by Sean Dooley
I walked twenty metres or so away from the verge and searched for evidence of the crash. It’s amazing how quickly nature covers all signs of human activity, even in the desert. While the bus was towed away at the time and anything of value would have been quickly scavenged, I was expecting to find more debris. Eventually fragments of that long ago moment revealed themselves half buried in the red sand: the black snake of a rubber windscreen lining. A shattered side window. A plastic petrol cap. The hard black plastic casing of a rear view mirror. Not exactly Ozymandias but it was a reminder of the fragility of existence, and the hubris of youth. When these artifacts were so violently deposited there I had long, rock star hair, I was thin, my future was full of endless dreams and possibilities. Many of those dreams have disappeared under the desert sands of life – bird girl and I only lasted six months, for instance – but here I was, brought back to this place all these years later in the pursuit of the one dream I couldn’t shake.
I had been hoping for some kind of momentous epiphany. But as I stood amongst the detritus of tragedy, with people burling past me on the Stuart Highway in their insulated bubbles of civilisation rushing to the next roadhouse for a refuelling and an ice cream, the only revelation I was aware of is that life moves on. And so must I. I was already running behind schedule.
This is a vast area and it had taken me the best part of two days to drive from Port Augusta to this point, in part because of a detour to Woomera. The settlement established to house the boffins and technicians working on the Woomera rocket range, the facility that helped develop the space race and enabled a foreign power to explode nuclear devices in our backyard, was now almost a ghost town. They don’t fire rockets there much anymore though they did on the day that I decided to have a stickybeak. The multimillion-dollar satellite crashed to Earth within seconds of the launch. Sadly, I missed the explosion by a couple of hours although this probably saved me from being arrested.
As the site of yet another immigration detention centre Woomera was in the news at the time. The government and the private firm that ran the place had shown extreme reluctance to let people know what was going on behind the razor wire. As I drove up to the perimeter I expected to be approached by armed guards but it seemed most everyone had gone out to witness the aftermath of the failed rocket launch. Nobody challenged me as I parked and looked at the complex. On the drive in I had seen what was probably a Ground Cuckoo-shrike, a bird I still needed, flying in the distance. It occurred to me how thoughtful it was of the government to build a detention centre out there in the middle of a treeless desert where summer temperatures regularly climb above forty degrees Celsius and winter nights plummet to freezing. Because despite the extreme weather and the isolation and flies, these new arrivals to our country were at least being treated to sightings of rare desert birds. I was moved to think, ‘Gee, I wish I was a refugee.’
I included this admittedly feeble gag in one of my reports to Birding-aus. The next time I got to a town to check my emails I received this message: ‘Mate, stick to birds and lay off people who are locked up and less fortunate than you. You are not funny. Just pathetic.’ My first ever hate mail! I was used to hearing ‘You’re not funny, Dooley, just pathetic,’ from producers and former lovers, but from a total stranger? Ouch. Birdwatchers by their nature are generally a conservative lot so I was expecting to cop some flak for this little bit of Bolshie humour. I hadn’t expected a barrage from someone who obviously shared a similar view to myself. Just goes to show satire is a weapon that, like a Woomera rocket, can easily backfire.
I decided to leave one hideous hellhole for another. A lot of people love Coober Pedy. I’m not one of them. I find it to be quite a hole. Well, thousands of holes, actually. The mullock heaps from the opal mines litter the countryside for miles around like giant ants’ nests. The white clay that dots the surface has not oxidised like the surrounding red soil. It has a certain beauty, I suppose, but I found none at all in the town itself. Outback hype is always full of the characters that inhabit Coober Pedy, attracted by the lure of opal and the promise of riches, but all I ever saw were sad, desperate, generally drunk or borderline deranged wrecks of human beings lurking around dusty streets and tacky tourist stands. All the delightful characters must have been hanging around at the underground hotel.
