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Glowing rocks and legends: following footsteps of extraordinary people in the Flinders Ranges

4/12/2015

All that glows at Arkaroola is not uranium - but most of it is. Included in the display is a bowl of uranium glass, a popular product in the early part of last century.

Doug Sprigg explains the convulsions of earth that threw up the geological treasures in his beloved Arkaroola in the Flinders Ranges.

Arkaroola was a steep learning curve, linking mishap with hospitality and a wealth of information about heavy radon gas, glowing uranium and a weird little bacterium in the ancient Flinders Ranges.

We limped into Arkaroola Wildlife Sanctuary in a 40-degree-plus swelter. Isabel was nursing a busted spring shackle and a blasted-out tyre. Shepherding us were Doug Sprigg and his partner Vicki. They and their two staffers, Roger and Gemma, could not have been more obliging as we sorted out spare part options that were to prove a little difficult.

We had intended ducking up to pay a quick visit to the village and then pushing on to the South Flinders but fate intervened and, as is often the case, made for a memorable experience.

Fortunately we became unshackled only a few kilometres from Arkaroola. A passing stranger called the village. Roger appeared. He and Tony jacked up Isabel and chained the spring to the chassis in a bit of bush mechanicking. Doug and Vicki turned up and followed as we crawled to what was to be our sanctuary for a week.

A pool, a bar, half the world’s population of pretty yellow-footed wallabies, friendly people, internet and no mobile service – what more could you want? Throw in curious tales of uranium mines, inspect glowing rocks, hear legendary stories about famous geologists, explorers and scientists who have explored Arkaroola, go for easy or tough walks along ancient gullies and hills or peer at the night sky through one of two observatories.

Then there’s the internationally famous Ridge Top Tour along a remarkable private 4WD track to Siller’s Lookout, a final scramble up a heart-stopping incline to gaze out on the spectacular ranges and the plains below.

Glittering through the hills was Lake Frome, the whitest salt lake in the Southern Hemisphere. So dazzling is the stark white that is used as a contrast material in analysing satellite data.

I don’t speak German but it was pretty easy to understand that Erica, Conrad and Lars from Switzerland, who were in the back of the open-top vehicle with me, were finding the ride uber-exciting. You can understand why the gate to the track is locked and why some people put it on their list of Ten Must-Dos in Australia.

Arkaroola, 144,000 acres of the northern reach of the Flinders Ranges, is a unique venture into private conservation. The least attractive of pastoral lease offerings in the region, it was fenced off and taken up initially in return for the cost of eradicating feral animals.

Legendary outback geologist, conservationist, academic and author Reg Sprigg (whose achievements are staggering – google him) bought the lease in 1968 after failing to convince the South Australian Government to turn it into a national park. Reg took a month to confess his Arkaroola venture to his wife Giselda but over the next decades they created a unique retreat in the remarkable range of South Australia.

What started with a small motel has now grown to a complex with lodging for about 300 people, plus a caravan park and camp ground at the end of 130km of gravel road. That’s if you take the easy option from the sealed road running from Port Augusta to Leigh Creek. Lots more rough back routes are available from south and from the north …. think Innamincka, Cameron Corner, Birdsville.

“I don’t know much about the Flinders Ranges,” I confessed to Doug when we arrived. “What can you tell me about them?”

He swept me to a satellite map the size of a toilet wall and conjured up colliding and splitting continents, an ocean floor being hurled on high, massive pressures thrusting ancient strata into convulsions that formed the unique geographic surges of the Flinders Ranges.

In another corner he flicked on an ultraviolet light above a cabinet. Flinders rocks glowed green, orange, yellow and purple in startling radioactive luminosity.

Doug told story of how geologists fathomed that the uranium was being washed out of the ranges. On the east is Beverley mine, churning out yellowcake for Neal Blue’s General Atomics in the US; on the west is the huge Olympic Dam deposit of uranium, copper, gold and silver on Roxby Downs.

Arkaroola itself has had fairly mediocre mining success. When settlers in SA, our only non-penal colony, started heading for the Victorian gold rush the Adelaide chiefs feared for the settlement. They tried to persuade miners to stay home because there was gold in them thar Flinders. There wasn’t. Copper was found in enough quantity to get some digging but the ventures went broke.

Arkaroola is a geologists’ paradise and you learn you are walking in the footsteps of extraordinary people. Exploits of outback legend Reg Sprigg, of Santos and Moombi oil fields fame, are detailed in the book Rock Star by Kristin Weidenbach. (Reg found the oldest fossil in the world, drove the first vehicle across the Simpson with his wife and kids, did scary exploration on the ocean floor and was given the keys to the City of London for his services to geology.)

An Arkaroola peak is named after Reg’s close friend and confidante Sir Mark Oliphant, who searched here for uranium to make the world’s first atom bomb, worked on the Manhattan Project and then walked a humanitarian line, pleading for nuclear energy not to be used in weapons. A valley is named after Sir Douglas Mawson, Reg Sprigg’s mentor who also searched here for uranium.

Ridges of haughty grandeur tolerate what vegetation will endure the average rainfall of 170mm. Green deposits on rocks signal uranium but glittering shards tell of other fierce twists in the bowels of the earth.

New vegetation rose up after the floods of 1974, including a swathe of pines flanking the perilous Ridge Top road. Goats chewed off the saplings as their numbers exploded; more than 90,000 were shot over 20 years.

Keeping feral animals out of Arkaroola is still a battle but keeping the miners out was even tougher. When the SA government turned a little overly miner-friendly Doug led the fight to keep Arkaroola free from mining exploration.

“Arkaroola really belongs to the people,” he said. “We run it like a national park, only we have to make a profit. We also make donations to conservation, research and education.”

