Gorge Ya On My Mind

Koran (Bitter Springs)

I much prefer the Yangman and Mangarrayi name for this place. Just like the other Koran, this place is totally sacred. You can feel it as soon as you enter the thick forest of fan palms, pandanus, melaleuca and acacia. It’s teeming with wildlife - birds, marsupials, fish, insects, and crocs, in places. The Roper River winds it’s way through this area, fed by an underground spring here that naturally pumps crystal clear aquifer water in at a rate of 300 litres/sec, so fast that when you lie on your back in the 34 degree water, the current pulls you along, and you can watch the tree-framed sky slowly pass by. It’s sublime.

8 years ago, when Brigitte and I and the kids pitched our tents in this very same campsite, it was just as beautiful. In honour of that visit, when I arrived here around lunchtime today, I didn’t go straight to the springs. I waited until dusk, which is when our family first experienced its magnificence, the warm water insulating us from the cold winter air (until we got out, that is). I just spoke to Lali now, she remembers hitching a ride on my back as we cruised along the river, occasionally careering into spider webs and submerged logs. I’m pretty sure that that was just yesterday, or was it the day before?

The more well-known spring around here is Mataranka, and it’s stunning too, but in the early afternoon in this, the busy season, I must say it feels a bit like going to a crowded heated pool at the local retirement village, which I’m sure is a great little social event, but it doesn’t quite have the solitary, peaceful vibe that I had in mind. As I walked towards the main pool I heard the din, so I quickly took a right turn and walked off on a beautiful track into the bush, to another pool a couple of kilometres away, that had a “Don’t swim, recent crocodile sighting” sign up. No wonder there was noone there. (Plus definitely the having to walk 2km thing). I stayed though, it was stunning, and when I finally made my way back to Mataranka it was a little quieter, but still well populated with hefty grey nomads, bobbing around on multicoloured noodles, like kayakers that were too heavy for their kayaks, so they’d half sunk, and they couldn’t get anywhere no matter how hard they tried.

They were all very friendly and nice, I chatted with a quartet from Ipswich who’d been across to Broome, and insisted I visit the Pearl Museum when I go there. It was one of their Australian tour’s main highlights. They also passed on their commiserations to me when I told them I was camping at Koran. “Oh,” one of the women said, “we’re staying at the homestead” (very close by), “sorry, but this pool is way better than the one you have over there. Yours doesn’t have the concrete, or proper railings.” Well there ya go. One woman’s meat is another man’s tofu.

After soaking for ages and having a good look around I noticed that I was in a minority of about one in that pool, in a 3 dimensional kinda way. I noticed that my bodily width was about half of the pool inhabitant’s average width, about a third of the depth, and I reckon about a fifth of the average girth. I was also by far the tallest person there, from what I could gather through the crystal clear water’s refractive trickiness. It’s nice to be different, I thought. No one said anything at all, old people are all so polite, they’re definitely not shitstirrers like me. If I’d thought of it at the time I would’ve got right up them, and said something like, “ok you slobs, party’s over, everybody out!, it’s exercise time, we’re going for a 3k run, then it’s yoga time, it’s Bikram month remember, and then it’s salads only for the rest of the week.” In reality they probably wouldn’t have heard me anyway, what with all the chatter, and with the fact that their non-waterproof hearing aids were probably safely stored away in little containers in their tote bags, along with their heart medications and headache tablets.

Elliot

There’s a lot of beautiful ways to wake up in the morning. The sun on your face as it flickers above the horizon at the campsite, or through your bedroom window. A beautiful dream, that leads you from the sleeping to the waking realms with sweet images and a warm feeling that makes you smile. A soft kiss from a loved one. And then there was this morning’s delight - a symphony of bird calls, an acapella choir that started softly, till I was awake, and then gradually got louder and louder, birds singing what sounded like hundreds of different songs, so many that it became almost impossible to distinguish between them. Besides the rockstar sulphur-crested cockatoo’s Barnesy squawks, that is. And then the dawn became the day, and they were gone.

Leliyn (Sweetwater Pool)

Nature has this amazing way of getting right into you, and the longer you spend in it, the deeper inside it gets. I’ve camped out every night for the past few weeks, sleeping on the ground in my little hiking tent, and my body, my mind and my nervous system are now switching to a slower, easier mode. It’s hard to describe, but somehow the longer I spend in nature the looser and looser life gets.

Tonight I’m camped at Sweetwater Pool with Gemma, who’s just gone to bed. We chatted for ages this afternoon and evening, we watched the setting sun put on one of its most magnificent performances ever, throwing its fiery reds, oranges and pinks all over the place, and bursting colour onto our own private infinity pool. It was very special.

Gemma is a paramedic from Cairns, who’s spent the past 7 months travelling around the country alone in her troopie, and hiking in loads of places. We’ve done a lot of the same hikes, in Patagonia, in NZ, and in Oz. She’s just finished the Larapinta Trail, a 230km hike through magnificent Tjoritja, the Western MacDonnell Ranges, from Alice Springs. I hiked it in April this year, with Miranda, Iain and Michael. We had loads to talk about. She walked into this amazing place with her pack, and, like me, knew that because of that, it’d be guaranteed to be pretty close to empty, which it is. So even though it’s only a few kilometres from a massive campground and swimming hole, there’s just us here. It’s so easy to escape the crowds if you’re prepared to just put a pack on your back. But don’t tell anyone.

