by Sean Dooley
Before I headed back down to Cairns I had a chinwag with Ron Stannard, the owner of Kingfisher Park. I hadn’t seen much of Ron when I was through here in September as he was down with Ross River fever. Even now he wasn’t quite back to full strength. Filling him in on my progress I lamented that I’d have to wait until I was back around Christmas to get Blue-faced Parrot-Finch and Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher. Ron was as surprised as all the other birders had been seeing the finches up on Mount Lewis. All the others except me, who dipped on this species yet again. He also told me that a pair of kingfishers had been hanging around the orchard for about a week. A quick trip there was enough for an encounter with this exceptionally cute little kingfisher.
Ron also mentioned that Dion Hobcroft had flown up from Sydney and was out at the wheatear site. I decided to say g’day to Dion, who had put me up during my lightning visit to Sydney for the Canada Goose, but when I got there there was no sign of the bird or of Dion. Once I was back in Western Australia I discovered he’d been over at the Freckled Duck dam finding not only them, but also a Grey Wagtail, yet another bird I hadn’t included on my initial list. It hurt. It hurt bad.
Is it human nature in general or the mindset of the twitcher in particular that makes it almost impossible for me to think about that mad dash across the country without grieving for what I missed out on? I got to see one of the most remarkable records in Australian birding history – and am, in fact, the only birder to have both the wheatear and the Blue-and-white Flycatcher –but whenever I think of that time the spectre of the missed Grey Wagtail haunts me. Maybe it’s just me. Even though Collingwood won a premiership in 1990, I still ache over the 1970 Grand Final loss to Carlton, and I was barely two at the time. I’m sure that’s the attitude that makes a twitcher – moments after seeing a new bird, they are thinking about the next one.
CHAPTER 31
29 November, Kununurra, Western Australia:
674 species
They call it the build-up. After a long dry season the heat builds and builds. So does the humidity. For weeks, if not months, it is unrelenting. To be outside for more than a few minutes is totally enervating. The whole atmosphere is tense, waiting for something to break as each night fierce electrical storms gather and blast out across the country. Some years it feels like the monsoon will never come.
Also known as suicide season, this is the time of year when the people living in this oppressive environment reflect the tension in the atmosphere and start to ‘go troppo’. It is an annual race to see who will crack first, the weather or the people. And it is into this cauldron that I return for the final long leg of the Big Twitch.
On the plane on the way back to Broome I sat next to a bloke who I studied law with. I suppose if I had actually turned up to lectures I would have remembered his face. His name is Tom Cannon and, unlike me, he actually went on and did something useful with his law degree. After working for the Aboriginal Legal Service in the Kimberley he went into private practice representing mainly Aboriginal clients in personal injury cases, earning him the nickname ‘Smash and Bash Cannon’. In the past, if a Blackfella was injured in an accident that wasn’t their fault they would be bandaged up and sent on their way, very rarely getting any of the compensation a Whitefella would expect to receive as a matter of course. Tom’s role in enlightening the local Aborigines to the full extent of their rights had not made him the most popular boy in town.
By the time we landed he had roped me into videoing evidence for him in a case where one of his clients had injured himself in a fall. The business owner whose negligence had created the conditions for the fall had been dismissive of the injured man’s claims. But when ‘Smash and Bash’ the big city lawyer turned up with me carrying a broadcast-quality camera to film witness statements and the site of the incident, you could see him almost wetting himself in the realisation that this thing could no longer be swept under the carpet. At least my camera had come in useful for something.
Eventually I was off, and heading back up the Gibb River Road, reputed to be the worst road in Australia at absolutely the most horrid time to travel it. There are a lot of good birds in the Kimberley; it is, after all, one of the last great frontiers, a vast expanse of virtually untouched woodland the size of many European countries. And there is one species of bird that is only found here and nowhere else, the Black Grasswren, and only one regular, accessible location for this species: Mitchell Falls. When I say accessible, it lies almost three hundred kilometres from the Gibb River Road.
