Biggest, Driest, Best: A Tour of the Southern Australian Outback by Yvonne Van Dongen
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Adelaide can tell its own story.
Its history is carved into the names, the statues, the parks and the buildings of this genteel, convict-free, grid-patterned city. Said to be full of churches but with twice as many brothels and pubs. Oh and a Central Market you long to bring home.
Of course, there’s more. A lot more. All you have to do is look. Adelaide’s story is 11 generations young and still unfolding.
The Outback
But beyond Adelaide is another country. A country of few people and fewer landmarks. In a word – the outback. And the outback needs an interpreter for it is vast and mysterious and silent. And looks like nothing much unless you have one.
Luckily I have Haydyn Bromley. This former teacher aches to tell his people’s story which reaches back 2000 generations, though it is the last 200 years he wants me to truly understand. The introduction alone is attention grabbing.
“When I was born I wasn’t an Australian citizen,” he begins. “I was classed as a native animal under the Flora & Fauna Act. Workers on outback stations were counted as stock. I wasn’t allowed to own a passport, vote or operate a bank account. No aboriginals were.”
It was not until 1967 that the referendum remedied this. These days Haydyn owns his own award-winning tourism business and as one of the Adnyamathanha (pronounced ad-na-mut-na) people, the traditional land-owners in the Flinders Range area, he can take visitors to places not accessible to the general public.
To be fair, before federation in 1901, South Australia had been proudly progressive with the franchise extended to aboriginals and women. But with federation the state was forced to cede to the will of the majority and these advances were lost. All the same, says Haydyn darkly, the place with the highest ‘No’ vote in the country isn’t far from here – Port Augusta.
A Sturdy Tourism Organisation
As he talks he drives us through the Clare Valley, passing villages of pretty verandahed golden stone basking in the afternoon sunshine, looking more dreamy and idyllic than their recent history might allow.
Nevertheless it’s a sturdy tourism organisation that provides a journalist with such a wearingly honest guide and I write like a demon.
The next day we tour Haydyn’s country. The Flinders Ranges rise from the northern end of the Spencer Gulf and runs 400km north into the arid outback. The ancient colossus is too big to capture on camera, probably why it’s never become a tourist icon. The next best thing is Wilpena Pound, an enormous amphitheatre, but again, impossible to photograph from the ground.
Even at the viewing platform I still can’t visualise a giant bowl. The Adnyamathanha creation myth featuring two giant serpents chasing an aboriginal ancestor paints a more vivid picture. In this story, the long mountain spine was formed by the serpents’ earthmoving powers. Their sleeping bodies made Wilpena Pound.
Depicting the Chase
A short walk takes us to the mouth of the male snake and indeed the stone yawns like a serpent ready to strike. Inside, ancient ochre and charcoal paintings depict the chase. Yet further, much much further back in time, this area helped bring life on earth into being. Algae, now fossilised in the rock, enabled earth to be populated by increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
The canted, layered rocks of Brachina Gorge are impressive as is the tourist trail which must be the most arcane I’ve ever seen – 20km of academically detailed geological signage. But the water, which should be hugging the apricot-coloured stone, has been hoovered up by the Big Dry. This is, after all, the driest state in the second driest country in the world (after Antarctica).
In places the soil has never recovered from just two seasons of crops more than a century ago now. Everywhere you look the region is sprinkled with failed settlements, dead businesses and abandoned dwellings.
Still, for now it is a good day. Haydyn has spotted his totem - a shy yellow-footed wallaby.
Faith in the Region
Third-generation farmers Tony and Julie Smith are newcomers compared with Haydyn but their faith in the region is bankable. The couple own the 3000ha Rawnsley Park station running 2000 sheep at the foot of Wilpena Pound. Though Tony’s father dabbled in tourism they have taken it to a whole new level. Ten years ago when the financial outlook for the region was bleak they took a risk and invested in upmarket tourism building straw-bale luxury villas. They’ve since built more villas and given the international recession a proper two-finger salute by buying a nearby station three times the size of Rawnsley Park.
Julie brims with boundless enthusiasm for their new venture. She’s already mentally transformed an old homestead into luxury accommodation and, eyes sparkling, outlines her plans for an outdoor dining arena under an enormous tree festooned with fairy lights, with maybe a walk lit by flaming torches and a brush fence to protect diners from the cool wind? Wouldn’t that be lovely?
Tony listens indulgently, aware it is such imaginative leaps that have contributed to Rawnsley Park’s evolving success.
He indulges me too, poor devil. Though he would have liked to drag me up Rawnsley Bluff (four hours, rated difficult, is he kidding?), he kindly drives me 150km to the famous Prairie Hotel, where the proprietors have truly made something out of nothing. In 1991 these pastoralists bought a hotel at Parachilna (population 7) when the railway left town and against all the odds, made it work with hard yakka and a feral fantasy marketing strategy.
Firmly located on the road to nowhere and yet packed when we get there. We munch on everything but a dingo and then motor on through countryside littered with the rusting remnants of long-gone dreams.
The Spirit of Endurance
Nevertheless visiting the Blinman cemetery is a strangely heartening experience. From the looks of things many residents became octogenarians. Perhaps they were the only people left. Perhaps it’s the dry air.