His sister Marg was away when we were there. A geologist, she looks after the management side of Arkaroola while Doug flies tourists on flights over the ranges, drives them to the ridge tops and beyond and shows them the starry heavens on dark nights. Restless Sprigg energy is evident, laced with a passion for knowledge and spillway of stories.

At the helm in doors in Marg’s absence were Doug’s partner Vicki Wilson and vivacious cook and bar manager Gemma.

An arid range of strange and grim fascination, Arkaroola is a long way from an English country garden – or even the Sydney suburbs where Vicki lived until a year ago. She worked in finance projects for One Steel Arriom but escaped the harbour city as often as she could to go on bush camping trips.

Two years ago (“I was on a camping trip with my ex-mother-in-law,” she says wryly) she met Doug. She moved to Arkaroola and loves the vastly different life. ”I had to adapt to not being able to pop out to the shops for things but, apart from missing my family, I love this life.”

She pointed us at the waterholes and places of interest. We didn’t make it to the Paralana Springs site but that might be on the cards one day. A doctor thought the radon springs would be therapeutic for his patients. He set up a spa in 1923 and rattled one group of patients up there before it all became too hard because of the rugged remoteness and grim roads. It was shut down in 1924. No records show what happened to patients bathed in radon.

“There’s a really unusual bacteria in those springs,” said Vicki. “They tried to work out how it could survive and found it has a regenerative gene. It heals itself. They have only found that sort of thing in nuclear plant emissions.”

Wow. Of all the fascinating features in Arkaroola, that one grabbed me. A gene that repairs the body. Isolate that gene and you would think you would be sitting on something a lot richer than a mine chockful of uranium, gold and diamonds. Maybe we should get that spa going again.

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Paradise a remote crossroad a long way from a pretty resort

3/24/2015

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Cheryl and Fenn Miller at Cameron's Corner, where New Year's Eve happens three times in an hour.

A yellowed dog carcass hanging on the world’s longest fence adds a curt footnote to the sign that warns you can be fined $1000 if you don’t shut the gate. They are pretty serious about trying to control wild dogs in this part of the world.

Cameron Corner, that iconic outback post where the corner of NSW and Queensland abut South Australia, is about half way along the 5614km of the Dingo Fence and is a hell of a lot better place to live than flashy Port Douglas, say Fenn and Cheryl Miller.

They left their home in Port Douglas when the ritzy crowd moved in and headed west to find the real Australia again. Port Douglas grew in popularity with the glamour crowd after Christopher Skase built a Mirage resort there.

“We didn’t like the way it changed,” said Fenn. “Too flashy. No sense of community anymore. Everyone started getting greedy.”

After a spell up in the Kimberley they bought the Cameron Corner Store six years ago and get to celebrate New Year’s Eve three times a year.

“We stand around the post and start in the NSW corner,” says Cheryl as Tony and I settled in at the bar for what proved an enjoyable afternoon stretching well into the evening. “Half an hour later it’s midnight in South Australia and half an hour after that in Queensland.”

Queensland is not on daylight saving so it’s last.

She and Fenn love their life, even though it has its challenges and long hours. Days start at 7.30am and can end about 1.30pm to cater for the thousands of people each year passing through the dusty roads to and from three states. Some come on postie bikes, tractors or ride-on mowers. A shearer came from NSW pushing a shopping trolley. A French couple walked by to follow the footsteps of Burke and Wills 150 years after that ill-fated expedition.

A miner barrelled through on a motorbike to set the record for crossing Australia at the east and west extremities of the mainland. He went from Steep Point to Byron Bay in three and a quarter days, made all the more impressive because he first rode 500km to the start at Steep Point.

“We’ve got a mountain bike rally coming through in May,” said Fenn. “Some nights during the season the whole camping area on the hill is lit up, the caravan park is full and all our accommodation units are full. The next night we might have two people staying here.”

Fenn has worked in the building trade and Cheryl’s background is mainly hospitality. They both try to keep the spirit of outback hospitality alive but Fenn’s patience gets tested when the city boys roar in in a cloud of dust. “Sometimes I meet them at the door with a broom and tell them they caused it (the drifted-in dust) and they can sweep it up.”

The Corner Store sits in the Sunshine State corner. Fenn and Cheryl like that. It means they are still Queenslanders, even if just by a few metres.

It’s a bit mixed up, authority wise. They come under the South Australian Regional Tourism Authority and NSW controls the dog fence. They have a NSW postal code and a South Australian phone number.

“I’ve had two phone calls from Google asking where we are,” said Cheryl. Saying “halfway along the longest fence in the world” doesn’t quite answer the question.

The Dingo Fence started out in the 1880s as a futile attempt to control the rabbit plague with a series of fences. They fell into disrepair until 1914 when they were repaired to keep dingoes from sheep stations. In the 1940s the fences were joined together to form a continuous 8614km line, shortened by 3000km in 1980.

It is maintained by the NSW Wild Dog Destruction Board, which employs boundary riders, each responsible for up to 60km of the fence.

Fenn and Cheryl’s busiest year at the Corner Store was 2009 when Lake Eyre filled up and word went out it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to see the lake with water in it. It wasn’t – it still has water – but throngs of Australians headed inland.

That year Cameron Corner nearly ran out of water. “We had three weeks of drinking water left in November then the heavens opened up,” said Cheryl.

“We had 11 years’ worth of rain in two months. It was beautiful. Baby ducks came out and were walking on the veranda. Birds’ eggs were everywhere – if you left the car windows down they would be building nests in it.

“Larry from the Dog Fence left his washing on the line and the finches had nests in the pockets and in the rolled up sleeves. So then we had the mice plague. We were catching 300 a night.”