All year I had worried that this was where my strategy would fall apart. When I arrived at the turnoff the road was looking good, but there was a roadblock and a sign saying the road was closed as of 1 November. What I hadn’t counted on was that the authorities, sick of rescuing stranded tourists cut off by the arrival of the wet, had put a blanket ban on travel along the road without a permit. I could have made a run for it, hoping I wouldn’t get caught and fined, but there was always the chance the rains would really kick in and leave me stranded without anybody knowing I was there. On top of that, it was a 750-kilometre round trip from the nearest fuel stop. Though my long-range fuel tanks usually provided me with around a thousand kilometres, I’d be engaging four-wheel drive for most of the journey and that might use more juice than normal. I’d be playing Russian roulette as to whether I’d make it out. In conditions where the mercury reaches forty degrees and the humidity eighty-five per cent, this was not somewhere I wanted to break down by myself.
My only option for Black Grasswren was to try Mount Elizabeth Station where they had occasionally been recorded before. Peter Lacey, the owner of the property, said I was welcome to try but added that nobody had been out looking for them over the past few years. It is a fifty-kilometre drive along a very rough track from the Laceys’ homestead to the outlying sandstone escarpment where the birds are meant to reside. For two days I scrambled across the rocky outcrops, unshielded from the fierce tropical sun. I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard for a bird. After hauling myself up yet another rocky escarpment I wiped my hands over my face to clear away the sweat and in my cupped hands lay a pool of perspiration half an inch deep. I was going through water at the rate of three litres an hour. Thank Godwit I’d bought that refrigerator unit for the car as I could return to savour a cold drink every couple of hours.
It might have been hot but there were still birds about, mainly in the relative cool of the morning. Unlike me, they’re not idiots and they mostly shut up shop by about eight o’clock. I still managed to add some nice birds to the list here: White-quilled Rock-Pigeon, White-lined Honeyeater, Sandstone Shrike-thrush and Green-backed Gerygone. But no Black Grasswren. At one point in the middle of the day I paused to rest on a rocky outcrop. From the clump of spinifex next to me I swear I heard a grasswren give its high-pitched call but after waiting with baited breath for another half an hour there was not another peep. Perhaps I was in the first throes of heatstroke and suffering auditory hallucinations.
I had told the folks at Mount Elizabeth that I would only be out for two days and even though I was sorely tempted to stay out in that furnace to have another crack at the grasswrens, I didn’t want to be responsible for having a search party organised unnecessarily. For the first time in the year it looked like I had definitely been defeated by a bird.
By the time I arrived in Kununurra a couple of days later, however, I’d hatched a fresh plan. Having consulted Tony Palliser, who with another birder had taken similar action ten years earlier, I started to ring around the air charter companies. My plan was to hire a light plane to fly me out to the nearest airstrip to Mitchell Falls, walk the sixteen kilometres up to the plateau where the grasswrens are, tick them off then walk back down to be picked up the next day. Sure, in such searing temperatures and humidity there was a chance I might die in the attempt, but it was the only way I could possibly see this species now.
The hitch in the plan was the cost. When Tony did it ten years earlier it had
cost him and his mate about five hundred dollars all up. The cheapest I was quoted was two thousand. If the trip didn’t kill me it was going to make me bankrupt. I just couldn’t afford to blow the last of my budget on the one bird. As much as it stuck in my craw, I had to draw a line through any hope of seeing Black Grasswren.
At Kununurra I receive another, more welcome piece of news with the announcement of the birth of Tahlia Ann Dooley, my brother’s first child. Oh, how the tables had turned in our family dynamic. I was always the sensible one, Warwick the black sheep, always on the verge of some sort of trouble. As he lay dying my father said to me, ‘Do me a favour, Sean. Keep an eye out for your brother after I’m gone. Make sure he doesn’t piss his inheritance up against a wall.’ Warwick had since got a nice house, car and job, met a lovely woman and now had a beautiful daughter. Me, the supposedly sensible one, was off gallivanting around the country pissing his inheritance up against any wall he could find. I think Dad might have spoken to the wrong son about who needed keeping an eye on.