Gemma is loose. You can tell she’s been out in the bush for months, and has spent loads of time alone. Her conversation is slow and relaxed. She listens. Things don’t seem to faze her much. She often just goes out into the bush on her own and camps for a few days, or hikes. She’s into her second pair of hiking boots this trip. She told me that sometimes after long periods of being alone she sort of forgets how to talk to people - not in a socially awkward sort of way, but in a forgetful sort of way. It’s kinda cute. She’s due back at work in 2 months, and really doesn’t know how on earth she’ll fit back in again.

We’re camped on the Edith River, which flows into the Katherine River, a few days walk upstream from Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge). The river runs through open woodland that floods in the wet season, and then the land dries out. It’s the dry season now, the water level’s down, but the river’s still flowing, and some side creeks are still feeding it. It’s stunning here. The days are hot (30-35 degrees), and the water is cool. It’s perfect. There’s so many places to swim, many deep long waterholes fed by waterfalls and side creeks, and bordered by short cliffs of orange, brown and red, or by sandy red beaches, or reed beds and flowering water lillies. I walked in with my pack and my guitar, and have been sitting by the water playing, swimming, chatting, and playing some more. If that sounds good to you it’s because it is good, it’s bloody awesome.

Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge, Smitt Rock)

Someone needs to compile a Thesaurus of Superlatives, so I can better describe what this place is actually like. I’d love you to really feel what it’s like to sit here on this pink-yellow sand, in the shade, completely alone, towering orange cliffs surrounding me, wet body still draped in the cool waters of the river, being softly massaged by the light breeze. But no, I could never really describe it well enough. Words can’t capture it, nor can the best pics on the fanciest camera. This place is completely over-the-top unbelievably and incredibly beautiful, mind-blowingly awe-inspiring, and so cosmically vast and humbling that I feel like I’m completely de-constructing, am utterly insignificant, and that my whole life, my whole existence, is just an invisible microdot, somewhere in the hot clear blue sky above me.

It’s tear- inspiring.

It was a bit of a mission to get here, but I guess you can tell that I don’t regret it. I walked all morning with my pack, the track started out wide and relatively straightforward, and then became more and more difficult the further in I got, rocky, steep, hard to negotiate. Maybe about a kilometre from my campsite I took a wrong turn, climbed down a cliff with my pack, and then found myself with nowhere to go. I definitely couldn’t go down - it was a 30m sheer drop. I couldn’t go back up, as I couldn’t really find anywhere to get my legs back up to (no rock climbing or bouldering experience, unlike some of you, plus I had a pack). I eventually worked out that the only thing I could do was to slowly (painstakingly slowly) inch my way around the cliff, round and round, step by timid step, until I eventually found a way back up. If the hairs on the back of my neck weren’t so drenched in sunscreen it would’ve been a hair-raising experience. My moderate fear of heights has diminished markedly with all the hiking I’ve been doing, but today’s experience definitely gave me that once-familiar sickening feeling in the groin. Somehow my undies remained clean, I don’t know how.

However I’m not at all unhappy about it now, now that I’m on relatively flat ground, as it adds a bit of adventure into my vagabondage tailings. If I was writing a book I’d make the whole episode way more dramatic and dangerous (eg. 150m drop, nearly dark, no water left, not sure where the campsite is, dingoes howling, vultures circling overhead, childhood traumas starting to come up, I step on a loose rock and it careers off the cliff and after a couple of long minutes crashes down onto the rocks below etc etc). But luckily for you this is not a book, just a real life blog.

I’m not sure who Smitt was btw, but his rock is one helluva incredible thing. It reminds me a little of one of those massive rock cuttings on the Pacific Highway between Newcastle and Sydney, but this one is way wider, way taller, way more random, and it’s here. It’s just, like, right in the middle of the gorge, there’s tall gorge cliffs on either side of it, and then this massive sheer cliff/ rock bisecting them. It’s really a phenomenal phenomenon. I wish I knew what the custodians of this land, the Jawoyn, actually call it, I can’t seem to find out. But it’s really special, as you can see:

The name Smitt reminds me of George, a friendly tubby man who used to work in the post office in Mullum. Don’t ask me why I’m thinking about him at this very moment, when a few seconds ago I was completely engrossed in nature’s magnificence, and existentially disappearing up my own arse-portal. Yeah, the brain is a pretty weird organ, sometimes it tends to play itself.

Anyway, back to Mullum. Back in the day when we had a PO Box, we’d go to the front counter inside the post office and ask the staff to collect our mail for us. I don’t know why we didn’t just get it ourselves from the outside PO Box with the key, maybe we were lazy stoned and broke hippies who kept losing our keys and were too tight-arsed to buy new ones. Anyway the staff would happily get our mail, and so they became familiar with our names, and who we were.