As the afternoon faded, Ken Ogilvie and his son Andrew rolled up from nearby Lindon Station. Their 3000 Herefords on a million-plus hectares are certified organic.

So are quite a few of the big cattle stations of the inland. It’s always been that way – no chemicals or pollutants. “We really just had to do the paper work,” said Andrew.

Mustering is a bit different from the old days though. Andrew uses a gyrocopter to find the cattle a radio down to the ringers on bikes.

Ken and Andrew had arrived with shovels. They pitched in with Fenn to dig holes and mix concrete, putting up posts for a broad sign that will be going up to announce a celebration for the 25th anniversary of the Cameron Corner Store at the end of May.

It’s going to be a decent affair. Andrew is keen to organise a bit of a sports day, with horse events and outback challenges. He wouldn’t mind if it became an annual event.

It’s going to be a bit of a hike back, but we wouldn’t mind if we swung back that way again to see how the inaugural event pans out.

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Grumpy gas man and dangling bones on the old Strzelecki

3/21/2015

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The southern part of the Old Strzelecki Track looked blocked - but there was a fine road leading off to the left. It also led to a gas field and a hairy, head-shaking gas man.

Take the Old Strezlecki Track south from Innamincka, they told us. The main Strzelecki Track is too chopped up from all the trucks.

That suited us. We were heading for Cameron Corner and the old track was a short-cut that took 36km off the journey. Seeing we were taking a 110km side trip on our way south to have a beer at Cameron Corner that was a bit inconsequential but it seemed good advice.

Ranger “Duck” Robertson at the Dig Tree told us the new Strzelecki Track was in a bad way. Trucks were busting trailers to bits on the bulldust holes. So many trucks were on the Strzelecki these days with all the mining that it should be bitumen all the way.

A lot of freight trucks were now running from Brisbane instead of Adelaide. Go the old track, “Duck” reckoned.

So did Jeff Matthews, our helpful friend at Innamincka, who warned millions of trucks plying the unsealed main road from Lyndhurst to Innamincka had battered it.

Off we toodled down the Old Strzelecki, named after Polish explorer Pawel (Paul) Strzelecki, who shot through from Poland after he was spurned as a suitor and accused of theft by a boss. Strzelecki was a self-proclaimed count, a self-taught geologist and a self-announced explorer who was the first to find copper in Canada and named our highest mountain Mt Kosciuszko after the Polish king.

A sign at the start of the old track warned it was an unmaintained road but it wasn’t too bad – narrow, rocky, a bit washed out but easily traversed without needing 4WD.

Halfway down a broad, unsealed, unnamed road cut east from the Strzelecki Track into Queensland. It looked to be used by a lot of mining traffic. Oil and gas was the go out here.

We doglegged it on to the southern stretch of the Old Strzelecki and about a kilometre down came across a wall of dirt piled across the track. Three flags were stuck in it. No one had said anything about the track being closed.

A fine wide gravel road ran off to the left but no arrow indicated it was a detour. We debated what it all meant and elected to follow the nice new road east, hoping it was a detour that would take us south again.

Turn south it did after a few kilometres. It ran through a gas field with signs right and left pointing to “Mudera No. 3”, “Mudera No. 6” etc. Our doubts grew. Eventually all roads pointed to Mudera.

We spied a truck over at one of the points, headed for it and were confronted with a large high vis man with a bearded, fly-netted head. He was shaking his head.

“You’re lost aren’t you?” We nodded happily.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said sternly. “This is a gas field. It’s dangerous. You need to get out of here. They’re venting all the time.”

He vented a little more as we tried to explain. “We’re trying to get to Cameron Corner on the Old Strzelecki but it had dirt piled across it back there. We thought this was a detour.”

“It isn’t. It’s a gas field. The Old Strzelecki is washed out. You have to go all the way around on the other Strzelecki.” He vented a bit more but we pointed out no one had told us the old track was closed. No signs indicated it was closed and no signs said we couldn’t come along the road that looked like a detour.

“That’s because you are too early,” he said in a more friendly fashion. “We’re not expecting you yet.”

By “you” he apparently meant some of the 30,000 travellers who explore the Strzelecki, Birdsville and Oodnadatta tracks region every year in the cooler months.

We thanked him, drove back to the flagged dirt piled on the Old Stzelecki, examined the obstacle and ignored his instructions. Behind the dirt was a big mudhole that had dried up. Tracks went around it and the dirt mound. So did we.

A couple more sections were a bit tricky but no problem. Soon the track turned into a well-maintained gravel road serving another gas field.

A large skeleton with a dislodged mining cap swung in the breeze on the side of the road. It had been carefully built from old cow bones – clever but vaguely ominous given the sometime terse relationship between inland travellers and the mining industries.

We turned east on to the Cameron Corner road and began undulating over hundreds of sand dunes. That beer at the beckoning bar of the Corner Store was looking good.

A welcoming piece of art work - or was that a warning?

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Innamincka Jeff just keeps building stuff

3/13/2015

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Maybe it’s the rhythmic name. Maybe it’s the remoteness. Maybe it’s just that it’s a tiny speck on the edge of the Strzelecki desert.

Whatever it is, Innamincka has a folklore fascination. A bitumen road now stretches west from Brisbane for all but the last 60 km. In outback terms that probably means it’s not really remote any more even if it is almost 400km west of Thargomindah.

At Thargomindah I had been looking forward to seeing “CONDUIT between above and below”, the celebrated sculpture hailing that life force of the inland - the Great Artesian Basin. Sculptor Frederick White created a field of 52 poles spearing into the ground, one for each week of the year the outback depends on water coming from beneath the ground.

