Black and Gold

Marlgu Billabong

There’s a croc not far from me, as I sit quite close to the water’s edge of this incredible teeming bird and animal chill and mess zone. But he’s close to the other bank of the billabong, and there’s enough food between me and it for me to not to be too worried. Don’t ask me for a pic of him, you’ll just have to take my word for it. This little black duck’s not gonna risk it for you guys, no offence.

This place is in the middle of hot, dry, desolate country (in the dry season), and it’s one of the few places around here with plenty of water, so it attracts every Dom, Rick and Gary of the Australian plant, bird and animal community, and a chunk of asylum seekers as well. I’ve been here for about 3 hours, just taking it in. There’s so much to see.

There’s hundreds of magpie geese, massive chunky birds, huge dancing brolgas, taller than me, pelicans, all sorts of ducks (including little black ones), egrets, ibises (amazing colours), and every heron under the burning sun, including the rufus night heron, the white heron, the speckled heron,  the spectacularly pied heron, the normal pied heron, the apple-pied heron, and Herren Schnitlauch Von Schneedelwutz, from almost as far across the continent as you can get, from near Mulldorf in Regenbogenland.

And that’s only the water birds. It’s incredible. Overhead, circling birds of prey check out the scene below, and come down to feast on fish and smaller birds, and any other poor little moving thing they can sink their talons into. They’re quite talonted at it really.

Sometimes my pics are a bit crap, but sorry, this lot are particularly dodgy, given that the birds just don’t wanna come close, no matter how many “you can trust me” vibes I send out, and I also don’t wanna go closer to the water’s edge. I’m sick of being seen as just some chunk of spicy (and getting spicier) Polish sausage, I’m not just a piece of meat, I’m a real live person, you chicks’d understand that feeling.

In fact, as I was cycling here on this lonely bumpy corrugated dusty dirt track at a stinky-hot part of the day (surprise surprise), in the middle of absolutely nowhere, sweating and pedalling into a hot wind no less, a large whistling kite started circling above me, and again I began to think of vultures and death, don’t ask me why. Dying of thirst, to be more specific. I realised that if that actually happened I’d just end up like the numerous other decomposing carcasses I’ve seen along every highway in this country, but more commonly up north - massive buffaloes, cows of all butchered varieties, big fat black pigs, hundreds of kangaroos, euros and wallabies, possums, snakes, lizards, echidnas, wombats, every variety of bird, and all sorts of other USOs (unidentified squished objects).

I even thought I saw a croc carcass once, but it turns out it was just a half-rotten dead kangaroo whose spine was all bumpy like a croc’s spiky things. Anyway, the difference between all that and my own dehydrated carcass would be that as my bones already show through my skin, you wouldn’t have to wait a few weeks for that to happen, as it does for all the other normal poor animal-sod pedestrian non-statistics.

Actually some of them puff up first, and become massive Trumpian blimps, massive bellies, legs and necks puffed up into the sky, before imploding and then shrivelling into a putrid heap of wedge-talied eagle, hawk, black falcon and kite maggot-meat food. Sometimes murders of crows also come and feast, happy that this time someone else did the killing.

NT/WA border and fruit quarantine checkpoint

As you head west from Katherine, the incredible gorge country continues. The road is spectacular, passing beneath massive orange escarpments, along deep river gorges, and past so many incredible trees. The most striking of these is the boab.

These trees are a wonder of nature. They’re massive, stunning to see, with their big wide round trunks and leaf-less branches that reach high into the sky. One in the town of Wyndham has a sign saying it’s estimated to be 2,000 years old, which is quite incredible if you think about it. It basically means that the tree was a baby at roughly the same time as Jesus was, and, luckily, it didn’t need to be resurrected because it didn’t get crucified. Mind you, it didn’t have to deal with the brutal Romans. The local indigenous crew here were way more benign and respectful of things like trees, and the whole ecosystem for that matter.

Boabs are part of the baobab tree family, and some of them are amongst the oldest living things in Australia, along with racism and sexism. Boabs are deciduous, and in evolutionary terms they decided to decid in order to retain moisture in the dry season. The trees are incredibly useful to indigenous locals, who eat the pulp, taproots and seeds, use the leaves as medicine and as a food thickener, and use the bark as fuel, dye and for making rope. Some boabs can hold as much as, wait for it, 100,000 litres of water within their soft pulpy inner! Not bad huh. I wondered where all the water got to around here. They’re just the most beautifully aesthetically designed huge rainwater-tanks-disguised-as-trees.

