Boodjamulla

Lawn Hill Gorge: home of 25 million year old fossils just sitting there in the rock for you to look at, fabulous waterfalls, birds of prey, turtles with red noses, fish - and for a while, us.

Fossil of a different kind

Crocodile teething ring

 

Borderline Personalities

 Seems different in Queensland

Water water everywhere

Dry season in the Northern Territory means lots of dust, 35 degree days and long, hot walks in the sun.

Thankfully, some respite is available.

There's still water in the waterfalls.

On top of Edith Falls, Nitmiluk National Park

You can soak in the plunge pools.

Florence Falls, Litchfield National Park

Leap into waterholes.

Buley Rockholes, Litchfield National Park

All of these popular swimming spots are perfect for wallowing in...

Wangi Falls, Litchfield National Park

...but can be crowded!

Wangi Falls, Litchfield National Park

Some waterholes look like crocodile-infested waters, but are seasonally monitored for crocodiles, so may be “open” for swimming.

No crocodiles in this trap - is that good or bad?

So we swam here too! Roper River, Elsey National Park

And there are the more traditional watering holes too! 

Cheers!

 

 

 

 

Daly Waters pub

Country

Australia is unlike other places. Often, as we bum our way around, we encounter scenes that are almost implausibly lovely. If put together by a landscape architect, I'd dismiss it as being unbelievably perfect – too contrived to be natural. Compare, for example, the naturally occurring pool at the top of Gunlom Falls in Kakadu...



… and the man-made infinity pool at Lake Argyle. (Lake Argyle itself, is man-made.)




They both look too good to be true. More often though, it's an extraordinarily harsh beauty we come across - nothing you can take a photo of, but impressive just the same. Usually a place that looks harsh, is harsh -  somewhere to examine for a few hours before escaping back to the pool, be it of the natural or designed kind. I frequently wonder, as we come across some relic of the past in these tough places, how did people do what they did  - explore, work, survive - in such a hostile environment.

Gregory's Tree on the WA / NT border. Gregory's party missed their boat so they walked from here to Brisbane.

But then again, just as I'm marvelling at the explorers and pastoralists getting by with their technologies of a hundred or so years ago, we come across ancient signs of existence left by the aboriginals. People who lived with relative ease in the same country - for thousands upon thousands of years.

How old is this picture? Look closely. How long since there's been Tasmanian Tigers in the Northern Territory? Actually, it's not that old - I took it just the other day.

Stranger still, to think just how hard it is to live the way a lot of aboriginals are living, right now – in cities and rural areas all around. I say that, more from what I've heard in the media, than what I've observed as a surface traveller. Which is not to say that what's in the media is untrue, or for that matter true. More that, as travellers, we only get the tiniest glimpse of how modern aboriginals live, in the same way as a touristic trip to France only gets you the barest inkling of how a modern Parisian lives. And it's fascinating in the same way.

Some people living in the Northern Territory still hunt turtles, bats, magpie geese, yams and what-not, cooking it on an open fire, a cuisine-style I would describe as burn-the-crap-out-of-a-dead-animal-carcass, tasting no doubt, as good as it looks. Kind of traditional but kind of not. Whereas the old mob knocked magpie geese out of the sky using sticks and spears, the modern connoisseur of goose à la flambé shoots those suckers down with a bloody big gun. Well, you would, wouldn't you?

I'm going to continue with the it's-like-France metaphor – partly because it's my blog and I can do what I want and partly because I hear people say it all the time as they arrive in some remote part of the Kimberley or Northern Territory – wow, this is just like Paris. Okay, that last bit is untrue (I told you not to trust the media) but what I have observed is: we are two countries – indigenous and non-indigenous Australia – two separate cultures living side-by-side in the one place. Separately.

Now, I'm old enough and ugly enough to know that what I think I'm saying and what people read between the lines are not necessarily the same. Especially when discussing topics such as, I don't know – the war in Iraq, asylum seekers, Asians, Muslims, John Howard's legacy, Julia Gillard, or the life of the modern Aboriginal as viewed by a white suburbanite who knows nothing about it.

With that in mind, feel free as you read this to collectively make indignant noises about what you think are injustices, or if you are inclined the other way - unfair privileges. No doubt this will vary, depending on how you feel about the afore-mentioned seemingly unrelated subjects – John, Julia and friends. But enough about you – let's get back to me. I will try to keep my reportage to be just that: reportage with only blank space between the lines, rather than judgement of any sort. So as they say in the Kimberley – voila.

There are whole parts of Australia – really big parts, where it is forbidden for non-indigenous Australians to enter without a permit. It really is like another country – complete with visa requirements for us foreigners to enter. Arnhem Land is a bigger piece of land than most entire countries, and it is off limits to most Australians. There is a town on the other side of the border called Oenpelli, that once a year drops the permit restrictions to invite all and sundry to take part in their annual festival.

Unfortunately, we couldn't go to this. The river crossing was a little too high and a little too crocodile infested for the Hiace.  In making this assessment though, we did talk to one of the locals. He pointed out the extremely big crocodile on the bank and the extremely dumb fishermen standing in the middle of the causeway. “You wouldn't do that would you?” he asked me incredulously. Not wanting him to think all white men are stupid, I assured him I would not, backing away from the crossing and the big lizard.

A big saltie

Later, we found a sign stating that it was prohibited to fish from the causeway - ever since the last death. You would think that a state that named its capital after Charles Darwin would encourage people like those guys to fish there – a bit of applied natural selection.




