands Botanic Gardens where I picked up my first desert species, the Chirruping Wedgebill. Just beyond the gardens is the beginning of the Stuart Highway, the thread of bitumen that joins the north and south of this vast continent. Named after explorer John McDouall Stuart who set off from near here on a similar route one hundred and forty years ago, the trip north almost killed him. I stepped out of the car and looked at the entire continent stretching before me. Even this close to the coast the country is desolate. Not a tree protrudes into the sky. In the distance a couple of mesa-like hills break the horizon. When Stuart set off he had a few horses and camels. I was in an air-conditioned four-wheel drive and had the option of staying in a motel every night, yet still I was chilled with apprehension at the thought of what lay ahead.
After a seriously long pause in which I fought the irrational urge to turn around and go home, I got back in the car, cranked up the stereo and headed off into the vast interior.
CHAPTER 18
16 July, Stuart Highway, 19 kilometres south of the
Northern Territory–South Australia border:
477 species
The minibus rolled at around a hundred kilometres an hour, killing the driver. Six passengers survived but due to the remoteness of the crash site it would be seven hours before they were finally airlifted by the Flying Doctor Service to Alice Springs. The greatest three weeks of my life were at an end.
It was August 1988 and we were on the homeward leg of a Monash University Biology Society field trip to Kakadu. I wasn’t even a student at Monash but, through the agency of Puke, I had weaselled my way onto the trip. Puke and I had hijacked the itinerary somewhat in order to satiate our twitching needs. To that point it really had been the greatest three weeks of my life. Experiencing amazing country, hanging out with a bunch of like-minded souls. New birds every day, partying every night. And to top it all off I got together with a girl who actually had half an interest in birds.
The morning of the crash had started well enough. We had been at the campground at Uluru as the sun rose on that magnificent rock. Unfortunately, in our effort to distance ourselves from the rest of the group for a bit of privacy, my new friend and I had set our sleeping bags down by the path to the sunrise viewing spot and were caught in flagrante delicto by a party of middle-aged German tourists. Hours later, as we passed over the border from the Northern Territory into South Australia, we were lying together on the back seat of the minibus. For some reason I suggested that we shift positions and lie with our heads towards the centre of the road rather than, as we had been, with our heads facing the verge. A couple of minutes later the tyre on our trailer had a blowout causing it to jackknife. Travelling at around a hundred kilometres per hour the violent swerving of the trailer brought the minibus over and we went off the road, rolling several times in the process.
The last thing I saw before I was blinded by the wave of red dust kicked up as we rolled off the road was my girlfriend falling backwards away from me. If we hadn’t just changed positions we would have gone over on our necks. Goodbye Sean, goodbye sexy bird girl. As it was, things were pretty dire. The sensation was like being dumped by a giant wave – I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t tell which way was up. The sound was extreme – tearing metal, screaming people, a deafening white noise. Suddenly everything stopped and I was lying on my back again, eyes closed. All was totally silent. I could feel pain in my ankles and wiggled my toes to check I hadn’t broken anything. Expecting to still be on the back seat of the bus I opened my eyes to find I was staring at bright blue sky, and for a moment it actually did occur to me that I might be dead. Finally I sat up and looked around. The bus had come to rest about twenty metres away, upright in the scrub. Between it and me lay a couple of dust covered bodies, not moving.
Later there was an inquiry, legal action, compensation claims, all of which I turned my back on. No wonder I did so poorly as a law student – a pot of money to which I had a legitimate legal right and I walked away from it. Or more accurately hobbled. Though my injuries were comparatively slight, for years afterwards if I went to change direction as I was walking, my damaged ankles would lock and I would fall face forward onto the ground. This was but a minor and at times amusing after-effect of the accident. The real impact was psychological. Being one of the only victims not to be concussed meant I remembered it all: the crash, the bloody aftermath, the shattering of the invincibility of youth.
/> There is a component in compensation payments that provides for pain and suffering, including mental anguish. For many this legitimises what they have been through, recognises the trauma of their experience and helps with the healing process. Throughout the accident I had held it all together – bandaging the injured, flagging down help, keeping the flies out of gaping wounds, joking with the rescuers about their appalling musical taste. It was only after arriving back in Melbourne a week later that the impact really hit me. Lying in the darkness that first night in my own bed, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the dark abyss that I had stared down on that lonely stretch of Outback highway. A matter of minutes, a matter of inches, and I would have ceased to exist out there under that piercing blue sky – a thought so powerful, so palpable, that it was overwhelming. I didn’t know about post-traumatic stress syndrome at that time but I was self-aware enough to know I was very close to losing the plot.
The support of friends and family, a little bit of counselling, the supercilious sub-dean who refused my request to defer my studies, the fellow law student who risked expulsion by practically writing my overdue law assignment for me all pulled me back from a second abyss. The one thing I felt wouldn’t have helped was money. Rather than compensate it would have felt like it was substituting for fully processing the experience of the accident. I didn’t need to be placated, I needed to absorb what had happened in order to come to terms with it. After a few months life returned to normal. The fourth anniversary of the crash was the first to pass without me remembering it, but it was such a momentous event in my life that I always felt I wouldn’t be fully healed until I returned to the site.
Now, on the sixteenth of July almost fourteen years later, I was finally there. I felt very strange. This was where I almost died. This was where we found the body of the driver, her neck snapped. This was where the most violent moment of my life occurred. Yet it all felt so peaceful. This patch of highway is typical of much of the Outback. The soil is a vivid, almost blood red colour, contrasting with the stunningly blue sky that stretches overhead forever. At first glance the vegetation is a comparatively drab khaki and straw colour, but it actually works as a superb counterpoint to the vibrancy of the other elements in the landscape. There was much more vegetation now than there had been fourteen years earlier. The mulga was thicker and taller, the Centre having experienced a series of wetter than normal seasons. If the bus crashed today it would come to rest very close to the edge of the road, the robust mulga growth retarding its trajectory.