Here we are in a quiet campsite just some three hundred miles north of Melbourne. Three hundred miles was our daily target on this trip, although as mentioned before we did not intend to actually travel three hundred miles every day.
Later today, (it’s 5am on the twentieth) we shall set off on a short ‘stroll’ along the southern coastal highway, taking in the Great Ocean Road doing not more than one hundred miles on any of the four days we have left before we hand our van back on the 24th. We then have three nights in a hotel, where I had initially intended to compose this catchup.
Lying in our van with this storm raging around us, there was no chance of much more sleep and my head became filled with the wonders of this trip. The greatest wonder of which, was the sheer vastness of this continent. It would probably have been ‘sensible’ to have concentrated one just one of the many fascinating areas, or even one of the territories. We may have even seen more, but never would we have experienced this whole continent and it’s many lands. The days on end of never ending, constantly changing bush with it’s wonderfully spindly gum trees, charred, sometimes burnt to death by the fires that often rage across this landscape. The vast expanses of salt lake, the very greatest of which -Lake Eyre- we unfortunately couldn’t reach in our two-wheel-drive delivery van. If only we could have reached it we would have seen it teeming with the birdlife that go there each year as the rainy season fills it with both water and life. On our trip, however, we saw many wonders and have no regrets about those we didn’t get to. Although I guess, when into your mind pops ‘next time’, it has to be a sign of some sort of regret.
I only wish we could have made a journal entry for every night we slept in the bush even the most ‘insignificant stops like our first one at Mambray Creek. You may not wild camp in most of Australia, but those wild places set aside as a Rest Area, where you may spend a night or maybe two, are wild enough, even when your provided with a long drop toilet and a shelter to picknick under. On this occasion we stopped at a creek - with water in it and even fisherman at it. On our journey we crossed many hundreds of ‘creeks’ and ‘rivers’, even the odd ‘burn’. Most of them, even those crossed by great bridges, had not a single drop of water to be seen. It was hard to imagine these great watercourses (there was no doubt that that is what they are in some other season) as rivers, rivers that even burst their banks and turn whole swathes of land into vast flood-planes.
Some of them retained great pools of water, like our Mambray Creek where you could fish or even swim, or they surged up out of the ground as wonderful springs. Around Edith Falls in the Nitmiluk National Park, we bathed in the warm waters of such a surging spring at Mataranka, where a river appears whole, straight from the ground. Nothing like those tiny springs that grow into great rivers. It’s not a geothermal spring, but nonetheless warm and invigorating. Also in the lake formed by the Edith River, but that was to be the last time we could avail ourselves of that opportunity for a swim. Not because there were to be no more such bodies of water, just that swimming with the crocodiles isn’t really our thing. Even at Edith Falls you cannot swim at night, because there are fresh water crocodiles there. Those are relatively harmless, although I imagine there could be a circumstance where you could frighten one enough for it to leave you ‘armless’ - or at least give you a nasty bite!
As we travelled further north, the very real danger was from another member of the crocodile family this one grows much bigger, probably even to a size where you’re the snack, not just your arm or leg. People do get eaten by these big ‘salties’, so named because they are estuarine crocodiles. Although the government makes every attempt to keep them in the estuaries through trapping and re-locating them, the big floods give them the opportunity to seek out new feeding grounds, and they do. When I arrived in Katherine in 1998 or 1999, the town had been under six feet of water or more. During the cleanup, after the floodwaters had receded, they found a massive estuarine crocodile in the local supermarket - I’m sure he wasn’t looking for bread. We did encounter them on our trip, but from the safety of a boat cruising the Yellow River, or the vast area of interconnecting billabongs formed by the yellow river. We hope to post our photos from there when we get back to Melbourne.
There’s so much more. After days of that vast changing wilderness - sometimes trees, at others mostly just shrubs, then a sea of termites mounds, ever changing their shapes and formations at each new vista where they appeared. You would then happen upon these vast geological formations, the greatest of which must surely be Uluru formerly known as ‘Ayres Rock’.
This vast rock, which is what it is, a vast boulder that emerges out of the desert, that like an iceberg has twice as much again submerged under the sand. The words don’t convey the immensity of this great natural wonder. When I was here last the Australian Government was requesting that people refrain from climbing out of respect for the spiritual significance of this place for the indigenous people, commonly known collectively as the ‘aboriginies’, a name that does a great disservice to this vast nation of different tribes and peoples occupying their different ‘Lands’ that made up this vast continent, for many thousands of years before Europeans arrived. It took another twenty years before the Australian government dismantled the handrails and actually banned climbing Uluru. Returning this place of great spiritual significance to it’s rightful owners.
I’ll finish now, but perhaps I’ll return with some musings on the many wonders and wonderful places. Those less imposing Granite formations that thrust themselves from the otherwise flat landscape: Karlu Karlu (The Devils Marbles), the great gorge of the Murchison River with it’s ‘nature’s window’, the phenomenal Pinnacles Desert just north of Perth and the Nullarbor itself. Not only is the Nullarbor the backdrop to the Great Australian Bight with it’s protected marine park, a welcome home for breeding whales who migrate here to calve in it’s warmer waters, but also under it’s bleak lanscape are vast networks of limestone caves with their underground lakes and rivers (‘next time’?).
Failing that, we’ll try to caption some of our photos and you can look up more factual descriptions than ours would be.