Or perhaps it’s evidence of the spirit photographer Henry Cazneaux saw when he photographed a shattered eucalyptus tree sometime in the 1930s. The photo he captioned “The spirit of endurance” became a National Geographic cover. Cazneaux has long gone but his grandson became the enduring Dick Smith and the tree is still here looking no more remarkable than any other.
But at least there are trees. The Flinders is heavily vegetated compared to what lies beyond and although the ubiquitous grey-leaved saltbush is no beauty close-up, en masse set against the ochre earth, they lend the landscape an otherworldly loveliness.
Loveliest of all are the luminal times of day - the morning when the blue haze of the eucalypts hangs in the air and evenings when the sky is on fire. Throw in a dozen kangaroos frozen on the spot and a lolloping thatch-bottomed emu and you feel there’s not a stranger nor more wonderful place in the world.
Word on the Wind
The word on the wind this week is water. Water in Lake Eyre. Imagine. Lake Eyre fills about once every 50 years. It’s not full now but thanks to rain in the far north the largest salt lake in the world is wet. The news is pulling the punters like nobody’s business. By chance I will fly over it on my way to Coober Pedy. I can hardly wait.
I do have to wait though since there are others vying for a scenic flight. Pilot Trevor Wright is a big hyperactive bear of a man. He’s already flown to Broome and back by the time I meet him at midday and he’s got a weekly schedule that indicates he must barely sleep. He says as it happens he doesn’t much.
But Trev’s uber cool once he’s up in the air. Hands off the wheel, he fills in charts and chats as the plane cruises over the landscape like an airborne bus. You can do that when there are no mountains and dodgy air currents.
At last I see the serrated outline of Wilpena Pound looking rather like a frozen rock wave. Then scrubby greenery gives way to a land flattened by sun and wind and time. It looks like what it is. A giant tidal bed with the sea permanently out. It’s been some 100 million years since the region was covered by a huge inland sea but nothing much appears to have changed since.
A Scenic Flight
And here is Lake Eyre. A journalist hands me a scribbled note. It says ‘Scenic flight?’ I suspect you have to be Australian to appreciate this enormous leaked puddle. At its deepest it is no more than a metre but most of it looks like you’d barely get your ankles wet. Colonies of pelicans huddle on sand-bars. Apparently the wet has made it quite the destination for jet-setting birds.
Flying over the Painted Hills is better. Hillocks of sulphur, white and ochre earth. Piles and piles for miles and miles. This really could be Mars. And Coober Pedy could be a settlement on the red planet. The aboriginals named it Kupa Piti or white man’s burrow since two-thirds of the dwellings are tucked into hillsides.
The dugouts keep the temperatures inside at an even 25C when summer heat sits around the 50 mark. It is a veritable rock hobbit town. My room in the Desert Cave Hotel is underground too. No windows. Dark as the proverbial. Sleep like the proverbial. Close as I want to come to being buried alive.
Rough as Guts
Coober Pedy is where the hopeful come to hunt opals – those fiery gems made from ancient water and silica. Commonly called a frontier town, aka rough as guts. Example: In the best establishment in town the barman and his mates set their pants - and some of the carpet - on fire. My plan to visit the less salubrious bars that evening is quickly scotched.
It looks a scrappy scrabbling sort of town though the hope that thrives here should be bottled. The statistics make no sense. Only one in 10 miners will find an opal. Of those one in 10 will make money and of those only one in 10 will make a fortune. And even though 99 out of 100 shafts have no opals, 80 per cent of the world’s opals are found here. Buying an opal sounds cheap by comparison.
Nearby, yet a world away, are a mob of drovers about to host a mob of journalists on the biggest working cattle station in the world. Anna Creek station is the size of Belgium, so large the talk is of hectares to the cattle.
This region specialises in extreme statistics. To get there we pass the longest man-made structure in the world – the dog fence. At 5,600km it surpasses the Great Wall of China. It is also the reason you can farm sheep here and not up north where dingoes still run free.
Cattle Drive
At Anna Creek I spend two days on horseback, test sampling the Great Australian Outback Cattle Drive 2010.
My experience tells me it will be a cracker. The scenery isn’t much, mind you. In the sense of literally not much out there though there is a lot of history in the dust and rocks and much culture in the people. This time the culture I learn about is that of the drover, a dying species thanks to motorbikes and aircraft.
The cattle drive gives them a chance to prove they can ride anything with hair on it. The cattle drive gives us the chance to prove we are soft-bottomed city folk. Honestly, I could give birth to twins after my ride.
But the tents have carpet on the floor, the food is of film-shoot standard and the bathrooms well-appointed. Best of all, there are diversions for the saddle-sore such as bus tours, books or just talking to the drovers. They’re a kindly lot who applaud us for ‘giving it a go’ even though this go is practically hand-held and lined in silk. Some are men of few words, some are poetic women (“we’re on the edge of creation here”), a few tell a good yarn and one or two can sing like - well, not angels maybe - but definitely deep-throated devils on horseback.
Broadcast journalists record the music. Not me. The best thing about this evening, about the whole experience, is that it happens in real time and for a change I’m part of making it happen. I am the guest and the entertainment. I will have as good a time as I allow myself. I allow myself the best. Because I’m worth it?
Nah, because it would be hard to have anything else here.
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