Flow from a bore created a bottomless effect in the pooling water around the cylinders. Or so I read. “CONDUIT” isn’t there anymore.

Experts are worried that the Great Artesian Basin isn’t infinite and the outback’s enthusiastic spearing, releasing water from about 4700 bores at an average depth of 500m, is drying nature’s subterranean reservoir up faster than it can be replaced.

Ground water apparently can take 20,000 years to drip into the great underground basin so authorities have been busily capping bores that had been left to spurt freely, evaporating without storage.

The bore creating the Thargomindah sculpture on the outskirts of town did just that so it was capped and the sculpture taken away. No one we spoke to in town seemed too sure where “CONDUIT” was now or what it going to happen next.

Innamincka, just across the South Australian border, doesn’t have a sculpture but it does have an eye-catcher of a building as you drive into town, a grand, graceful two-storeyed ... what was it? Old or new? Residence or headquarters?

As we peered for a sign a ute pulled up and we again encountered that extraordinary outback hospitality that begins where the coastal green and greed ends.

“Need any help?” asked Jeff Matthews. Just having a look around, we said. “Are you stopping?” No, just visiting and looking for a bite for lunch and topping up with fuel and if possible water.

“No water in Innamincka,” said Jeff, “but we just had three and half inches of rain so I’ve got plenty at my place. Follow me and I’ll top you up.”

He pointed happily at Cooper Creek gurgling across the town causeway and told us the building we were examining was the old Inland Mission, restored thanks to Australia’s electronics billionaire Dick Smith.

“He didn’t do it all with his own money, of course, but he’s pretty good at getting other people to part with theirs.”

We followed the ute past the town’s clutter of mining paraphernalia to a garage where he topped up our water, showed us the solar powered boat he’d built, the motorhome he’s built (above) and offered us a cup of tea in the surprisingly comfortable air-conditioned quarters he had renovated on the corner of the building.

The guy has built a lot of stuff, including the impressive rustic Cooper Creek Homestay accommodation.

He arrived in Innamincka in the late 1990s with his wife Julie and daughters Miranda and Ali. They had roamed around Australia most of their married life. “We rammed a fair bit into our lives.” The girls had never been to school. Julie, with a Bachelor of Education, had home-schooled them.

I peered at a family photo on the wall. Miranda had married a German microbiologist and gained her masters degree in political science at Heidelberg university. Ali and her partner ran the Cooper Creek Homestay, which can seat 30 in the spacious kitchen.

Innamincka has a permanent population of about 17. Only four, including Jeff and Julie, are freehold landowners.

“Everyone else is either a manager or staff here,” said Jeff. “I suppose there’s also the National Parks but we don’t really count them. They’re something different.”

We drove down to inspect the cool and welcoming Homestay with a variety of bed arrangements in self-contained rooms. Business had been flat out last year but had slowed down a little with the ease-down in mining. Tourists would start to trickle in as the temperatures dropped.

At the Innamincka Trading Post we paid $1.90 a litre for fuel and had an ice cream for lunch. No take-away food was on sale. “You’re early in the season,” we were told once again. “We don’t do food during summer.”

Jeff was waiting to escort us out of town to make sure we didn’t miss the turn-off south to the Old Strzelecki Track. One day we are going back to see what else Jeff has built at Innamincka and rest our heads in what is considered outback luxury at the Cooper Creek Homestay.

And finally, here it is, folklore flowing from its name.

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Ranger "Duck" gives low-down on Burke

3/2/2015

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"That Burke should never have left Melbourne."

Dig Tree Ranger “Duck” was a little uneasy when he drove up to our camp beside Cooper Creek. It looked like the Bulloo Shire Council might be taking over the running of the historic precinct around the famed Burke and Wills coolibah tree and he didn’t know what that might mean for him.

The big camp ground around the legendary Dig Tree is on private land, part of the sprawling Nappa Merrie Station. Owned by the Kidman company, it was sold to Santos a while ago for $8 million and leased back. Now there's a new lessee and that means changes for 77-year-old Donald “Duck” Robertson. He wasn’t sure where he would fit into the new plan.

“Kidmans have looked after this place pretty well,” he said, waving away the flies. Tourists wanting to see the Dig Tree pay $11 at the honesty box to cover the upkeep of the modest facilities and the services of “Duck”, who has accommodation at the homestead.

Now Santos and the lessee want the council to look after the outback mecca on the edge of the Queensland border, about 70 rough kilometres from Innamincka.

As we waved at each other to brush away the flies, “Duck” explained that Santos had been buying a few properties around the Strzelecki region. The Kidmans had shifted all the cattle from Nappa Merrie and the new lessee was off buying about 8000 head to build a herd and pay off the $700,000 annual lease.

We had camped alone at the Dig Tree the day before, confronting the summer flies and heat that keeps most tourists away until around Easter. Then they come in their thousands, says “Duck”.

This year there will be a group of 40 veteran army vehicles, “Willys jeeps and stuff”, stopping over on their way to Birdsville.

Some campers stay a month, watching the Cooper go dry as the monsoonal rains in the north disappear. When the creek bed appears you can take a short cut across it to Innamincka.

“It’s been pretty dry around here,” said “Duck”. “They had four inches in Innamincka a month ago but we only had one. Breaks your heart.”

On a happier note Cooper Creek was now flowing strongly. The water had appeared a week ago. Probably come down the Thomson, he reckoned.

The permanent waterhole upstream at Nappa Merrie homestead would have 80 feet in it by now. “Where you see a homestead, you can be pretty sure there’s a permanent waterhole close to it.”