As they age boab trunks sometimes hollow out, and become a very cute little shady home. And of course white policemen used them in the early years of the invasion for much darker purposes - as holding cells for indigenous prisoners, sometimes keeping up to fifteen people in one tree overnight, in transit. So innovative, those troopers.

You may not know this, but Australia has a slave history. In the 1800s indigenous men from the West Kimberley were kidnapped by men called “blackbirders,” and sold to pearl companies as divers and labourers on their pearling boats. They were rounded up, chained together, and forced to walk all the way to the coast. Sometimes they were locked in a massive, fat, sacred boab tree near Derby, that was hollow, but only had a small, easily guarded entrance.

Derby Prison Tree

Judbarra (Gregory) National Park

At Sullivan’s Creek campground I met Nyal, a Kiwi dairy farmer-cum farming technique specialist, who’s lived and worked in 22 countries, including Egypt, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and many countries in Europe, such as Sweden, Germany and Switzerland. As if you needed to know all of those. He’s also lived and worked on those small islands off the west coast of Europe, aka the UK. With all his globalising, him and I had a lot of travel talk to get through in the short evening we spent there together. It was very necessary and very fascinating.

Deep down Nyal’s a farmer, and it was during farm talk that the conversation became a little more spiky. He’s reading a book about one of Australia’s most successful pastoralists, Sir Sidney Kidman, known as the “Cattle King,” who achieved fame and fortune by buying huge amounts of land, and driving cattle right across the north of the country, from east to west. He personally owned around 3.5% of the whole Australian mainland. Kidman, in Nyal’s words, “totally opened up the west.” That’s not exactly how I would describe it personally, but Nyal was genuinely proud of the guy, good for him.

As we kept talking about that topic I eventually told him about a book I’d read, “Rabbit Proof Fence,” by Doris Pilkington Garimara, which, on top of the sad but incredible story of three indigenous girls taken from their family and what they did to get back to them, also describes the terrible impact colonial farm settlements and the cattle industry had on indigenous communities in the western part of Australia. The impact was absolutely devastating, and it happened lightning-fast. Communities were suddenly fenced off from their traditional hunting and gathering lands and from their vital water supplies, and within only one generation many were suddenly dependent upon handouts from missionaries in order to avoid starving to death.

However Nyal didn’t seem particularly interested in those less savoury scenes in his heroic mythical West Side Story. He then told me that a few years back he climbed Uluṟu (twice in one day, go figure), and on the way down the second time he came across a young guy struggling down the rock face with one arm heavily bandaged. It turns out that this guy was a NT policeman, who’d been bitten on the arm during a scuffle with an indigenous fella, and his arm had become infected and he was in great pain. Nyal said, with a reddening face, that he wasn’t surprised it got infected, (read “they’re like rabid dogs”) and that, in his words, “life’s not worth two-bob to that mob, they’ll bash you over the head with a shovel just to get a drink. I’m never parking on the road on my own in this place, no way, they’d probably roll my car over and take everything I’ve got.”

Wow. Sounds like you need some decongestant Nyal. It was pretty confronting for me.

I told him that a few months back I was driving alone between Alice Springs and Tenant Creek in the hot late afternoon, and a bunch of 5 indigenous guys hailed me down and asked me if I had a jack and a wheel brace (for undoing wheel nuts). I did, and for the next half an hour or so I was totally entertained by this bunch of bantering guys, cracking jokes left right and centre, and watching in barely muted humour as they gave me a lesson in dodgy bush mechanics, before they headed off back to country, their old Commodore creaking and groaning down the highway. I felt in no danger whatsoever, quite the opposite. If I ever needed any help out there I’d ask those guys.

Nyal and I parted as friends. But our conversation was really revealing. Even though I know racism in Australia is alive and kicking black arse, it’s different when you meet it in the rabid flesh. I mean, it’s 2022 not 1822 for God’s sake. He’s only about 10 or 15 years older than me. But he represents a completely different generation and mindset.

Come on you old chaps, get with the program, chin up, time to let go of those old myths once and for all, just throw them on the floor with your peanut shells, that’s the spirit, time to live in the present not the past, bottoms up!

Emma Gorge

Santa Maria, Madre de Jesus! (Spanish ‘j’ = ‘h’). This place is absolutely cosmically divine!

I’m now in the heart of the East Kimberley, Balanggarra country, on the Gibb River Road, at the end of Emma Gorge - well the end of where you could reasonably be expected to walk to that is - as you can see:

Jumping jalapeños (both with Spanish ‘j’) it’s hot out there!