Give me the surrounding countryside any day. There can be few landscapes in the world as desolate as the South Australian deserts. It is barrenness on such a mind-bogglingly enormous scale that it takes your breath away. At one point I pulled the car off the highway and scrambled onto the roof. There was not a stick of vegetation above ankle height to be seen for the entire 360-degree panorama. Nothing but red gibber plain all around me. I could have been on Mars.
Birds live here, though, and a couple of hundred kilometres north of Coober Pedy I was to stumble across one of these desert specialists and into another round of birdwatching politics. On the way I stopped at a site where Chestnut-breasted Whiteface had recently been seen. South Australia’s only endemic species, this little brown and cream bird is regularly reported from only one site near Lyndhurst, about five hundred kilometres away. I was heading there in August but thought this place was worth a try.
At first glance it seemed like much of the rest of the country I’d been driving through. A large plain dotted with dry grass stretched to a small rise of barren, rocky hills a couple of kilometres away. Why the whitefaces would hang out here rather than the millions of hectares of similar country surrounding me is a mystery, but things looked promising as I pulled up and a pair of Southern Whitefaces flew from the side of the road. All three species of whiteface had been seen here recently. One down, two to go.
An hour later and no other whiteface of any description had put in an appearance. I was having a ball, though; the air was crisp, the landscape vivid and there were enough little dickie birds to keep me on my toes. A small flock of whiteface emerged from the bushes about eighty metres in front of me. They kept moving just far enough in front to stay out of identifiable range. Finally one popped up onto a small saltbush and I saw the flash of a reddish band across its chest – Chestnut-breasted Whiteface, one of Australia’s least known birds. I was ecstatic. After I’d had my fill I was walking away, fists pumping in triumph like Lleyton Hewitt winning a match point, when I startled a flock of whitefaces. Over the next hour I saw at least twenty-two and possibly as many as forty Chestnut-breasted Whitefaces, an unprecedented number as the highest number ever reported to that point was only twelve. This was an exceptional birding moment, one of the highlights of the year.
Then, of course, came the repercussions. What I didn’t realise at the time was that this location had been known for a number of years but people had kept schtoom about it. The primary reason given was to protect the birds from disturbance, though there was a rumour that at least one birding guide wanted to restrict knowledge of the place to a select few to give himself a competitive advantage when taking overseas clients around. The bloke who’d made a posting about the site on the Net had quickly been castigated and was soon backpedalling, contacting me to ask that I not publicise the site further. I was in a dilemma. In order to verify all my sightings I had to be open about where I had seen every species. I decided to describe the experience but be vague about specifics. But over the next few months other birders continually asked me to provide details so that they could have a look when they were in the area.
To a non-birder this may not seem like much of a dilemma, but as a twitcher I am torn between my desire to ensure the welfare of the birds and the unspoken obligation I have to enable others to experience them too. Why should I be privileged above others? In reality there is unlikely to be any serious threat to the whiteface from rabid twitchers swarming all over the place. The location is a long way from anywhere and even if it was well known, the amount of human traffic would increase from perhaps a couple of visits a year to a couple of dozen at most. Birders have been happily twitching the Lyndhurst whitefac
es for almost twenty years now and they still seem to be going strong. The real danger comes from people whose interest in birds is far less benign than merely having a squiz at them through a pair of binoculars.
In Australia we are terribly naïve about the trade in wild birds and eggs. Because the country is so vast, much of the illicit activity of bird trappers and egg collectors goes unnoticed. Generally the black market aviarists aren’t interested in little dickie birds like a whiteface, preferring to collect the colourful, iconic species such as parrots, but egg collectors would be very interested indeed in a bird like the Chestnut-breasted Whiteface, whose nest was not discovered until 1968. Not many collectors would have the eggs of this little one lying in their cotton wool filled drawers and the thought that I could be the one to tip them off about adding to their collection totally sickens me.