Not only were the finances tight but so too the window of opportunity for some of the birds I was after. The other critical species I needed to get before the wet season kicked in was the Gouldian Finch. Much reduced in numbers, they were very thinly spread across the vast area of their former range and encounters with them in the bush were very rare, though there was a far greater chance of seeing them in the dry season when they come in to drink at their favoured watering holes. One such hole was at the Wyndham Caravan Park but too much rain had already fallen and there were no finches of any persuasion at the caravan park.
I did find plenty of finches, including Yellow-rumped Mannikins on the irrigated agricultural plains just out of Kununurra. The town owes its existence to the Ord River Irrigation Scheme, one of those ‘nation building’ projects begun in the 1960s. Northern Australia’s answer to the Snowy River Scheme, the damming of the Ord River to create the massive Lake Argyle was the first step in a grand vision to turn the deserts green. This is a concept that is back in vogue, particularly with certain Sydney radio announcers and their mates, but it is interesting to note that after thirty years of government money being pumped into it, the Ord Scheme, though impressive, still hasn’t paid for itself.
While the inundation of such a vast area was probably not a plus for much of the local wildlife, it has been beneficial for a select few species, including my old nemesis the Little Bittern. Frank O’Connor assured me he had the spot for Little Bittern at Kununurra. He scribbled out a mud map for me when we were on the Torres Strait cruise but after four attempts at dusk and dawn I yet again had no luck. I was seriously regretting not going for it in Brisbane in February as I was running out of ideas for this species.
Frank had drawn me another mud map but there was no label on it telling me which species could be found there and after three months I couldn’t for the life of me remember what bird we’d been talking about but I decided I might as well check it out anyway. It was a patch of open woodland much like the surrounding hundred kilometres of open woodland. Perhaps Frank had seen Gouldian Finches, or maybe Pictorella Mannikin, another dry country finch. For all I knew Frank might have lost his keys here. I wandered tentatively about the area, and after about ten minutes a female Red-chested Button-quail flushed from below my feet, staying airborne a remarkably long time and allowing me a good look. To be honest I’d had no real idea where I was going to find this species so I was particularly grateful to Frank’s mud map. Then I notice on the ground a keyring with Frank’s initials. Turns out they weren’t his.
Actually that last bit’s not true. But the Red-chested Button-quail certainly is and I was so stoked that I pumped my fist in the air too emphatically and managed to throw out my back. I spent the rest of my time in Kununurra hobbling around like a binocular-carrying hunchback. Strangely, I seemed to fit right in.
Having had no luck anywhere with the Pictorella Mannikin I followed some advice from Tony Palliser, who said he’d seen them in drier country out near the Northern Territory border. I stopped for some finches that turned out to be Long-tailed Finch, and watched a male Spinifex Pigeon presenting his courtship display to a female who seemed mightily impressed with all that chest puffing. I was about to get back in the car when a slight movement further down the road caught my eye. Probably the Long-taileds. Then I heard what might have been mannikins calling further up the road. I was about to turn and chase them when I remembered that ‘bird in the hand’ saying and turned back to confirm the Long-taileds.
The image that focused in my bins was a male red-headed Gouldian Finch. It was joined by a female red-head and a black-headed male. I’d forgotten just how stunning these critters are in the flesh. One of the most incongruously beautiful birds going round, the colours are extraordinary: glorious greens, purples and yellows that manage to be exquisite without being gaudy. I say incongruous because they contrast wildly with the stark ochre colours of the harsh environment they live in. They were so beautiful it almost made me weep. Or perhaps that was from the sheer relief of happening across a bird I had all but written off. It never happens this way, just fluking on Gouldians. It had to be my lucky day. And to top it off, a few kilometres down the track I lucked onto some Pictorella Mannikins as well.
