Month: June 2021

A Bed at Last – Darwin

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June 30, 2021

8:18 am

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A colourful croc on a Darwin wall

 

A bed at last!

We slept in our little tent for 50 nights straight between our cabin in Ravensthorpe and our hotel in Darwin.

During that time, I didn’t fantasise about beds at all. Well, only occasionally.

All the same, sleeping in the Cavenagh Hotel room in Darwin undoubtedly had its pleasures: stretching out in bed, napping during the late afternoon in an air-conditioned room and, most luxurious of all, having a toilet only 3 metres away.

Jabiru – street sculpture by Indigenous artist, Janice Pungautiji Murray

Our room was rather dark, with a skylight but no windows. It was the exact opposite of being in the natural world. To my surprise, even while I enjoyed the comforts of city living, I missed waking up with the dawn and listening to the birds.

There were of course many consolations, especially the fleshpots of the inner city. All the way along Knuckey and Bennett Streets were diverse restaurants, bars and ice cream shops, rocking even on Monday night. We particularly liked Moorish, with its hints of Northern Africa and Spain, and Johnn Johnn’s for a dessert ice cream.

Art through projections of light – by a Darwin Indigenous artist, Dotty Fejo

On every street there were references to the Larrakia people, the traditional owners of Darwin, who number about 2000 and who have survived and prospered, like Darwin itself, against the odds. We were astonished by the quality and abundance of Aboriginal art works, some originating also from further south in the Northern Territory. If only our house still had some empty walls and the kinds of spacious rooms that might give those representations of the outback due impact.

As the target of human foes and the victim of natural disasters, Darwin has a rich modern as well as ancient history. At the Darwin Military Museum, I discovered that in 1938 it took nine days to fly from Sydney to London, with Darwin as the last Australian stop. The Japanese attacks from 1942 onwards were far more frequent and widespread than I had ever assumed; the raids continued for 20 months after 19 February, 1942, and included towns as far flung as Broome, Derby, Townsville and Exmouth. Although the loss of life and destruction of property at Pearl Harbour were far greater than during the first raid on Darwin, there was a similarity between the two attacks, in that each struck an unsuspecting population and brought a foreign war back home.

The location of Japanese raids in the twenty months after February, 1942

The introductory film about the first Japanese attack was moving and cleverly conceived, with old footage brought to life by additional modern effects such as flames curling around ships and buildings. One of the saddest parts of the film was the story of the nine workers in the Post Office who were killed outright.

When David pressured me to visit Parliament House, I replied snootily that I doubted it would be worth the effort, but I was wrong. The former upper house had been converted into a library, a quiet and appealing space offering respite from the infernal, draining heat outside; it was adorned with paintings, documents, commemorative quilts, historical references, and wall posters of lucidly explained information. All upper houses in Australian states should share the same happy fate.

Insights into how women’s magazines portrayed the situation in Darwin after Cyclone Tracy in 1974 – from the Upper House Library

Having taken advantage of numerous services in Darwin, including an optometrist, a car mechanic and a hair stylist, we felt ready to roll out our tent again for the long drive south*—and in my case to wake up once more with the sun and the birds.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ 

* At the time of writing this post, we were planning to drive home via South Australia to avoid the COVID outbreaks in the eastern states. That idea came to a sticky end.

♦ We left Darwin 2 and a half days before it went into lockdown. Sheer dumb luck.

Davey takes a break in one of the seats hewed out of a tree that are placed invitingly around the Darwin Botanic Gardens.

Final Notes and Comments
♦ Accommodation
The Cavenagh, 12 Cavenagh Street, Darwin (ideal location in the town centre)

♦ Fun Fact from the Military Museum: The word “jeep” comes from “GP” for “general purpose” vehicle. Initially, I thought that this might be an urban myth, but it was corroborated by my Oxford app.

♦ The Botanic Gardens represented many different habitats, including rainforests, eucalyptus woodlands, Tiwi wet forests and Madagascar baobabs, with a guest appearance by our own beloved boab, Adansonia gregorii.