We were to learn later that everyone from Innamincka to Cameron Corner knew Donald “Duck” Robertson but not many knew he had been given his nickname when, at 12 months, he became the first baby to go on a mercy flight on the NSW Royal Flying Doctor.

Flown out from his home at Tibooburra, east of Cameron Corner, the doctor had asked the name of the sickly child. Told it was Donald, he had written “Donald Duck” on the wristband. For three quarters of a century the name had stuck.

“Duck” clearly enjoys the ranger job he has done for three years. He’s studied the story of Burke and Wills and, brushing away flies, reckons Burke was the problem.

“That expedition should never have left Melbourne. There wasn’t an explorer amongst them. Burke was the problem. An Irish cop. He gave Gray a flogging on the way back from the Gulf and he died three days later. If Wills had been in charge it would have been a different story. At least he was a surveyor.”

When we left the Dig Tree, “Duck” was on his way back with what looked like a couple of council workers in his ute. We hoped it was all going to work out OK. He pulled over to say goodbye, assuring us we would not stay long in Innamincka.

“The flies are really bad there.”

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Sitting and sipping on the Cooper wondering why....why....

3/1/2015

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The celebrated Dig Tree ... well, not really it seems.

Coolibah trees edging Cooper Creek were starkly silhouetted by the moon. Soupy and silent, the river flowed swiftly past as we soaked up the solitude and a cold beer a hundred metres from the legendary Dig Tree on our right.

We wondered why the sun had set in the east and why Australia’s most fruitless, foolish expedition was also the most famous.

Three gaunt, exhausted men and two knackered camels appeared in the moonlight to our left. Or they did 154 years ago.

Burke, Wills and King staggered past us to the coolibah tree that was to become etched into a nation’s folklore and testament to forbearance and folly. Despair engulfed them as they saw the camp and stockade had been abandoned by William Brahe and the three men they had left there three months earlier.

Robert Burke, William Wills and John King had achieved the goal of the bleak and most expensive exploration expedition in a country that was not yet a nation. They had found a route to the Gulf of Carpentaria and made it back – but only to Camp 65 in the fierce inland.

In their wake lay the corpses of mysterious Charlie Gray , four camels and poor Billy, Burke’s grey horse. When the three slumped men gathered a little strength and a few wits they found dates and signs carved into blazes on the tree. On a nearby tree was the word “Dig”.

Eighteen inches under the ground they found a camel pack with dried meat, hard meat biscuits and bitter news. Brahe and Co. had waited an extra month for their return. They had left to return to Melbourne at 10am on April 21. Burke, Wills and King arrived in the moonlight nine hours later.

In February 1915, Tony and I sat alone near the Dig Tree and wondered why. We had come to the inland before the inland tourist season on our way to the South Australian coast. Savouring solitude has its price: we reluctantly resorted to fly nets as we parked on the bank of the Cooper.

We had crossed the Cooper in the Channel Country after Thargomindah and parked for the night on its bank near the Dig Tree. Around us the land was parched but the creek was powering towards Lake Eyre with a bounty of muddy water from monsoonal rain in the north.

With cold beers in hand and fly screen on head, we idly watched the creek. “It’s running the wrong way,” I said. “It’s going north.” Tony agreed and noted the sun was setting behind us in the east. We had been heading west for a few days. Perched on the Cooper bank, we felt we should still be facing west.

We checked the map and saw how the Cooper had made a U-turn below us and we had curled around to its western bank. Relieved we flicked our thoughts into the past and examined more puzzles.

Why the Royal Society of Victoria let pride drive it to make ill-considered plans to try to achieve exulted exploration status for the colony? Why did it appoint a grand party of men, horses and camels without a single explorer in it? Why did it put an Irish cop with a dubious pedigree in charge of the grandly named Victorian Exploring Expedition?

Why did Burke split the party after two months at Menindee, leaving supplies behind with Wright? Why did Wright dawdle for so long, taking five months to catch up? Why did Burke split the party again at Cooper Creek and head off in December to make a lunge for the Gulf in summer heat?

OK, they sort of made it to the Gulf without seeing the open ocean. You could understand why they decided to turn back at that point. But why did Charlie Gray die a few days after Burke gave him a thrashing for stealing flour?

When they arrived back at the Dig Tree, the three men agreed they were too exhausted to catch up with Brahe. Two days later they had recovered enough to push on. Wills wanted to follow Brahe south; Burke foolishly decided to head to Mt Hopeless, about 150 miles away. They buried a message and left. Why didn’t they leave any mark on the tree showing they had been there?

Two weeks later Brahe, who had met up with dawdling Wright and more supplies, returned to the Dig Tree. He stayed half an hour, never checked the buried box and left without leaving any mark on the tree.

Three weeks later Wills struggled back to the tree, buried his journals and left no sign he had been there. He, Burke and King had been driven back to Cooper Creek because they couldn’t find water on their attempts to reach Mt Hopeless.

Burke and Wills died about a month later. Alfred Howitt led a search party that found King, weakened but being kept alive by the local aborigines, beside the Cooper on September. Burke and Wills, dead about two months, were buried and King given a hero’s welcome in Melbourne. Another party later fetched the remains of the most famous unsuccessful explorers in Australia and gave them Victoria’s first state funeral.

The following year Howitt returned and pitched camp downstream from the Dig Tree. A bottle with a note saying the depot was downstream was buried under the tree, which was carved with the word “Dig”, initials and an arrow pointing to the new camp.

Confusion followed. Pioneers saw the Howitt “Dig” and until a few years ago it was revered as the tree where Burke and Wills dug, instead of a tree about 7.5m away which is a more likely candidate.

