Big Paul Broad from Etadunna Station, who has been our host for the past few days. Big man, big laugh, big things. Cattle stations, bulldozers and graders, he’s the sort of bloke that needs a lot of space. His property is contracted for sale to Western Mining Company (they want the water only) but he can’t bring himself to sign away the big life for a rich property on lower Murray catchment.
Mungerannie Roadhouse and John, the whiskered one. A Kiwi in search of the quintessential Australian lifestyle. He sells beer and fuel so he lives here and pokes around the sand hills. He has books of track observations, and is a source of both landscape and human observations. He introduced us to Peter Weston of Clifton Hills Station. We met Peter in the yard outside the homestead. A collection of metal boxes, fences, sheds, houses, trucks, yards, machinery, laid out like a Torrens town on the sparse surface of Sturt’s Stony Desert. The homestead has a well manicured green lawn. It has obviously taken some effort and much water. We deliver a slab of beer and a carton of cigarettes as a thanks for access to the Walker’s Crossing Track that will allow us to get across to Innaminka with all this water about. The Queensland flood is in Innaminka, but not down to Walker’s, yet. There are hundreds of lakes and overflows to fill. A huge tract of dry Coolibah country awaiting the gift of water. Peter Weston is like a piece of crisp fried bacon: thin, crusty, hard and salty. Last night we camped on the northern tip of the Koochera Dune, a massive red dune that runs 20 kms into Goyder’s Lagoon. I sat on the dune at dawn, on the wrinkled, sculpted, cold hard sand, surrounded by the waters of Goyder’s Lagoon. The lagoon is filling with waters from the Diamantina and, perhaps, Eyre Creek. I felt the earth turning into the dawn, standing naked on the dune. I put my toes in the sand, and drank cool morning air. Today we continued our journey up the Cooper. We used a station road called Walker’s Crossing, Clifton Hills Station, and into Innaminka Station (a Kidman property). The track ran up a series of dune swales with occasional crossings, until eventually it came out on the clay pans of the Cooper floodplain. Coolibah country, beautiful sparse forests with open clay and salt pans, hasn’t seen water since 1989-90, but we know it’s only a few days to the north. After crossing on to Innaminka Station, we came upon the main channel, with a culvert under a clay causeway. Still no water in sight. From here the track returns to dune county as we approach the Moomba gas and oil fields. The approach into Tirrawarra, a satellite facility of Moomba, is from the east. As we crossed the last dune, we could see the water on its way, flooding the channels and overflows of Cooper Creek. Travelled into Innaminka along the station track, crossing the dry Strzelecki Creek on the edge of town. Along the way, stopped at the Gigealpa waterhole for lunch. Innaminka was in a state of anticipation. The water had crossed the causeway that morning, and the last vehicle from the north, a low loader and kato, forded at .75m. We camped on the town common on the east side of the Strzelecki, on high ground near the pub. The publican is a young dread-locked bloke called Dylan, who seemed to fit perfectly the image of an outback publican. Slightly eccentric, resourceful, personable and he has got the outback in his blood. His family previously owned the Birdsville Pub. After dinner, our tour group, half a dozen mining workers, and local poet-character Taffy Nicholls, made up the pub crowd. Dylan lent Andrew a guitar and the obligatory songs were performed for the group. Later, things got more relaxed, some of our group retiring, and the music more spontaneous. I yarned to Taffy for some time about his time as the Birdsville mailman, droving, and writing poetry. He’s got a chuckle on him that has to be heard. Sometime later our little party was joined by Greg. Greg was a bit of a surprise package. Firstly, Greg was not a he, Greg was a she. Secondly, Greg first made her presence known when Dylan explained that the “bottle rattling” behind the bar was Greg’s doing. We couldn’t see her, until she finally wandered out after draining a few stubbies. Greg is a pig. A four-legged, curly-tailed black pig, who wanders around the bar after dark, looking for a beer. Dylan told us how he takes Greg for a swim each day down at the waterhole. She used to travel in a pub van until Christmas day. On that fateful day she feasted on two buckets of beer and a packet of marshmallows. Later, when it was swim time, she travelled in the van down to the water. When Dylan opened the door of the van she fell out flat on her back and wouldn’t get up. Since then she won’t travel in the van, and insists on waddling down to the waterhole.
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The mouth of Coopers Creek on shores of Lake Eyre north. It’s hot summertime hot, and flies have been ruthless. Tonight, like last night, we camp on the Cooper near Cuttapirra waterhole. The river is dry, with Queensland waters not yet at Innaminka. The lake is 60% full, most of the water hasn’t been here long enough for the birds. The country is looking lush after some local rains recently, with a swath of Mitchell & other grasses between the dunes.