Only one of them is the Australian boab – the one on the top left. I actually didn’t think that it looked all that typical of the boabs I had seen in the Kimberley, which were generally taller and stockier, as shown by the information board reproduced below:

Artwork and poster depicting the “Uluru Statement from the Heart” – in the Upper House Library
St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral, built to withstand cyclones, yet inviting and architecturally cohesive as well.
A Darwin resident saved a desert rose from demolition by a developer and delivered it to the Botanic Gardens, where it now has pride of place.

Not Really Roughing It – from Kununurra to Katherine

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June 21, 2021

9:04 am

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David on the Jenemoom Walk, Keep River National Park. I especially like this boab tree because its shape is so like a wine bottle’s.

Sometimes I feel moderately pleased with myself for travelling around Australia in a medium-sized SUV with a medium-sized husband and a medium-sized tent. Then I meet other travellers whose conception of the journey is far humbler and much more exacting than ours.

When we visited Keep River National Park, we saw mostly campers at the lower end of the comfort scale. At Jarnem Campground, the campers were either other tent-dwellers or owners of camper trailers, which represent the next step up from tents in the comfort hierarchy. Although Keep was accessible to all kinds of vehicles and eminently worth visiting, it was largely ignored by the big caravan dwellers who had packed the park in Kununurra. It was as though many of them had restricted themselves to the comforts of town life, perhaps in order to avoid the undeniable messiness of bush camping—despite the built-in luxuries they could have towed along to soften the experience.

Rock shelter used by the Miriwoong people in the wet season

David and I had planned two walks at Keep: one in the cool of the evening and the other at dawn. We began the “Jenemoom Walk” at four in the afternoon, which was actually far too early. Since all our gadgets had ticked over to Northern Territory time, one and a half hours later than the time in Kununurra, we had falsely assumed that the sun would play by the same rules. It was still burning hot. Whenever I was in the full sun, I felt as though my arms were roasting on a rotisserie. Fortunately, we were walking at least some of the time in the shade of the rocky cliffs towering over us. We coped by drinking frequently and sweating copiously.

At the end of the walk, which took us along the edge of an almost dry creek bed, we came to a huge overhanging rock that was used in earlier times by the Miriwoong people as a shelter in the wet season. We could see the hollows in some flat stones on the ground where the people had pounded seeds to make a kind of flat bread. It was a quiet, mysterious place, imbued with the secrets of the deep past.

A mortar stone with a hollow caused by seed grinding – from the wet season shelter of the Miriwoong people, Jenemoom Walk, Keep River National Park
Dawn breaks over the “Bungle-like” sandstone formations on the Nigli Gap Walk.

The early morning walk led us to Nigli Gap along the base of the Jarnem escarpment. The dawn sun cast a golden glow over the tops of the sandstone formations, leaving the rest in shadow. At the end of the track we came to a rock wall with ancient paintings in red ochre that also seemed to whisper to us from long ago. 

Paintings in red ochre at Nigli Gap

We were covered with red dust when we returned to our campground, yet filled with the sense of self-denying achievement that comes from rising before the sun. “I’m going for more walks at dawn when I get home,” I told David.

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied. Such a cynic.

The magic light effects of a dawn walk – but shall I have the motivation to try it in Melbourne? Davey doubts it.

Our pride in our efforts was tempered later that day by our encounters with other campers in Timber Creek, nearly 100 kilometres further along the highway to Darwin. We met two women who had cycled from Melbourne (“up the guts”, they said, not across the Nullarbor like us) and who had set off only 2 weeks before we had. They looked to be in their fifties.

“You two must have more brawn than brains,” commented an older man in the camp kitchen.

“Not much brawn,” one of them replied—and it was true. They looked neither muscular nor particularly athletic. Yet every day they managed 100 kilometres or more on their electric bikes, carrying all the necessities of life with them, including solar panels with which to charge their bike batteries when they camped in the bush. David saw one of them the following morning with a 15-litre soft pack of water—yet another heavy object to be carted in tropical heat over vast distances on their bike trailer.