So the Dig Tree isn’t really the Dig Tree. We sighed over follies and had another beer. Something kept nagging at us: no matter how hard we tried we tried to get our head around it, the sun had set in the east and the Cooper was running north.

An eerie likeness of the non-hero Robert Burke was carved 30m from the Dig Tree (which is not really the Dig Tree) by John Dick in 1898.

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Hookmup now the Red Caviar of camel racing

9/15/2014

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Yes. I realise I am the fastest camel ever over 400m at Boulia and I am also quite beautiful. These amazing eyelashes are my own, all my own. Eat your heart out Kim Kardashian.

Don Anesbury was a worried man on the final day of the Boulia camel races. You couldn’t tell because the ex-policeman who once patrolled the bottom of the Oodnadatta Track has one of those expressionless faces fashioned by years in the outback.

Glamour camel Hookmup’s start in the 400m final was the reason for Don’s hidden nervousness.

A few months earlier the camel was running wild in the desert around Alice Springs.

Now he had arrived in Boulia nicknamed the Black Caviar of camel racing. Six starts for six wins, including three cups, were under Hookmup’s hump. Perched at the back of the hump in the 400m charges had been a small bloke wisecracking in a wicked Irish accent who had driven up the Birdsville Track in a Celica sedan.

“How the hell did that car get here?” a bar attendant hollered as she peered out the Birdsville pub window.

Came the reply in a lilting brogue: “I drove it.”

From where? An Irish finger pointed eloquently down the track towards Marree and Aaron soon tootled off, rubbing hubs with 4WDs on the road to Boulia.

Tony and I had lobbed into Boulia a few days earlier to relax in Isabel for the week leading up to the iconic outback event that had been on my must-do list for years. Boulia had a good deal where for an extra $10 on your two-day ticket you get to camp at the showgrounds for close to two dusty weeks.

Among our diverse neighbours were a deer-hunting Taupo dentist and his attractive wife and a sharp Victorian professional woman (no, not that sort, a business consultant) who scooted around the world as a hot air balloon pilot and balloon racing judge. (Think you have luggage problems? Try packing a hot air balloon for your next flight.) On the other side were a Zambian-born woman and American guy who had been married, had a family, divorced for 11 years and then remarried. Then there was the Tasmanian guy who talked in decibels that would have been audible had he still been the other side of Bass Strait.

Then there were the strings of camels exercising, trialling, bellowing, kicking up dust and practising in slow motion for the barrel racing feature that would also be contested in slow motion. Camels are not clever when it comes to steering and cornering.

Tony studied form and declared a pale, slightly built camel called Dolly was showing a fair turn of pace. She would be the one to watch and back.

Cheerful Robyn Anesbury stopped by to check out Isabel. Learning she was “with the camels”, I jumped at the chance to visit the camel camp where Robyn and Don had their rust-coloured double swag in the red dust beside their dusty vehicle. What a wondrous world we have when one can now buy swags that match the dust of the interior.

We met jockeys Stuart Brown and Aaron. Back home in Cork, the Sweeney folks are in disbelief that Aaron is hurtling around tracks in the outback on the back of racing camels. He rode horses back home and was the All-Ireland champion three years in a row in the odd equestrian art of riding racing trotters.

When he came to Australia he ended up riding picnic races around Scone, where Stuart took him under his wing and persuaded him to try camel racing. They lobbed into Forbes at Easter where Don Anesbury was introducing Hookmup to the circuit.

Don felt an affinity with camels when he was stationed in the 1970s at Maree, where the Oodnadatta Track meets the Birdsville Track in north of South Australia. Marree has camel races once a year. Don decided to go down the dromedary track. He made his move 22 years ago, jumping on a motorbike to ride out into the desert and rope his own beast of burden.

He trained and rode his racing camels, starting with Weetbix. Crystal is his favourite: she’s won him nearly $40,000 around the circuit. Courageous on the track, she’s quiet enough to be ridden by women and kids. Money would not buy her.

“I owe a lot to camels,” said Don. He’s found them a source of solace in times of stress and admits racing them can be a challenge.

“They don’t steer at all well. They cut across in front of each other, zig-zag, turn around and go back the other way.”

These days Don leaves the race rides to younger, lighter blokes. He sticks to training and handling on race days. And he’s always had his eye out for that special racing camel.

When a mate at Kings Creek near Uluru rang him about a tall camel he had caught, Don’s ears pricked up. “When he described him, I said to get me a photo. Quickly. Everything about the camel – wide chest, red colour – told me he was a racer.”

Hookmup was aged about seven. Don took it easy and lined him up for Forbes at Easter. Along came Irish Aaron and to everyone’s astonishment the duo bolted in for a win in the 400m heat despite a hairy time over the first 100m.

“Once I got him going he was just passing camels one by one,” said Aaron. The next day the pair shot home to win the final. They repeated the performance at the start of the July circuit, racing at Marree and Bedourie for another four starts for four wins. One win was from a sitting start when Hookmup refused to stand before the gun fired.

Hookmup was the talk of the town by the time the Anesburys arrived in Boulia. Camels were paraded, the crowd started buzzing, bets were laid and all eyes turned to the start of the first 400m heat. Down the track came dromedaries, lurching, lunging, pausing and turning around. About 50m from the finish line the fair Dolly decided it was all too much and sat down.

Most camels compete over 400m and again over 1000m for the Boulia Cup (the final of which is run over 1500m). Hookmup had only the shorter event (he’s too green to race over distance yet) and sadly he was Aced in the heat, coming second but still qualifying for the final.

