Articles > Up the Bumpy River Road

If commonsense had anything to do with it, the Gibb River Road would never have been built. The 664km road was gouged out in the 1960s to cater to cattle stations that have no earthly business being at the top of Western Australia. The parched land is hard on the beasts and the Beef Road, as it was called then, was rough and in the wet season not even ready.

So really it was a jolly good thing when a sealed road going roughly in the same direction was completed in the mid 80s. The Great Northern Highway might be longer than the Gibb River Road by several hundred kilometres but it’s still faster.

The blessed highway took road trains longer-than-an-airport-runway and their gruesome road-kill out of the picture and left the cattle track to the people who really appreciate it: the self-punishing, self-drive maniacs. We’re all mad.

The photographer and I have visions of travelling the long and winding road listening to CDs, stopping intermittently to take artsy shots and talk to gnarly characters along the way. We are persuaded, well more like forcibly marched on to a 4WD with a guide, by the tourism folk and thank god for that. It doesn’t take us free spirits long to realise the CDs would have been spat out of the player on the first bump, we’d never hear the music over the rattling of the vehicle and the distances are so vast and so taxing we’d never have time to stop. Plus without local knowledge we would have missed the sensational rock art.

So okay they were right. You can do it yourself but it takes time, a special vehicle, truckloads of food and water and masses of research.

So instead we are in the 4WD listening to the wheels on the bus going round and round. And thumping up and down. And flinging us every which way.

Most of us would call it a bone-shaker but to one German woman it is, she declares cheerfully, “a real boob shaker.” Fortunately I don’t have such big bosoms.

Technically the Gibb River Road goes from Derby to the Wyndham turn-off but to get to Derby you have to drive on a sealed road from Broome. We consider giving the guide our CDs on this section but come to the conclusion that no one but us is likely to appreciate Joanna Newsome or Arcade Fire and, besides, the guide is in full verbal stride.

He tells us the road was so-named because it went to the Gibb River Station while the moniker Gibb remembers a chap who surveyed the region. Other names in the area have much more prosaic origins. Mt Elizabeth is named after an explorer’s mother, Bell Creek after a local doctor, Adcock Creek recalls a storekeeper and Galvan’s Gorge a grader driver.

Our guide then gives us more reasons to hate cattle. They ate all the native bamboo, altered the landscape irrevocably in just 130 years and don’t even make proper money. The original short horned and long horned cattle have now been interbred with the more drought resistant Brahmin but the meat is still only good for curries or stews. Just over half of the Kimberley is in pastoral lease but only 10 per cent of that is considered good grazing. You need at least 10,000 cattle to come close to being viable. But what you need most are people. Most cattle stations have turned to tourism to turn a dollar.

However we are not staying at cattle stations. We are booked into wilderness camps which are really enclaves of semi-permanent tents in the middle of bloody nowhere staffed inevitably by middle-aged Australian couples wanting to get away from the city and embrace the outback.

And why the hell not? She’s a beautiful country out there. A country roughly the size of Switzerland and, apart from the cattle, still largely untouched and untrammelled. Much of the Kimberley only opened up to the world when the roads were built less than 50 years ago.

She’s a fierce and biblical land, though, with floods, droughts, fires and blistering heat painted in colours just as uncompromising and stark. Basically there’s just two hues – rust red and cobalt. Earth and sky. Though often the light alters both, giving us a full palette of reds and oranges, and in the evening scenes come out of a Tuscan dream when the air is filled, you would think, with golden dust-motes.

She’s also biblical in her history – Old Testament definitely – full of blood and sorrow and characters larger than life and situations that can only be described as surreal.

In Derby there are the remains of the leprosarium where the nuns formed a classical orchestra playing Wagner, Beethoven and Mozart to ease the isolation and boredom of patients.

South of Derby is the Boab Prison Tree. These bottle-like trees are said to be immortal by aborigines and our guide concedes he’s never seen a dead boab. This one is reckoned to be over 1500 years old with a girth of 14m and a hollow trunk and looks as sad and tormented as its history, for it was once used as a resting place or prison by blackbirders – settlers who captured aboriginal people for the pearling industry. Prisoners were also held here en route to Old Derby Gaol.