Bungle-like formations and a boab in the early morning on the Nigli Gap Walk

Another couple in Timber Creek, clearly older than David, were travelling with just a car and a double swag. I saw them in the early morning, lying side by side in the pale light, chatting quietly. I was seriously impressed by their modest equipment and their gentle companionship. David and I prefer not to communicate more than absolutely necessary before breakfast.

All in all, we have to conclude that our method of travelling is somewhere in the middle of the scale. We may have renounced certain comforts, but compared to some people our style of camping involves substantial self-indulgence.

Final Notes

Accommodation:

Entmoot at sunset, Kununurra
Emu in red ochre, Nigli Gap Walk
The fruit of the Pandanus Palm, looking like Christmas tree decorations—or hot coals from a fire
The pith of a boab nut, originally on the ground at Jarnem Campground
Wet season shelter information board, Keep River National Park
A view of Katherine River from the Baruwei Lookout, which we climbed unwisely in the heat of the afternoon. How I longed to be chugging along in that happy little boat of revellers…

Options and Encounters – from Derby to Kununurra

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June 15, 2021

7:59 am

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Davey always asks for extra froth on his cappuccino. They take him seriously up here.

“It goes against the grain to outlay all that money,” I said, “but I’m prepared to go on the $190 cruise.”

David demurred. “The $299 one is better.”

We were discussing possibilities for an Ord River cruise from Kununurra, a town that only came into existence in 1961 as a by-product of the dam project. 

“That tour doesn’t even give you an extra meal for the extra $110,” I argued. “Just nibbles and a glass of champagne.” 

“Yes, but you get to see Lake Argyle as well as the Ord River.”

“So what? It’s just a dam.”

This was like secular blasphemy to a lover of dams and other feats of engineering. “It holds 21 times as much water as Sydney Harbour,” David cried. He flapped the brochure about in the early dusk and his unkempt beard fluttered in the Kununurra breeze. “I want to see it. I don’t want to miss it.”

I had to give in. You can’t stand between a man and a dam. 

Lake Argyle pours water into the Ord River. To the right is the stony “plug” that forms the dam wall between the mountains.

Sadly for David and for my dam education, his desired tour was booked out and we had to settle for the one I’d originally chosen. This is what happens when so many Australians are travelling at the same time. We did see and admire Lake Argyle, but not for quite as long as he had hoped.  

The sandbar near the junction of the Fitzroy and Margaret Rivers

Before this heated discussion, we had spent a few days and nights travelling ponderously along the highway from Derby to Kununurra. On the whole, the road had been quiet and lonely, but not without its idiosyncrasies and its pleasures. We had driven over any number of one-lane bridges spanning creeks that only have water in the wet season, and we had navigated, as usual in Western Australia, many kilometres of roadworks. We had stayed overnight in Fitzroy Crossing, at Larrawa Station (not a patch on Bullara Station) and at Doon Doon Roadhouse. 

Sunset at Larrawa Station

Other travellers had told us to avoid stopping overnight at Halls Creek because of its “security problems”, but it was at the Poinciana Roadhouse there that we had one of the most memorable moments of the whole trip. We met an Aboriginal man, Ivan Bridge, exactly David’s age, and he told us about his childhood and life on a cattle station as the son of an Aboriginal woman and an Irishman. His father, unlike many other white people at that time,  had encouraged him to speak his mother’s language, Kija. I asked him to speak to us in it. The sentence that he chose, and kindly repeated when I asked him to, was: “I am speaking to you from the mouth of my mother.” 

I would have liked to undertake an intensive language course for weeks on end. 

But back to our river cruise. The thing about tours is that you surrender yourself for a whole day to someone else’s planning. After weeks of reaching our own not particularly knowledgeable decisions, we felt liberated. Once we had climbed onto the bus, we were in the capable hands of the tour providers, Triple-J Tours. All we had to do was lean back, enjoy the air-conditioned comfort and await further instructions.