That was not sad for Ace’s owner Glenda Sutton, a tiny legend who once rode racehorses in track work until a chance came by in 1998 to race camels in the United Arab Republic. At 23 she quickly learnt to ride a different type of creature, raced in the Middle East and returned to buy her own camels. She’s now 38 and she can’t imagine life without her humped friends. She races them, she takes paying customers for rides and she has worked on films such as Tracks, Kangaroo Jack and the television series Inside Nature’s Giants.

Caring for camels on the road is exhausting work, lugging buckets of water and bales of hay, but Glenda lavishes her “best friends” with kindness, discipline, love and occasional kisses. She reckons camels are the most misunderstood and most resilient animals in the world.

“I’m as close as you can get to them. We have a great relationship but you can never completely trust them, even though they are the sweetest creatures. Camels are more deeply affected by things than people realise. They think so much and question everything. You can see them saying ‘Why are you doing this?’

“People look at them and see 800kg of unpredictably but I see a tiny, delicate thing.”

Glenda’s tiny, delicate things have won the Boulia Cup three times, won 11 of 11 races (not counting the consolation) at Boulia in 2008. Her star Chief set an Australian record with 14 wins.

This year Ace won his 1000m heat as well as the 400m but the finals on Sunday were not so lucrative for the camel queen from Shepparton. Bumping at the start was too rough for him. The cup was won by popular local runner Uncle Bob, with Anesbury camels second and third.

And Hookmup? He flattened out and won the 400m final in the record time of 34.75 seconds. Don Anesbury’s usually inscrutable face had a grin as wide as the Strzelecki.

Then it was on to the Winton races for the Anesburys. We won’t go there. Suffice to say Hookmup’s nickname was changed to Red Caviar – but I’d sure like to see that camel racing again at Boulia next year.

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Urandangie and an extraordinary publican called Pam

8/17/2014

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Discarded car bonnets make grand stands for publican Pam's signs propped up along hundreds of kilometres of roads into Urandangie.

You know there’s an energy force at Urandangie before you get to the little Queensland town close to the Northern Territory border.

It’s apparent when you come to the first cattle grids off the main Mt Isa to Boulia Road. Brightly painted car bonnets splashed with hand-painted slogans are propped up at the fence line.

“Hot beer. Lousy food. Bad service. Welcome to Urandangie, Qld” says one. Another says it’s 51km to the Dangi Bush Resort, a “rare droving days pub”. Other signs announce Urandangie is the home of the Georgina River and free riverside camping is available.

Close to town is a grave with an upright slab of rock. A car bonnet headstone commemorates the “Unknown Traveller. Arrived in 2009. Built his humpy here. Drowned in the March 2011 flood. Refused to move in the flood.”

At the intersection we find the Urandangie pub, with bougainvillea decorating a sign that announces it is also the Dangi Bush Resort. Mt Isa is back the way we have come. Across the road is a hitching rail and a “horse parking” sign.

A green directional sign has points left: 2km to the Georgina River, 48km to the Northern Territory border, 95km to the Plenty Highway, 313km to Jervois (fuel – cash only), 650km to Alice Springs and 71km and 98km respectively to Manners Creek and Tobermorey stations. A lonely arrow to the right points only to the cemetery.

A car bonnet sign points straight ahead to public toilets and solar-powered showers with the curious footnote “Maintained by the Boulia Shire”. One deduces irony afoot and that the amenities might be best avoided.

Inside the pub is a small bar roped off from another room jammed with memorabilia. “If it’s old and doesn’t move it will probably end up in there,” says a voice from behind the bar.

You know instinctively that you have arrived at the tiny town’s human power station. Pam Forster, now in her sixties, spent most of her life in Victorian towns until she “got the shits with the world” a decade ago and decided to head for Darwin.

“On the map it was about as far away as I could get from where I was in Australia,” she said with a grin. She didn’t make Darwin. Her path took her to Katherine and Derby with a stint at Urandangie on the way. Something about the dot on the map in the Queensland outback appealed to her.

Six and a half year ago she returned and bought the pub in a town of 12 adults (including herself) and 16 kids. She loves the life and swears the only place she will be going when she leaves the hotel is along that right turn to the cemetery.

“The best thing about living here is that life is so uncomplicated and relaxing,” says Pam. “The rest of the world could be gone and we would still be here.”

Pam has a strong relationship with the indigenous people, the station workers and contractors heading for projects a few hundred kilometres away or relocating on journeys of thousands of kilometres across the interior.

Grey Nomads? Pam screws her face. Some are OK but she doesn’t enjoy the sour-faced retirees who skulk in, buy a soft drink and ask for a glass so they can share it while they stare at the photographs and memorabilia.

Stingy and unfriendly or not, all tourists get information thrust at them with history and data on Urandangie. It includes the statement that Urandangie is spelt with an “e” at the end despite maps that erroneously spell it Urandangi.

We read that Tobermorey station was once owned by two brothers, who split off half into Manners Creek Station when they married two sisters. A little rearranging followed with the wives swapping stations and brothers and one wife later moving on to a new partner in a deal involving a horse.

You learnt that the town is pretty much surrounded by the million-hectare Headingly Station, which has a working population of 28 in residence, making it a bigger town than Urandangie. Drought is across the region – the usual 40,000 head of Santa Gertrudis at Headingly has dropped to about 8000.

Behind the bar hangs a commendation from Superintendent R. D. Miller, the Mt Isa police district officer. It commends Pam Forster for unwavering commitment to the community of Urandangi (no “e”) and support for the police.

Without being asked Pam merrily gives directions to the free camping area on the Georgina River. Beside the pub and its friendly back yard of goats, chooks, geese and machinery is the start of a camping area but its development is in limbo until rain falls and a lawn can be grown.

