by Sean Dooley
‘You know what, Sean? I’ve seen a Bridled Tern in Victoria. How many people can say that?’ And he smiled a very satisfied smile.
At that moment I knew that finally, after all these years, he had an understanding of my birdwatching addiction. And also at that moment I knew that I would trade all the Grey Falcons and Bridled Terns in the world to have my father back.
And so, a little over two years later, I sat shivering in the Outback dawn, waiting for the Grey Falcon. The bastard never showed.
CHAPTER 21
14 August, Cairns, Queensland:
528 species
We not only missed out on the Grey Falcon, but also other important birds such as Rufous Fieldwren, Inland Dotterel and Flock Bronzewing. By the time we set up camp alongside the permanent waters of Cullyamurra Waterhole on the banks of Cooper’s Creek Dave was uncharacteristically quiet. I told him, ‘It’s a good thing you got me that Hudwit in March or else I’d be seriously calling your creditability into question.’ His only response was, ‘You see, Marco, this is why you should never travel with a Victorian. They’re a bloody jinx.’ Marco, who is Swiss, wasn’t buying into the argument and merely replied, ‘I think you are both crazy.’
What Marco’s earnest Swiss sensibility failed to pick up was that despite our baiting of each other, Dave and I get on exceptionally well. Actually born a Pom (with links, he claims, back to Gilbert White, one of the first naturalists in print with his delightful The Natural History of Selborne published in 1789), Dave comes across like an ocker Australian. He’s one of the few birders my father would have hit it off with. And as much as I stir him, the fact is the reason we weren’t seeing the birds he normally sees on this part of the Strzelecki is that it was such an extraordinarily dry season that away from the permanent waters of the Cooper there was not much for birds to survive on.
The Cooper is as wide as the Murray at this point and so deep here that the waterhole has never been known to dry out. Sitting by its banks is an incredibly peaceful experience. This is where the ill-fated Burke and Wills saw out the last days of their disastrous 1861 expedition. Having made it back from some of the most desolate land in the country, they slowly perished here surrounded by plenty of game, fish and water due to Burke’s pig-headed refusal to accept the help of the local Aboriginal people. I could think of worse places to see out your days. Suddenly I felt tired and could easily have stayed here for a week or longer but time was moving on.
My original plan had been to accompany Marco and Dave onto the Birdsville Track, picking up Flock Bronzewing and Grey Grasswren, amongst others, before heading up into western Queensland, but I realised that would take me too far west to see Hall’s Babbler so I only accompanied them for half a day or so into the parched country north of Innamincka, where again we had no luck. I parted company with them near Leap Year Bore and as they drove off in a plume of red dust I realised I was alone again. Just me and the enormity of the Outback. For about half an hour I had to focus all my mental energy on not chasing after them.
Yet again I spent another night alone in the Outback but for the first time I found the isolation disquieting. Maybe the camaraderie of the past few days triggered a desire not to be alone anymore. Maybe having knocked off one sizeable chunk of the country my body felt like the trip should be coming to an end when in reality it was only beginning. In the past month I had driven almost eight thousand kilometres; in the coming month I expected to be driving just as far. I should have been excited: I had just passed the five hundred mark and had the whole of Queensland, the most bird-rich state in the country, stretching before me, yet part of me just wanted to go home.
That feeling grew stronger over the next few days. I camped by a dry little watercourse called Candradecka Creek that hardly rates a mention on any of the maps, and all night I was unable to shake an unsettling feeling of being surrounded by malevolence. Normally as the darkness of the night closes in I can reason away such irrational thoughts; that night I couldn’t.
After a fitful sleep I rose before dawn for another stakeout for Flock Bronzewing. They failed to show, as did the Grey Falcon, which had been reported from this area. To make matters worse, I later heard from Dave and Marco that the next night whilst camped by a waterhole near Birdsville they had a phenomenal forty thousand Flock Bronzewings come in to drink. I would have settled for just one.