A view of the cliffs and vegetation as we motored along the river

The boat driver and tour guide, Grant, was clearly a lover of dams and of the plethora of living creatures that make their home on the Ord River. He was especially enamoured with the elegance and ingenuity of the dam system that has been developed over the past 60 years. “No pumps!” he said. “It’s all done with gravity. And there’s no concrete in the dam wall either.” The clay in the wall expands and becomes watertight as it gets wet, which seals it in a natural way. Lake  Argyle currently holds 18 Sydney Harbours, but at the height of a particularly heavy wet season, it has held 43. It is one of the largest freshwater lakes in the southern hemisphere.

As the boat twisted and turned along the Ord River and then across Lake Kununurra, we were mesmerised by the towering red cliffs, the trees that nestled on them, seeming tiny in comparison, the emerald green water, the white spray, the reeds swaying in the sunlight, and the spinifex clinging to the rocks. Grant could pick out even the most well-camouflaged wildlife, such as the crocodiles sunning themselves on the banks and the tree branches, and the rock wallabies peeping out from their little caves. There were all sorts of birds too: sea eagles, ospreys, darters, cormorants and jacanas, which Grant nicknamed “Jesus birds”, because they can walk on the floating vegetation. 

A view of Lake Kununurra from the front of our cruise boat

I had to admit that we really did need a boat to see all this, rather than our trusty, dusty car. Yet to my mind, the meeting with Ivan, over a coffee and a Kit Kat at a dingy roadhouse on a seemingly interminable highway, was just as memorable as our river cruise. 

Final Notes

Accommodation:
A fuzzy photo of the jacana bird “walking on water”
A relatively youthful boab in Derby
Cooking gnocchi at twilight on Larrawa Station
Two boabs growing side by side
The “Mini Bungle Bungles” in Mirima National Park

Following the Trail of the Boab Trees to Derby

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June 9, 2021

1:56 am

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The Prison Tree, 7 kilometres from Derby
Sunset on Cable Beach

I felt quite relieved to leave crowded Broome firmly behind us. Although it is an attractive town with inviting shops and beautiful beaches, it was simply teeming with tourists—most of them, it seemed, bent on viewing the perfect sunset, riding camels and buying pearls. 

Naturally we are tourists too—but we are such tasteful, low-impact tourists! We try to walk on beaches rather than drive onto them in showy 4WDs. We sleep in a tent rather than in a 24-foot-long mobile home with a two-room annexe, a built-in satellite dish and twinkling fairy lights…

Okay, I’m kidding myself—we are really no different from all the others. But at least we don’t have unrealistic expectations. The woman beside us at Tarangau Caravan Park in Broome, who specialised in facetiming loudly deep into the evening, said to one listener: “All I want is to have a selfie shot with all my friends on Cable Beach with the sunset in the background.” She went on to complain that the sky was not complying with her wishes; the clouds were always in the wrong place.

I mean seriously. David and I don’t expect the sky to rearrange itself just to indulge us.

Well, perhaps occasionally.

A boab in Derby with that distinctive swelling trunk (even in relative youth)

On the road to Derby, the environment was dotted, to my delight, with ever more boabs, and I asked myself why I am so taken with these stocky, imposing, long-lived trees. Is it because they start with slender trunks and gradually grow sturdier, chunkier and more robustly individual with the passing of time? Are they potential metaphors for solid women who are long past the first flush of middle age? Am I drawn to them because, to put it bluntly, they are unashamedly fat like me?

Whatever the reason, the Prison Tree, seven kilometres out of Derby, jolted me out of my fanciful conjectures. In the late 1880s, Aboriginal people were kidnapped from the West Kimberley and forced to work in the pearling industry; this venerable and ancient boab, believed to be 1500 years old, was used as a temporary gaol for the slaves en route and later for those who resisted. When I sent a picture of it with details to my daughter Sophie, she wrote back: “Are you serious? They used trees to imprison people? God, we’re horrible.”

Enough said.

So it was a joy to discover other boab trees without such a disturbing past in the town of Derby itself. They were growing abundantly all over the town and some had been planted in a straight line on the main street: relatively young, flourishing, and unsullied by human cruelty.

Derby certainly had a healthy number of tourists, yet it seemed far less frenetic than Broome. And at the close of day, the sky indulged us, casting a golden light over the bulging trunks of those centre town boabs and creating long shadows on the green grass.