Not far from there, in the middle of Kakadu is the town of Jabiru. In Jabiru, the van-park has a special dispensation to sell alcohol but only to residents. Residents of the van-park that is, not residents of the town. Not only do you need a little green ticket to buy a beer, but when you drink it back at your camp-site, it is from within the bounds of a tall fence topped with barbed wire – like you see around low security jails, only with the barbed wire facing out - not in. I'm guessing the barbed wire is not there to stop the wallabies jumping over – it would be a damn impressive jump.

So yes, just like in France, the law is slightly different, especially with regards to alcohol. Interestingly, the law in France states that everyone must drink lots of red wine, all the time. Conversely, in parts of Australia, it is illegal to bring alcohol into the area - and no pornography either. Those movies of ill-repute from the back corner of the video store at home, the ones you can only rent if you are old enough to go to war, those movies are completely forbidden in some places. Interesting huh? Same rules as some Muslim countries I've visited.

Alcohol laws vary immensely from place to place. As a person in some ways not so far from the targeted demographic (large consumer of whatever alcohol is cheapest), I find myself constantly reading the fine-print on the doors of bottle-shops, in order to find out how I can stock the van – and when. They often have charts indicating different times of day correlating to different strengths and volumes of alcohol that can be purchased. It's enough to drive a person to drink.

In Port Headland, a grey-haired traveller approached me in a bottle-shop, asking me which of the cheap cask-wines was any good. Presumably she thought I worked there, since relatively young fellows like me would be working, not hanging out in bottle-shops in the middle of the day. I had to inform her - I'd discovered you couldn't legally purchase cask-wine at that time of day. “That's discrimination,” she said, “although I'm not sure who they're discriminating against”. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the grey nomads they had in mind.

At least on me, the system seems to be working. I'd rather head into the wilderness for a couple of weeks with only light beers, or even no beers, if the alternative is to wait around for hours for full-strength-beer-o'clock.

Unleaded petrol, out here in the boonies, is also not the same. It is Opal, a non-aromatic derivative designed to stop petrol sniffing. I should point out here, despite all the forensic evidence – we have witnessed barely any anti-social behaviour from aboriginal people. We saw a few drunks in Kalgoorlie but concluding anything from that would be like concluding all aboriginals are fish because we saw some locals swimming in a river. That metaphor doesn't quite work, I know (see the paragraph about it being my blog) but what I mean is, we saw a lot more white people outside of pubs in the same town - acting far more anti-socially. Far more.

Speaking of Kalgoorlie - the names of places are different in these two nations that inhabit our country. There's any number of places that had their aboriginal name of forty thousand years revoked by the whitely newcomers. Classically, Mount Nameless near Tom Price had an aboriginal name since Jesus was a boy - but for the last sixty or so years, has been Mount Nameless.

As you may have guessed from that last paragraph, I can't remember the aboriginal name – I find the words very foreign and hard to remember. For this reason, the monikers on our photos tend to be names like Katherine Gorge, rather than Nitmiluk. I just can't remember the old names – which intriguingly, along with control of some national parks have reverted back to the original owners. The old names are now the new, new names.

Katherine Gorge / Nitmiluk

But then we came to splendid Gunlom Falls in Kakadu...



Gunlom was known as such by the old folk until the new folk came along and named it UDP Falls. That's UDP as in, Uranium Development and Prospecting which was the name of the company that held the local mining lease. When I found this out, I not only went over to using the new, old Aboriginal names, I came very close to agreeing with that guy – white men must be stupid.

Completely unrelated interesting fact: when I married Jean, my Chinese name became Gumlin.

Gumlin falls at Gunlom Falls

Now, where was I? That's right, the wilderness of northern Australia and how more or less, it is exactly like the streets of Paris. The French are notoriously aloof buggers. I shall not enter the debate as to whether it is actually rude to disengage yourself as quickly as possible when stopped outside your own house and barked at by hundreds of tourists a day - in a language you don't necessarily speak.

Rather, I shall use that rather flimsy premise to segue to the observation, that in the main, the two cultures of Australia do not interact. They don't hang out together, except where, just as in France, the one is involved in providing tourism to the other. Even then it is easier for example, for a tourist to buy Aboriginal art from a white intermediary than an Aboriginal.


There are also equally fascinating places where on paper at least, engagement between the two cultures is greater. In areas around the Kimberley where Aboriginal communities have lived since year dot, cattle-stations and other once white-owned rural businesses have been bought up by  aboriginal groups. Groups who used to be more or less slave labour at those same places. Clearly there is a burgeoning Aboriginal economy that is linked into the non-indigenous economy. You can't help but notice though, that often in the Aboriginal-owned service-station, or resort or supermarket – it is people of other races who are working the desk.

Hall's Creek is a relatively large dot on the map of the Kimberley. Its population of a thousand odd must be about three-quarters indigenous. The Aboriginal-owned service station on the main road has white guys running the counter. Equally surprising, were the staff at the supermarket, which was quite large by Kimberley standards.  There were hundreds of locals hanging around in the car-park, shooting the breeze or inside buying stuff. Of about six check-out counters, every single one of them was manned by not one but two Asians – all young people, it didn't look like it was just a family-run business – but who knows?

Jean acts as an example Asian

 There you have it – I have managed to use the words Aboriginal, Muslim and Asian in this post so no doubt I will be hearing from my fellow Queenslander, Ms Hanson at some point. I for one, think I am lucky to live in a beautiful country with two very different, very rich cultures hammering out an existence right next to each other. There are problems – well, there would be wouldn't there? And there are some pretty radical solutions being tried – some working, some probably not, some controversial. What is obvious is that there are people on both sides of the border who are trying to make it work.

Laws to live by - beware of crocodiles