By the time I’d got back to the car after my whiteface encounter it was getting on. As I kicked the footy over the ‘Welcome to the Northern Territory’ sign, I realised that if I was to make it to my destination at King’s Canyon I’d have to do a couple of hours of night driving. Forget your crocodiles and your venomous snakes and funnel-web spiders; about the most dangerous thing anyone can do in the Outback is drive at night. Nowhere are the roads fenced and there’s a saying that hitting a kangaroo is the best thing that can happen to you when driving at night – it stops you from hitting something really dangerous, like a cow or a camel. Once the sun had set I slowed to around eighty kilometres an hour, adding at least half an hour to my trip but drastically reducing my chances of colliding with wandering wildlife. Well, that’s the theory. I only managed to avoid smashing into a bullock by a matter of inches as its jet-black hide absorbed the beam of the headlights until I was almost upon it.
A little further down the track I came across one creature who hadn’t been so lucky. A boobook owl was sitting stunned in the middle of the road having come off second best in an encounter with a road train. The temperature was beginning to plunge towards freezing and I didn’t like its chances of surviving out there on the cold road, so I decided to take it into my care. Donning a thick pair of gardening gloves from my bag of tricks I approached, wary of that very sharp bill. The bird was too dazed to bother having a go but as soon as I picked it up it dug its talons into my hands in fear. I suddenly remembered the main weapon of this hunter is not its beak, which it only uses to tear its prey to pieces once it has been caught, but its talons. The more I tried to extricate myself the tighter its grip became and I had visions of me driving the rest of the way with the bird attached like some boo-book-sized wristwatch. Eventually I disentangled myself and put the owl safely away in a box.
Driving along feeling smug for being such a good friend to the native creature I saw a car approaching from the opposite direction. Just as it was about to pass me a pair of Red Kangaroos bounded out onto the road. I hit them at about seventy kilometres an hour. The first merely bounced off the roo bar and hopped away. The second, however, copped the full impact and was thrown backwards into the path of the oncoming vehicle, which was travelling much faster and drove right over it without stopping. Guilty, I reversed back to assess the damage. Between the two cars we had broken both legs of this enormous big red male. It flailed hopelessly on the bitumen, unable to make a getaway. It would eventually bleed to death or more likely be crushed under a road train, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave it lying there in agony like that. This was a beast of a roo and I realised I didn’t have an implement big enough to finish it off with one blow, nor did I have the stomach for slitting its throat. There was only one thing left for me to do.
I got back in the car, turned the tape player right up so I couldn’t hear anything and aimed the two tonnes of my four-wheel drive directly in line with its skull. Screaming at the top of my lungs to drown out any noise, I managed to hit the target first time and drove off into the night, shaking.
What a day. A reminder that in country like this there is both great beauty and great danger. When something stuffs up out here you really are on your own. And I was heading into the heart of it alone.
CHAPTER 19
30 July, Edge of the Simpson Desert,
Northern Territory:
497 Species
The only other time my life has ever been in the slightest danger was on the night I attended my first ever rock concert. Forget a bus crash; you want truly life-threatening, try losing your footing as a skinny sixteen year old amongst the throng of burly blokes with t-shirts wrapped around their heads dancing in the mosh pit of a Midnight Oil concert. I had gone along with Groober and Puke but as I went down for the third time in that crush of sweaty bodies they were nowhere to be seen. Suddenly a hand grabbed hold of my collar and pulled me up from my impending doom. It was Jezz, a kid I knew from school. We have been firm friends ever since.
Jezz was working as head gardener for the King’s Canyon Resort in the middle of Watarrka National Park. His girlfriend Karen worked there too so I decided to make their place my base for my Central Australian foray. King’s Canyon is not a high priority for most birders but I managed to see some of the real Central Australian specialties here such as Rufous-crowned Emu-wren, Dusky Grasswren and Spinifex Pigeon which I first saw on a freezing dawn, curled up into a tight little ball, only its crest protruding so that it looked like a pigeon popsicle. And the scenery is second to none. There are magnificent ancient bluffs and canyons, hidden springs and rolling spinifex plains peppered with majestic Desert Oaks. Every day was a joy to be alive. Inspirational country, great birding by day, sitting around a campfire in Jezz and Karen’s backyard by night, warding off the chill with a few beers and a whole lot of laughs. For the first time all year I felt I was home.