George was one of those people, he and I would have our little conversations and joke around about random things. One day he asked me where my surname came from. I told him it was Polish, and that, in fact, my name was so common in Poland that there were pages of it in the Polish phone book, and that it was as common as Smith is in Australia. He immediately said, in his rich Aussie accent, “oh that’s great Smitty.” Impressive quip! After that, whenever I went to the Post Office or if we’d pass on the street, he’d say “g’day Smitty,” and I’d lower my eyes, dip my head, and say “it’s the King.”

And btw did I mention the stars out here yet? Oh my Buddha! Strap my face to the side of a pig and roll me in the mud! They’re absolutely stunning! Night after night. It’s been totally clear every night, but the night sky is cloudy white, white with stars, planets, the Milky Way, and all sorts of cosmic gases and supernovas, satellites, space junk, Elvis, and whatever else is up there. It’s so beautiful. I’ve been watching the sky for ages every night, and can even see the brilliant display when I go to bed, from inside my tent. In there there’s also the occasional additional cosmic gas, emanating from my own arse-portal, which adds to the pungency of the moment.

Cutta Cutta

I’m not sure about your knowledge of evolutionary history, or whether or not you believe that the earth was created in 6 frantically busy days by Herr Gott Vater and Frau Gotti Mutti, (after which time they had a day’s sabbatical, had a few quiet Krombacher shandies, and watched the Bundesliga). But let’s go with the scientific version for a bit.

The earth was formed 4,600 million years ago. Life forms began to appear 3,700m years ago. Dinosaurs started appearing 250m years ago, the first mammals 210m, human ancestors appear around 5m years ago, Homo sapiens around 300,000 years, homosexuals around the same time, homophobes begin to appear in the last few hundred years. So infantile we are.

The Cutta Cutta cave system is made up of rock that formed when vertebrates first appeared on earth, 590-505m years ago, life in the form of things like trilobites and other calcium rich little crustaceany things. At this time, shallow seas covered much of Australia, and when these cute little creatures died, they’d slowly make their way to the sand at the bottom of these oceans, and were compressed by the weight of the water till eventually they and the sand became rock. Over time the seas subsided, the ocean floor became exposed, and now you can see fossils of some of the very first forms of life in the Cutta Cutta limestone. It’s pretty amazing.

And not only that. There’s stalactites (hold on tight) above. There’s stalacmites (come on, you might get there) below. And then when they join up, the scientific name for them is .... columns. So bloody inventive. I would’ve called them stalacatlastwefinallymeetaftermillionsofyearsIcanactuallytouchyoukissmemyloveI’vebeenwaitingsolongforthismomentthisistruebliss-ites. Probs would be a bit of a hassle for all the cave signwriters, but would def be a healthy challenge for the guides.

One amazing thing about these caves is that the deeper you go in them, the hotter they get. Normally it’s the opposite. But these caves are eroded every wet season by thermal springs, and the deeper you get in, the closer to the thermal heat source you get. There’s also heaps of other interesting crystal and other formations and animals (especially bats, and blind prawns that are only found in these caves and in Madagascar, of all places), but I can’t be arsed describing them all now, plus my pics are so crap anyway. But it was amazing, and our tour guide Jaz was pretty funny, and knew a thing or two about the place.

Katherine

I really didn’t know which famous Katherine this town was named after, so I looked it up. The river and town was named by the explorer John McDouall Stuart, after the second of his expedition sponsor’s daughters. Oh, that famous Katherine. So auspicious. There are only about 6000 residents here, over 25% of whom are indigenous.

I sorta like the place. There’s loads of mob hangin around the streets, shopping, chatting, in larger family groups. Often there’s a bunch of women of different ages, with loads of kids floating around them. The big pub in the main street, the Katherine Hotel, belts out really cool country and country-rock music from quite early in the day. You can hear it from miles away, and it always seems to be full. There’s two huge beefy Māori or Pacific Islander dudes manning the doors, to keep the riff raff out (or in, I’m not sure which, when I look inside), they always smile at me as I walk past, loving the music. (I generally don’t feel like a beer at 11am, hence the walking past).

Michelle worked in Katherine for awhile, and told me there’s not a huge amount of mixing that goes on between cultural groups here, I automatically assumed it was because of racism. She said no. She said people just have different interests. She said her crew like to hang out in cafes and restaurants, and the mob aren’t into doing that, and they probably don’t have the cash for it either. But ya gotta wonder about the fundamental reasons for the wealth gap, don’t ya? I’d bet my last brass razoo (until my next Centrelink payment, if I was getting one) that there isn’t a huge amount of choice involved in that reality. But I gotta admit I don’t actually know enough about what’s really going down around here. But I do know that there’s a helluva lot.

Rippin Yarns

So, beautiful friends, my next quest is to see if I can watch the sun set over the Indian Ocean, which I can’t do from India. I’d love to have you here with me in the flesh, but I gotta warn you, I’m becoming a bit of a bush pig, and my flavours are becoming a little, well, spicy.❤