Back at Innamincka the waterhole on the Cooper was still several metres deep. Even though it had hardly rained here for years, the creek was still teeming with life courtesy of monsoonal rains that had fallen several months earlier in the Gulf Country many hundreds of kilometres away. The wildlife follows the water. Big flocks of Cockatiels and budgies and corellas came in to drink before heading out onto the parched plains to pick through the deserted seeds of the previous boom times. Pelicans and cormorants and herons fed on the fish that had gathered in these residual pools waiting for the next big flush of water from the north.
And like the wildlife, the water attracts all sorts of people. This was my second visit to Innamincka, having headed up this way the previous year in a sort of dry run for the Big Twitch. I had come from the Queensland side, travelling for fourteen hours from Cunnamulla over six hundred kilometres of bone-shattering corrugations. By the time I rolled into Innamincka it had been dark for two hours. I was completely knackered to the point of delirium and all I wanted was a bed to fall into. If it did occur to me that there were an awful lot of cars in the carpark for a remote Outback pub, I was too tired to dwell on it. I opened the door of the hotel to be greeted by the beaming face of Dick Smith, adventurer, entrepreneur and Australia’s most famous nerd. Before I could process any of this information properly he thrust his manic dial right up to mine and enthused, ‘Are you one of us?!’
‘One of us?’ I thought, startled. ‘Oh my God, it’s true. Dick Smith really is a pod person.’
What he actually meant was whether I was with the charity car rally he was involved in. The inn was full as was the dining room and I had to eat my dinner in the midst of the celebrity auction. Dick Smith was running about like an excited toddler cajoling all the middle-aged businessmen to put in a bid for the items. I left when Dick started getting way too excited about a life-sized Elle Macpherson poster.
I was chatting to a guy outside near my car when I noticed all the rally participants spilling from the pub. Just then a four-wheel drive decked out in flashing coloured lights started doing burnouts in the carpark with a guy in a harness performing gymnastic tricks off the back of the car. This was all getting far too surreal for me so I decided to leave. At that precise moment the first of the fireworks started. The guy I had been talking to was the pyrotechnician. Right where I was standing he had laid out his incendiary devices and they were going off in a series of exceptionally loud explosions. Through the flashing lights, smell of gunpowder and overwhelming cacophony, there was Dick Smith in an apoplexy of excitement. Fourteen hours of absolute solitude then this. I was in hell. But even then I knew I would have revenge on Dick, for I knew that if one day I could break the Australian birdwatching record and then write a book about it, I could knock Dick Smith off his perch as Australia’s number one nerd. Oh God, shoot me now.
Happily Innamincka was far quieter on my second visit, though it was busy compared to the road to Tibooburra. On three hundred-plus kilometres of track I passed just four vehicles. The countryside was even drier than it had been the previous year and there were far fewer birds. I only stopped a couple of times, including once atop a large sand dune where I managed to find another pair of Eyrean Grasswrens, this time without having to drop my trousers.
At Cameron’s Corner, the point where the states of Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia meet, I brought out the footy. Physics has never been my strong point so it took me several attempts to work out how to kick the ball from South Australia into New South Wales then curl it around into Queensland until it eventually landed back in South Australia. But I finally did it –
perhaps the first tri-state kick in history?
Tibooburra, in the extreme northwestern corner of New South Wales, is one of those great little Outback towns that still retain a frontier feel. Remnants of its old mining past lay strewn on the outskirts of town. Rugged hills of red boulders surround the town and further out the even redder gibber plains are interrupted by the flat topped mesas of the ‘jump-up country’. The motel room was most welcome, though dipping out yet again on Flock Bronzewing and Grey Falcon was not. Sadly, I had no time for a sleep-in as I needed to get to Wompah Gate on the Queensland border by dawn to have a crack at Grey Grasswren.