Boabs are the plane trees of Derby.

Final Notes
Accommodation:

Some Details About Boab Trees

  • Our name, boab, is possibly an Australian version of the African word baobab.
  • It is hard to determine the age of a boab tree, since older trees are hollow and have no growth rings. It is believed, however, that the particularly large trees could be thousands of years old.
  • A boab tree can survive drought because it stores water when it rains and swells in diameter. The cavities within hollow trunks or between branches provide water for Indigenous people.
  • Since the wood of boab trees is spongy and fibrous, it is not valuable for timber. This is actually fortunate for its survival.
  • The Nyikina people of the West Kimberley region know how to use the roots, pith and seeds of the boab for food and medicine. The bark can be used generally to make string. The bark from a young tree can be chewed to freshen the mouth and provide fluid.
  • The pith of a ripe boab nut is high in Vitamin C and was used in the past to heal explorers suffering from scurvy.
  • It is unwise to shelter under a boab during a storm. Lightning strikes can cause boab trees to collapse and die.
Derby Jetty at sunset

At Kooljaman – the Bardi Aboriginal Name for Cape Leveque

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June 6, 2021

7:53 am

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Sunset on the Western Beach at Kooljaman, Cape Leveque

On the way from Broome to our campground at Kooljaman, I felt rather jittery about the roads and the capacity of our “almost 4WD” to deal with them. According to reviews and other literature, the last 10 kilometres of the trip called for a 4WD with high clearance, rather than an AWD with mere standard clearance like ours.

I hadn’t realised that our car was not a “proper 4WD” until I had read a pamphlet a few weeks back about which types of cars would be safe to drive in Francois Peron National Park. Our spanking new Subaru Forrester had been classified in one mean-spirited brochure as a definite non-starter, which had made me doubt its credentials for today’s driving challenge. What if we got bogged in the 10 kilometres of sand that we would have to navigate before reaching our campsite?

As always in such situations, David was nonchalant and unconcerned. “Of course we won’t get bogged,” he said. “This car will manage fine.”

David is always laid-back and optimistic, whereas I invent problems and dread situations that may never arise.

Fortunately the roadworks that pervade the whole of Western Australia had also touched this little northern point of the Dampier Peninsula; the 10 kilometres of unmade roads turned out to be only 3.7 kilometres. There was certainly a lot of sand threatening to ensnare us, but we rolled through it all and only came close to getting bogged when we reached our campsite, where the sand was treacherously deep. Davey managed to reverse out of the quagmire. Once again, his nonchalance was more justified than my nerves.

Later, when my sister Dot arrived, I observed that even in her 4WD she had to be careful when navigating through the sand. As I listened to the interaction between her and her male companion, it occurred to me that David and I are not the only ones who see the world from opposing points of view.

The western beach, close to sunset on our first evening at Kooljaman 

One of the pleasures of travelling with another woman, incidentally, is the opportunity to whinge about male companions. I had missed this experience for 7 long weeks. It seemed a bit churlish, however, to take full advantage of it now, for David calmly continued to do all the things that make him, in the main, an admirable travelling companion: he cooked chicken curry while the rest of us walked past the red cliffs to the western beach to watch the sunset; he produced obscure and desirable items that no one else could find; and he approached every worry with his customary, easy-going serenity.

The relationship between camping couples was particularly easy to discern in this small, tightly packed campground. One afternoon, an array of 4WDs with wild and wonderful camper trailers, some with fold-out hydraulic tents, arrived to take up 3 or 4 spots near ours; we watched the drivers’ attempts to manoeuvre into their narrow sites with a certain fascination. I prefer not to park even a car with others watching; how much harder must it be to back a trailer into a small area while other campers assess your prowess? One woman bawled at her partner, whose trailer had reached less than a 90-degree angle to his car, “All you needed to do was reverse straight!” My heart went out to the hapless driver. (David mentioned later that this V-shape between a car and van is called jackknifing and can lead to axle damage.)

We could walk on the beach, but not on the rocky cliffs.