Too bad I almost got them both sacked.
Let this be a lesson to all: never invite a twitcher to stay. They cause havoc wherever they go. Not long after my disruptive presence on Norfolk Island they had their first murder in one hundred and fifty years. I turn up at Woomera and a multimillion-dollar rocket explodes. I was beginning to suspect I was some kind of chaos theory generator. It wasn’t even what I did at King’s Canyon that got them into trouble, but what I wrote about after the fact in my dispatch to Birding-aus. Using the inside dope I had from Jezz about the place, I merely mentioned a few management issues involved in running a resort in the middle of a national park in the middle of Australia. It didn’t go down too well. Luckily for Jezz I had also included the Parks and Wildlife people in my assessment of the way things were run. There is always a certain tension between the Parks people and the resort management, so while Jezz’s boss wasn’t happy with what I’d said about his domain, at least he could have a good laugh at the expense of those uppity rangers. Not that I’d been particularly malicious but I did relay that they were nicknamed Sparks and Wildfires by locals because just before I arrived yet another of their prescriptive burns got out of control and set fire to half the park and neighbouring properties.
Still, I did make Jezz and Karen’s social life a bit tricky for a while there, particularly with one of their mates from Parks and Wildlife. It all had to do with that injured boobook owl. To my surprise it had survived the night in its box but it looked in a bad way. I took it to the ranger’s office hoping they might be able to look after it. The ranger on duty looked distinctly nonplussed and I wrote later that I got the impression that as soon as I left he most probably dashed its brains out against a tree. The ranger in question was a good friend of Jezz and Karen and he came to them almost in tears, protesting that he loved animals and how dare I think he would do that. They asked him what he had done with the boobook. He paused and then admitted he had dashed its brains out against a tree. He tried to explain that there was nothing that could be done for it, and he hadn’t enjoyed doing it, but his protestations were drowned out by their laughter. I suspect it will be another decade before I can safely show my face around King’s Canyon again.
Luckily I had left before everything hit
the fan, heading into the MacDonnell Ranges. Welcome to superlative country. At nearly every turn was another staggering vista that would reduce me to the language of a second-rate sportscaster – the phrases ‘magnificent’, ‘awesome’ and ‘absolutely f***ing brilliant’ seemed to pass my lips with much regularity. The entire region is spectacular but I was particularly impressed with the road into Palm Valley along the Finke River, which apparently is the oldest river in the world. The landscape drips with sublime beauty both in the majesty of the big things, like huge rounded purple mountains and jagged red rock ridges, and on a micro scale: the subtle patterns of a spiky little Thorny Devil, a small lizard whose method of self-protection was to remain stock still even as I picked it up to move it from the middle of the road where it had defiantly taken up residence.
I felt more like a tourist than a twitcher. For days I happily moved through this area allowing myself to soak it all in rather than get too het up about my birding schedule. At Ormiston Gorge, somewhere that gives the Finke River Gorge a run for its money in terms of awesome beauty, I hooked up with a couple of nurses who were eighteen months into a round-Australia working holiday. Sharing my last bottle of beer as we laid back on the picnic table in the campground gazing at the enormous expanse of brilliant stars above us, I thought this must be how most people travelled. They were taking it easy, soaking it all in, mixing a bit of sightseeing with a bit of partying. They suggested I spend the next few days travelling with them. It was very tempting. But I was up before dawn, packing up the tent and heading out into the bush. It had been four days since I’d added a new bird for the year and sadly, the lure of a Spinifexbird was far greater than their feminine charms.