This was the point at which my Big Twitch trial run had come horribly unstuck the year before. At that stage I didn’t have a four-wheel drive and managed to completely trash the underside of the Toyota Cressida I had inherited from my father. There are some serious boulders and potholes on the road to Wompah Gate and even with the high clearance of the Cruiser I was worried about doing my loved one some damage. For, yes, I have to admit it, and I never thought it would happen to me, but I had become one of those guys who is in love with his car. I still didn’t know my sparks from my elbow, but God I love driving the thing. Sometimes as I drove along I was overcome with a sense of wellbeing and just had to give the dashboard an affectionate pat. There would be plenty of opportunities to wear the dash down to nothing in the coming weeks as I drove across the entire length of Queensland – roughly equivalent to travelling from Paris to Moscow or from New York to Texas without ever leaving the same state.
But first there was the small matter of the Grey Grasswren. This time I was determined not to dip out but when I crossed the dingo-proof fence at Wompah Gate and entered Queensland, I was in for a major disappointment. Grey Grasswrens live only in the remote lignum swamps of the Outback. There are very few easily accessible points into this sort of habitat, the road through Pyampa Station on the Queensland–New South Wales border being one. In recent years birders reported good numbers here, but as I pulled up at the site the full impact of the drought in this part of the world fully hit me. I was expecting to be greeted with a picturesque vista – a lovely old windmill by a full dam in a vast sea of green lignum, but what had once been a vast overflow was now a desolate, dry, dusty plain. The dam was almost dry and on it the stinking carcass of a cow lay rotting in the drying mud. There was not a blade of vegetation within cooee of the dam, a result of the lack of rain and the voracious appetites of the cattle and kangaroos that had been coming in to drink the last of the dam’s waters.
The first stands of lignum were several hundred metres away. Lignum grows in thick tangled clumps on inland wetlands, the foliage more like spindly twigs than leaves. In poor seasons it dies off, only to bloom into life come the next flood. The pathetic clumps of lignum that clung to drainage lines here looked like they were well beyond resuscitating and I had to walk several kilometres into the sepulchral swamp before I came across any half-decent habitat. Every step I took across this desolate plain raised a puff of grey dust which the morning breeze started to blow around in eddies.
This was the most dispiriting day of the year so far. After today I wouldn’t be in the Grey Grasswrens’ range for the rest of the year, so if I missed it, that was it. I was convinced I wasn’t going to get it and the thought of staying overnight only blackened my mood. To fail at this first hurdle meant I would have to find one extra species somewhere further down the track and if I couldn’t get this first difficult one, and there would be plenty more just as hard, then why even bother?
Despairing but pressing on grimly, eventually I heard a hopeful tinkle. (‘Hopeful Tinkle’ – a good biography title for a man recovering from prostate surgery). Hearing is one thing; seeing is an altogether more difficult prospect. Over the next hour the slowest chase in history ensued with me on my hands and knees, down amongst the grey powdery dust and cattle dung and roo pellets, peering into the impenetrable lignum bushes hoping for a glimpse. A movement caught my eye and I got an almost subliminal view of something darting to another bush. Somehow the birds got around behind me and ten minutes later a pair made a quick flight across twenty metres of open terrain to the next cover. Streaky backs, chunky trailing tails and a distinctive black moustachial stripe, there was no doubt they were Grey Grasswrens.
I stooged around for another half an hour with no further sign of the grasswrens. The wind had picked up, the sun was beating down and I had had enough of the shitty place. I’d had a view that allowed me to see enough of their salient features to identify these birds as Grey Grasswrens, although I never really got a sense of the birds’ essence. Bugger it, I’d had it. The bird went down in the list as number 503 and it was onward to the next tick.
My sense of despair refused to lift, perhaps a reflection of the landscape I was driving through. To get to the lush northeast of the state I had to pass through its dry heart that had been devastated by drought. Leaving the desolate gibber rises I entered the broad sweep of the Bulloo River flats which were equally desolate, every blade of grass gone. Great drifts of sand had formed along fence-lines, blown in from the bare paddocks.
After all these years of trying to farm the land with European techniques you’d think we would have cottoned by now – when there is no rain the first thing that goes is the grass. Even if the drought is so dire that it kills the deeper rooted trees and shrubs, they will still stand for many years, their roots holding the soil in place. Take out the trees and shrubs and, come the first big dry, you’ll have nothing but bare earth, which will very quickly blow away. A pretty simple demonstration of cause and effect, one would have thought, yet in this most drought prone of lands we are still taking out the trees and shrubs at an alarming rate. Driving through the ripped-out guts of Queensland it was astonishing to see kilometre after kilometre of bare paddocks with nothing on them – a legacy of the panic clearing of the late nineties, when the government mooted putting a moratorium on broadscale destruction of native vegetation.