The Kooljaman campground is located on land belonging to the Bardi people. Archaeological excavations indicate that they have inhabited the surrounding islands and this spectacular coastline for at least 27,000 years. The business enterprise itself is owned by the communities of One Arm Point and Djarindjin. A few Bardi people work at the Kooljaman Resort and others live in isolated communities, to which visits are currently banned because of the COVID virus. A very few older people continue to speak the Bardi language, children learn the language in the Djarindjin Lombardina school, and there is a Bardi dictionary, as well as a grammar, published in 2012 by Claire Bowern. The young Bardi woman who works at Kooljaman reception told us that her grandmother still speaks Bardi to her. The language is listed as endangered because so few native speakers now exist: 9 years ago, there were only 5 fluent native speakers remaining. 

Sacred rocks at Kooljaman’s western beach

Although the camping facilities were clearly in need of an upgrade, Kooljaman was a lovely place to stay, with a “sunrise beach” for swimming to the east, and the wild, lonely “sunset beach” to the west. The western cliffs were red and rugged: they gave the whole coastal landscape an eerie, other-worldly aspect when we walked to the western beach each day to drink in the sunsets. One traveller commented that the rocks there, considered sacred by the Bardi people, looked rather like the Grand Canyon in miniature.

We thought that we heard barking owls calling to each other in the Kooljaman campground at night. David commented that one sounded like a small yappy dog while the other had a deeper, more sonorous sound.

A vine curls its way between the rocks and sand.

As we drove out of Kooljaman, there were a few tricky moments when we had to pass other cars by pulling off the road into the deep sand piled up on the sides. At one point, I felt sure that we were about to get bogged. Not surprisingly, David retained his composure while I imagined being stuck helplessly on the sandy edge for an indefinite period. By reversing and manoeuvring, we came down off the hill of sand and made our way without further incident back to Broome.

After this week, I am fairly sure that if we were a couple of barking owls, I’d be the yapping, insistent type, while David would bark in a deeper, more soothing fashion.

Final Notes
Accommodation

  • Broome: Tarangau Caravan Park (excellent)
  • Cape Leveque: Kooljaman (a beautiful environment, but some maintenance of the information plaques on the boardwalk, as well as other infrastructure, would be beneficial to the whole enterprise)

The Bardi People and Their Language

  • Kooljaman is actually pronounced “Gooljaman” in the Bardi language.
  • About 1000 people identify as Bardi, but only a few older people can still speak the language. The population has grown in the past 80 years, yet the number of native speakers of the Bardi language has declined, largely because the people were moved from mission to mission between 1940 and 1970; this interfered with first-language acquisition.
  • There were only 5 fluent speakers 9 years ago in 2012, when Claire Bowern published her grammar of the language.

A Very Few Interesting Details about the Bardi Language – from Claire Bowern’s A Grammar of Bardi

♦ The ending -iidi, when added to nouns, creates the meaning “expert”. When a person displays the noun as a major characteristic, this ending can be used to create a noun signifying a person with expertise in that field:

  • joornk – fast → joornkiidi – runner
  • goora – game → gooriidi – playful person
  • biini – maggot → biiniidi – an extremely deviant person

♦ The past tense, as in other Australian languages from the region, is created with the prefix ng- or nga-.

♦ What English-speakers might call the conditional or subjunctive, which is used to create hypotheses, to refer to possible worlds or to express wishes, exists with a range of possible meanings in Bardi, as in these sentences:

  • Look out! The snake might bite you. Anjala! Joorroonim oolarlarri.
  • I would like to eat monkey fish from an earth oven. Gaadiliny ngalarlin laalbooyoon.

♦ There is no fricative in the Bardi language. A fricative is a consonant made through turbulent air flow in a small space, e.g., f, th, h and sh in English.

I would have liked to delve deeper, but the grammar by Claire Bowern is far too expert for me; I needed the book that she has created for learners rather than for grammarians.

David, Dot and I visiting the western beach

Camouflage at Kooljaman
Wild mushroom risotto at the Kooljaman Restaurant
Eating out at the Kooljaman Restaurant