Derby and our next stops, Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek, were also the setting for the legendary exploits of the outlaw aboriginal tracker Jandamarra. His is one of the few tales of armed resistance against the European colonizers. Initially Jandamarra worked with police tracking and capturing aboriginal people who were spearing sheep. But in 1894 his aboriginal loyalty got the better of him and he shot a police colleague, freed captured tribesmen and lead a band of dissident people who evaded search parties for almost three years. The aboriginal tracker who eventually killed him shot Jandamarra in the thumb because he said that’s where his spirit lived.

Barefoot Jandamarra knew the 750m long Tunnel Creek well enough to vanish into the shadows. We need a torch and thick soled shoes to cope.

At Windjana Gorge all we see are freshwater crocs floating motionless in the river, sunning themselves apparently, while archer fish send out arcs of water to knock out unsuspecting insects.

Both were once part of an ancient ‘great barrier reef’ 350 million years ago. In fact the entire Kimberley is a geologist’s dream boasting numerous tessellated this and sandstone that and that’s all I want to say on the matter. Mostly the land is flat but when it’s not it is more table top than mountain peak and not so much rising as crumbling away. It’s also pocked with staggering gorges and delicious waterfalls and waterholes, all of which I swear we swim in on this eight-day trip.

We also stop at all the roadhouses en route and suck slowly on the alcohol we have brought with us since there’s nowhere to buy extra supplies until we reach Kununurra.

We become adept at recognising woolly butt, the quinine plant, bachelor buttons, jinggal trees and the rosella bush. They almost make up for the wildlife I reliably miss seeing out the window. Apparently there are black cockatoos with red feathers in the tail, small wallabies, frilled lizards, kites and brolgas. I wouldn’t know.

Eventually we enter country known as having the highest concentration of palm trees in Australia. The Livistona Eastonii palms are a blue-green in colour and only grow where there is bauxite in the soil. But where there is bauxite there is aluminium mining, fortunately not in operation at the moment. Mining removes the bauxite-rich top soil and where it’s been done elsewhere it has extinguished all the palms.

The Kimberley may not have been a land of plenty for cattle but it had been for centuries for aborigines, especially along the coast. The rock art we view at Mitchell Plateau on our walk to the multi-tiered Mitchell Falls is in the nature of a menu board featuring edible fish and birds and lizards.

Here we see the distinctive Wandjina for the first time. Wandjina is a style of art, a creation god and a relatively recent religion dating back only 600 to 1000 years. In this part of the Kimberley the people believe Wandjina and Winggur (sacred snakes) created the world. Wandjina are usually represented by black eyes, a black nose, no mouth and a halo of radiating lines. Wandjina have immense power over water. Offend a Wandjina and you risk lightning, rain and cyclones.

The art is believed to be the shadows of Wandjina imprinted on the walls and each clan had their own Wandjina they were responsible for retouching. You can only paint your own Wandjina. Our guide tells us of a misguided government initiative which resulted in non-clan people touching up Wandjina art with Dulux paint. Local people said the act would bring on the death of the artists concerned. All seven died soon after.

But the real mystery surrounds Gwion Gwion art, also known as Bradshaw paintings.

I have been looking forward to viewing this rock art since hearing, admittedly in snatches, an interview on National Radio about the pre-aboriginal art in the Kimberley called the Bradshaw paintings. I understood this art was looked after by the Bradshaw Foundation and I even checked out their website – www.bradshawfoundation.com.

All of which I think should qualify me for girly swot status but in fact marks me as an ethno-centric fascist.

To even call the paintings Bradshaw art is akin to naming Israel ‘Hitlerland’ says a guide I meet later in disgust. Joseph Bradshaw may have been the pastoralist who found the unusual style of rock art in the 1891 but he was also responsible for killing many aborigines. Not surprisingly aborigines prefer the work to be called by its aboriginal name - Gwion Gwion.

Also the Bradshaw Foundation suggests the art was possibly 50,000 years old and pre-aboriginal which means aborigines were not the first inhabitants of Australia. This is not a view shared by aborigines and many academics. Even their statement that the most accurate dating methods so far put it at 17,500 years is contentious. This art is so old the pigment has become part of the rock’s surface so it is impossible to use traditional carbon dating technology. Other academics reckon it is more likely to be 6000 years old.