The road out to here is about 80 kms and took 8 hours. We followed a station road out to Georgina Bore (west) then turned north on to a shot line that took us up to Cuttapirra waterhole. Camped the night in a beautiful setting on the salt bed of the Cooper, under an escarpment of gypsum. This morning we backtracked down the shot line about 5 kms, then travelled west on a GPS bearing across the dunes. The surface is choppy and soft here and there. Low-range 2nd-3rd mostly. After two hours turned WNW, and continued for two more hours until we hit the river at the mouth. In a dry season, a drive down the riverbed salt flats from Cuttapirra would be better going. It is the autumn equinox and sunset and sunrise are within a minute +12 hours of each other. It’s a big world tonight, with the Sometimes Sea filling and the heavenly clock ticking.
I’m sitting by a mound spring on the southern shore of Lake Eyre. At my feel there is water bubbling out of the sand, which hasn’t seen daylight since it fell as rain on the Great Dividing Range over 1 million years ago. It’s crystal clear from the filtration of 1000 kms of aquifers, and it is bubbling happily. Scattered around the dunes are great artefacts? of stone tool making. Smooth washed river rocks from the rivers of the Flinders Ranges lay scattered amongst a field of discarded chips of many colours. The lucky chips, the useful ones, have long gone walking along the travel lines to be left beside an unknown campfire. The scale, the timeframes, the sky, the water, is all big fella. The land itself is a little confused, with no grand landscape architecture such as a mountain range or major river system. The drainage lines lack the logic of water running downhill, and wander about in a seemingly patternless maze. The soil varies from deep agricultural soils to harsh stick forests, with bare red soil, gravelly soil, scattered with endless seams and veins of quartz gravel, rocks, reefs and outcrops.
This is gold country, a landscape peppered with golden promise. Gold deep in the earth, in the mother lodes, gold thrust to the surface by geological events, gold stolen from the quartz by water, and scattered, rounded by creeks and rivers and streams. Old rivers long ago buried or lost their way, new rivers stealing gold from old rivers, making rounder still gold. The forests have followed this history: some trees are made for the poorer gold-laden soils; others, grander trees, have claimed the other gold, the rivers of water, the richer, goldless soil. The trees seem to know the country better than any, a wisdom held deep in their collective wooden memories. The lakes and billabongs, the drainage lines, creeks and streams form a loose family that calls itself the Loddon River. The Loddon meanders through the landscape, laying a lacy pattern of River Gums across it. The brushstrokes of water are rich in plant and bird life. A pattern that does make some sense of the rolling face of the land. The farmers have found places where the Loddon has dropped soil, places where the water is near, places that support life and enterprise. These places seem to be where the gold isn’t. Where there are no farms, where there is little water, where there are the stick forests, this is where the gold is. This is where the ant men came. Digging holes, burrowing with hope and endless optimism, into the dry, stony soil in search of “colour”. In search of gold. In search of some good fortune in their bleak and arduous lives. They came in their hundreds of thousands, from all over the world, to find fortune. Industrious and manic, they dug and dug and dug until the whole landscape had been torn apart, the trees slaughtered, the soil skin pocked with diggings. And good fortune many did find. The towns that followed the miners are grand and mostly empty. Grand, ornate, architectural monuments, banks, courthouses, town halls, mechanics and art institutes, hotels, railway stations, churches and stores. The bleached bones of could-be societies. And grand towns they were, the flesh on these bones. Instant cities of many thousands, born and grown over a few years, mostly to die when the gold ran out a few years later. So across the jumbled landscape, in the gaps between the water lace, stand the bleached bones of grand vision and hope. The farmers built their towns, too. Smaller, less ostentatious, but survivors on the banks of a life-giving river. Towns of shade and continuing life. Then came the railways. Sharp, uncompromising black lines across the land. Joining the towns, feeding commerce, rivers of man that defied the logic of water. Along the shining tracks, other communities grew. Dot communities, built around silos and sheep yards. And also the roads. Joining, linking, giving status to the towns and cities. Now across this landscape is woven a hundred thousand life stories, family histories, human tragedies and triumph. To each of us, most of the people stories are invisible, illegible, or lost. For some who have become rooted in the earth, the stories have become who they are. They are defined by the mix of landscape and personal heritage. They belong. For others the landscape holds the keys to their myths and definition. They may be beholden to another place, but this golden landscape is part them. Part me! |
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As a practicing artist I have travelled far and wide across Australia, walked on country, camped on country and rolled out my swag. I thank the custodians and I acknowledge the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and their continuing connection to land, culture and community. I pay my respect to Elders past and present.