As I kicked the footy over another state border I couldn’t help but wonder how long my luck could hold. I might get as many as 705 if I saw everything possible. This was contingent on the weather as much as anything else. As I drove into the Northern Territory I passed all the waterholes where I had been planning to look for Gouldian Finch. With so much water lying about there was no way they would have been coming into drink at these places. The sheer improbability of my chance encounter with them near Kununurra seemed all the more miraculous.
It was the last day of November. One month, twenty-six species to go. Easy…Yeah, right.
CHAPTER 32
3 December, Kakadu National Park,
Northern Territory:
680 species
As I was driving through the Top End I heard on an ABC radio bulletin some news that rocked my world to its very foundation – Midnight Oil had split up. For twenty years the Oils had provided the soundtrack to my birdwatching life. One of the reasons I kept at birdwatching through my teen years (aside from an inherent nerdiness that just couldn’t be suppressed) was that twitching was about the most punk thing I had ever been involved in. Perhaps not quite as rebellious as growing a mohawk, putting a spike in your arm or throwing bottles at the police, but it was more exciting than anything else in my teenage world. While I could have spent the weekends hanging around in suburban lounge rooms drinking rocket fuel or smoking bongs and listening to bands like the Dead Kennedys, the Birthday Party and the Violent Femmes, it seemed to me far more radical and exciting to be out on road trips chasing rare birds and listening to the Dead Kennedys, the Birthday Party and the Violent Femmes.
And of all the bands that fuelled those all-night twitches across the countryside, the Oils were king. I guess it helped that they were one of the few bands with an environmental sensibility but, more importantly, they played some kick-arse rock’n’roll. A shared passion for the Oils had cemented my friendship with Puke and Groober as much as our mutual passion for birds. We tried to combine the two wherever possible. The first day I saw Regent Honeyeater at Chiltern was also the first time I heard the ‘Bird Noises’ EP on the crappy tape deck in Puke’s old Valiant. We commandeered Puke’s cousin’s farmhouse at Chiltern that hot January night to watch a live telecast of one of their concerts. I don’t know what his country cousins made of these young idiots spazzing it up around their lounge room in emulation of Peter Garrett’s epileptic dancing style. I think their parents used it as a cautionary tale of what happens to you when you go to the big smoke.
The Oils did an outdoor gig at Portarlington on the coast south of Melbourne. After a spot of wader watching on the way down we threw ourselves into the thick of the mosh pit during the gig. On the way h
ome we stopped, bruised and sweat encrusted, at a dodgy hamburger joint in Geelong, and we realised we were standing next to then Midnight Oil bassist Peter Gifford buying junk food while Garrett himself waited in the car. It was the first time I ever recall being star struck, apart from the day I met Roy Wheeler.
I remember being disappointed with their best-known album, Diesel and Dust, when I first heard it back in 1987 – too many acoustic guitars for my liking. It was only when I travelled through the Outback that I realised what genius that album showed. The red soil reverberated in every note. If you want an understanding of the Outback’s essence, drive the road from Coober Pedy to Marla with ‘Beds Are Burning’ cranked up loud and you’ll know what I am talking about.
The only song that betters anything else in terms of evoking a quintessentially Australian spirit is the Triffids’ ‘Wide Open Road’. Coming from Perth this band must have made the long haul across the Nullarbor to the east coast commercial centres innumerable times, and that song captures so brilliantly the essence of travelling across the Australian landscape, both physical and emotional – I hardly need to explain why it was easily my song of the year, though it wasn’t the song I heard most throughout the year. Unfortunately Kasey Chambers’ ‘Am I Not Pretty Enough’ won that gong. Every time I turned on a commercial radio station anywhere outside the cities that song would be playing. I just couldn’t get it out of my head. It drove me crazy. Possibly literally. Stocking up on supplies in the supermarket at Kununurra I found myself in the checkout queue singing about whether my heart was too broken – at full volume judging by the looks I got.