It made for depressing driving, exacerbated by the amount of dead wildlife rotting by the side of the road. I gave up trying to count roo carcasses per kilometre after my first three counts tallied seventeen, twenty-three and twenty-seven. Instead I tried to remember the name of every kid in my year at school, but that eventually depressed me even more so I started to count dead Emus. That took more skill as I could travel for as many as twenty kilometres between piles of feathers. The Emu is either less common or much smarter than the kangaroo. Perhaps it is just quicker at dodging road trains. It was like this for the best part of a week as I made my way through towns that sound like they were named out of Outback central casting – Thargomindah, Cunnamulla, Augathella (Home of the Meat Ant, according to the town sign) and Muttaburra (home to the Muttaburrasaurus, complete with a life-sized model).
Throughout all this death, gloom and carnage there were a few highlights, though. A patch of flowering Coolabah trees near Thargomindah that yielded hundreds of woodswallows and a few Painted Honeyeaters, a rare bird that I had missed down south over the summer and one that I really needed.
I finally picked up Hall’s Babbler on ‘Bowra’, a working sheep and cattle property just outside Cunnamulla run by Ian and Julie McLaren, though I managed to dip out on Chestnut-breasted Quail-thrush and yet another Grey Falcon as well as picking up another puncture out on the backblocks.
And so, just shy of forty days in the desert, I drove up to the lookout on Mount Stuart on the outskirts of Townsville and gazed longingly at the ocean. To steal a line from David Andrew, former editor of Australian Birding, I felt like I was a birding Moses, looking out over the Land of Milk and Honeyeaters. For birders, the northeast of Queensland is indeed the Promised Land. More birds squeeze into its rainforests, reefs, swamps and woodlands than in any other part of the country.
I was especially pleased to have hit the coast at Townsville as it holds a very important place in my personal story. My mother was an only child but she bonded so closely with her
cousin Kay that they were more like sisters. For the first seven years of my life Kay and her family lived next door to us. My cousin Michael, though five years older, was my closest friend and I was devastated when Kay’s husband Frank moved them up to Townsville for work and to be closer to their eldest son. Over the years I visited often, to go birding as well as to catch up with family, and Townsville became a second home.
I hadn’t actually been there since 1991 when I drove up from Melbourne with my Mum. Not exactly Kerouac, but a road trip nonetheless. Frank had died a couple of years earlier and Kay was in the final stages of breast cancer. In the eleven years since, Townsville had kicked on – in places it was almost unrecognisable. It was like seeing a family member for the first time in years: they might look different but there is a familiar resonance to their presence. The huge mango tree in the backyard of Kay and Frank’s Housing Commission place had been cut down to make way for a subdivision. It had obviously been sold to a private developer and I noticed the washhouse that had been home to a family of Green Tree Frogs was also gone. Like the frogs, any traces of the people who once lived there had been obliterated, covered up with a fresh coat of paint and some aluminium cladding.
I could happily have rested up in Townsville, but I was due in the Torres Strait in a week’s time so after a day of replacing tyres, doing washing and sending emails, I was off moving ever further north, picking up as many ticks in a couple of days as I had over the previous month. By the time I reached Cairns I’d had but a taste of the delights of the tropics. There were Spotted Catbirds, Macleay’s Honeyeaters and Grey-headed Robins in the rainforests. A dazzling male Victoria’s Riflebird gave a bravura performance, flashing his iridescent velvet blues and blacks as he celebrated stealing a scone from my plate at the Ivy Cottage Tea Rooms in the little village of Paluma. There were Crimson Finches on the edge of the canefields and Green Pygmy-geese in the wetlands. A pair of Beach Stone-curlew circled noisily around my budget motel room in Cairns at night.