But in here it’s a different world. It’s absolutely amazing. There’s a narrow gorge entrance to get in to this place, you walk in, and then you’re surrounded by 100m cliffs on all sides. It’s so cool in here, in all ways, despite the 35 degree day burning everything up out there. On the waterfall side of the cliff, brilliant bright green vines cover the whole face of the rock wall, as if they were clinging to the walls of some Tudor home in Sussex. It’s so vast, so random, and so spectacular. I swam out to the falls a little earlier, the water was actually quite cold, and now I feel like I’m in the Timber Creek bottlo fridge.

What an incredible display nature puts on sometimes. You can’t order it, it’s so random. Sometimes you just have to be there for awhile, for an hour or two, or more, and wild and wonderful unexpected things happen. Sometimes it’s just there already. On my way here, as I was walking past another swimming hole downstream, I noticed small fish in the beautiful clear water, and sat down to chill and have a look. After some time larger fish began to appear:

So I just watched them for awhile, it was such a beautiful sheltered cool spot. And then this guy appeared:

It took its time to show itself. After sticking it’s pointy snout out of the water, it just rested, for ages, leaning on a log, meditating.

Meditation instructions for freshwater crocs: Move to a quiet and comfortable place, eg. floating at the top of a pond, in a very relaxed position, head resting on a log or flat rock. Relax your body, allow your legs to go floppy, like jelly. Now focus on your nostrils, at the very tip of your long pointy snout. Feel the air as you breathe in through your wet snout, right at the end of all those sharp pointy teeth, allow the breath to flow in naturally, with no resistance, and then feel the breath again as it passes out through your nostrils. Good. Allow yourself to just be there. Breathing in, and out. In, and out. There’s nothing to do, nowhere to go, just be there, just be a crocodile, still, quiet.

Now SNAP!!! Well done, you got a fish, you totally fooled ‘em! Haha!

Yeah, so Mr/Mrs/Ms/Das Crocodile didn’t actually snap at a fish, but it did put on an awesome display for me - slowly swimming around using only its tail for propulsion, while all four legs just hung down like floppy cadaver arms that had accidentally slipped off the morgue bench. Aware of my need for interesting pics for this blog, and obviously a bit of a show off, croccy opened its mouth regularly to display those razor sharp fish mincers to me, climbed over logs, slowly and rather snake-like, letting his long body slide over, bit by bit. If I could draw I would’ve done a sketch for you, to scale. Yeah, croccy was so obliging, it just did loads of really interesting croc things. And this fella was only a couple of metres from me, it was quite the display. I’ve never had the chance to watch one from so close for so long, it was a true privilege, you can tell I do give quite a croc about it.

Wyndham

Much of this town is a like a ghost town. It’s situated right on the Cambridge Gulf, a wide body of water that eventually leads to the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf (named after Napoleon’s older brother), and then to the Timor Sea, off the coast of Darwin. But it’s a long long way from Darwin.

Wyndham’s a bit of a ghost town because the once-thriving gold and meat industries have shut down, and there’s loads of abandoned shops, houses and other businesses around the once busy town. The port is also quiet now. It sorta looks like everyone in town went off to a local wedding or something, which was then deliberately targeted by a US drone strike, and so no one ever came back. Spam tins still in the pantry. White bread turned green, then purple, then to fairy dust. High viz jackets all grey and dusty, now more like low-to-no viz.

I’ve met some lovely people at the campsite. French-Australian Jean, an on-off Sydney resident who came to Oz 40 years ago, is riding a motorbike around the country. He said he doesn’t want to go back and live in Sydney anymore, after this trip. “Sydney’s trying to get rid of older people like me,” he says, in his still sexy French accent. He’s retired, he has cash, and therefore he has options.

Melburnians Kate (artist) and Richard (psychologist) are away for 9 months, they’ve got some family action down in Perth, they’re travelling slowly. We all had drinks and watched the sunset at the wharf tonight, and met these kids just after they caught this fish:

Notice the boy’s muddy legs. He’d gone into the water to land his fish. A few minutes later we all saw a large saltwater crocodile in the water, only a few metres from where he’d just been! Merde! He was so lucky!

So that was that. The boy lived, the catfish died, I got pissed on only 2 beers after having no food and a long day in the sun, our conversation became livelier and livelier, and of course the sunset was all gold and stunningly beautiful, as usual. Ho hum.

Not There Yet, Except I’m There

So I know the water in this sunset pic leads to the ocean, but it’s still not the ocean ocean. I’m still heading west towards that. And I’ve really sunk into it now. I’ve found my new home. My beautiful life on the road has become me❤️