But as far as the local people are concerned these dates are of no account. To them, the delicate and elegant and detailed works have been painted by birds which pecked at the rocks until their beaks bled and then created the paintings by using a tail feather and their own blood.

Many of the best Gwion Gwion works are located on Theda cattle station which is closed to the general public and even most academics. Although the station has a pastoral lease its main focus is the preservation by isolation of the rock art. The station is distinctive for its long grasses since unlike the other stations in the area it does not practice controlled burning.

The rest of the Kimberley has to be an arsonist’s fantasy, since deliberately lit fires on the side of the road are everywhere, but all in a good cause. A little now to prevent a lot later.

Even though Theda has the best Gwion Gwion work there is still plenty for us to view along the way. The figures have been compared to Matisse’s dancers for their lightness and vigour and the images do not disappoint. This is art for art’s sake and tells us the land here was once so rich and plentiful it allowed people time to paint.

The ones we see were likely to have been painted with ochre, blood and the sap of black orchids – a mixture which reads rather like a romance writer’s creation.

Kimberley’s Gwion Gwion rock art is at least as good as the rock art in the Lascaux caves in France says our guide and having seen those works I have to agree.

Our last stop takes us from the sublime to the ridiculous. El Questro station has taken the tourist initiative to another level. Another failed cattle station, it was named for a previous owner’s love of Westerns. After a series of owners, the one million acres was bought for AU$1 million by an ambitious, and luckily, wealthy, Englishman, who turned it into a tourist spectacular before selling it to the Voyages Group.

The station still has 5000 head of cattle but really it is a tourist mecca for all budgets. At the upper end there’s El Questro Homestead which caters to 12 guests for about AU$1200 per person a night. Then there’s the wilderness park which is home to the Emma Gorge Resort where we stay in luxury tented cabins and finally the station township with bungalows and a campsite. The whole thing is a bit faux and theme-parkish but done so well it’s almost forgivable.

El Questro also has wondrous gorges and waterfalls and even a thermal stream called Zebedee Creek surrounded by those magical Livistona palms and populated by little butterflies. Pity we are only permitted to swim here till midday when it becomes the exclusive domain of the homestead guests.

But we are not complaining. For the first time in eight days we have our own toilet and shower and the delights of a bar as well as the company of the world’s geriatrics.

A line-up of big tourist buses outside the dining area tells us our journey is coming to an end. Tarmac is in sight and the bones and boobs will soon rest easy. All the same I’m glad the government has promised to keep the Gibb unsealed.

Eight days on the Gibb River road come to an end at the Wyndham Road turn-off. It is one of the only times the driver has to use the indicator. We take commemorative photos of the signs but don’t feel like we’ve really said goodbye until we get to Kununurra. To get there we pass through Wyndham and ignoring the downbeat nature of the town, marvel at the views from the Five Rivers Lookout.

Kununurra looks positively urban after a week on the road and the consumers among us celebrate by buying more t-shirts (apparently Kununurra is famous for its good value) and books at the terrific bookstore while the rest of us check emails and reconnect with lost friends and family.

I haven’t bought a thing mainly because I couldn’t find the only souvenir I really wanted of the Gibb River road. God only knows why. Some enterprising soul would do a great trade on those gorgeous long horns if they had the sense to sell them.

No good on the land. Great on a wall.


Fact File

Getting there: Fly to Broome or Darwin depending on where you start.

When: Dry Season only. Ideal between May to August.

How? Cheapest option is The Gibb River Express. This excellent bus service allows you to hop on and hop off along the way and a ticket is valid for three months.

Otherwise you can self-drive in a hired van with all the gear or tag-along in your own vehicle behind someone else in a tour. Or be driven in a small tour (four people in a vehicle with a guide, camping en-route) or a bigger tour like APT where you are fed, watered and sleep in real beds. Bookings essential.

Accommodation: Unless you do a tour you’ll be camping. Or you can stay at a APT wilderness camp for bed and breakfast in a comfortable but still wild setting , but be sure to book ahead.

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