“We can keep a lawn going in the droughts but you can’t start one,” says Pam. Droughts are often broken by impressive floods when the Georgina swells and bursts over the flat landscape. Pictures on the wall show the pub surrounded by a sea of muddy brown water in the big flood years.

One photograph shows the 2011 flood. “That’s the one that drowned the Unknown Traveller,” I nodded wisely. Pam nodded with a grin.

Some days are quiet, some are flat out but Pam always has her eye out for something extra for Urandangie (like marking the graves of phantom travellers). Her partner Ross-Clark Dwyer scours the country and stations collecting Southern Cross and Lister engines: almost 100 of them are now built into the landscape at the crossroads.

Pam puts on impromptu disco nights for the kids in the town. She organises “Get To Know Your Neighbour” days for station and community folk who live hundreds of kilometres apart. Other social occasions are created by her fertile imagination, humour and energy.

We have a couple of beers with a crew driving three trucks to a job dismantling a drilling rig somewhere west of Tobermorey. One driver tells us he’s from Taupo in the Kiwi North Island. He’s heading back there soon and tells us to call in to see him. “Just ask for ‘Slab Sinton’.”

We laze on the banks of the Georgina for a couple of days. Yellow belly have been biting after the wet but the river has drained a little too low by the time Tony tosses a lure. Next year maybe.

On the way to Boulia for the camel races we take Pam’s advice and stop in at the school, where nine children are on the roll. Some indigenous children in the outback might lack education facilities but not at Urandangie.

It has a teaching principal, another full-time teacher and a full-time teacher aide. Usually the principal’s spouse is also a teacher but not in the case of Alex Price from Brisbane. His wife is a nurse and is studying French and education.

That meant another residence had to be built at the dusty compound to house the second teacher. In the outback contract builders don’t come cheap. Talk of the town was the price tag on the modest demountable house: $818,000.

Alex’s double classroom was a bright, well-equipped unit. Only four children have turned up today but he is busy. One teacher is off for the day and the teacher aide is a little late getting there from Headingly station.

He admits he had a little culture shock when he first arrived from Brisbane at the beginning of the year but he is loving the life and expects to stay about three years. One of the challenges of the role was the way the children often moved to different areas. Hence the halved attendance on the day we visit. “It’s the way things are. You have to be flexible.”

Back at the pub, Pam had told us the school had one of the best equipped classrooms in Australia on a per capita basis. She spoke with a mixture of pride and bemusement that peppers much of the goings-on at Urandangie. We told Alex she had suggested we visit the school.

He smiled. “Ah yes, Pam. She’s the lifeblood of this town.” If that ain’t that the truth Elvis is camped on the Georgina River.

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Clancy's gone to Camooweal droving - and this is where he are

7/29/2014

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Brian Thompson (left) and Jeff Hill tell tall tales and true at the Drovers Camp at Camooweal.

Nostalgia for the droving days flows down the stock routes from the Kimberley and Northern Territory, swirls around Camooweal and evaporates in the western Queensland town of Dajarra.

Roads along the stock routes are usually broad and well-maintained to handle the road trains that have replaced the drovers since the 1960s.

Governments no longer maintain the bores that once watered mobs of 1000 to 1500 head a day. Bores were 20 miles apart and drovers were spread out to slot into them in turn.

If a mob was spooked and rushed (Americans call it a stampede), a following drover could leapfrog ahead on the stock route.

“The cattle were usually pretty quiet then though,” says Brian Thompson. “They were handled a lot more than they are today.”

Brian, 77, is one of a band of volunteers who man the Drovers Camp museum at Camooweal in the winter tourist season, talking about the old days and spinning a few yarns that raise eyebrows.

Most of the volunteers are former drovers. Brian just makes the ex-droving ranks – he was raised on a station and made one droving trip as an assistant horse tailer before his dad died and his family moved to Adelaide.

He ended up owning an optical manufacturing business but always yearned for the bush life, spending as much time as he could with his uncle Charlie Schultz on the Humbert River Station north-west of Top Springs.

Visitors to the Drovers Camp are shown maps of where the main stock routes went, what droving equipment was used and how the teams of riders, cooks and horse tailers integrated.

“Time was entirely different in those days,” said Brian, pointing out the patience and skills needed to make ropes and utensils, tend cattle on the move and make do in the bush. “These days people turn on a computer and if it’s not going in 10 seconds they’re blueing.”

A man’s word is not so honoured these days either. Brian explains a giant painting inside the door of the shed, showing a drover and a cattle owner shaking hands on horseback. They have just done a headcount of the mob in the background, agreed on the tally and the pastoralist is handing the cattle over to the drover. Big money was tied up in those herds but a handshake was the only contract needed.

Dominating the interior of the shed is a mural by brilliant South Australian artist Yvonne Dorward, who took up painting when she was in her 40s. Ex-drover, ex-station manager and ex-buyer for cattle export, Jeff Hill, joins us and adds banter as Brian points out the cook setting the campfire, the tailer hobbling horses and the start of the first night watch.

Swags and saddles in front of the mural add dimension to the scene as Jeff, 77, spins a couple of yarns about droving days. We learn how important is was to have a good cook; how the horse tailer was up at 4am every morning to track 25 to 30 horses and get the hobbles off; and how singing to the cattle helped keep them quiet on night watch.

“You had to hear some of those blokes sing at night,” said Jeff. “They were bloody good.”

We learnt that if you had a good dog or a good horse for droving you had to keep a close eye on it. Drovers were not averse to swiping either when they mingled. Tony and I were also surprised to learn that Jeff had retired to Maryborough 10 years ago and lived only 10 km away from our home south of the city.

In the main gallery hang 55 portraits by Yvonne of legendary men and women who rode thousands of miles through the outback to take cattle to sales and rail heads.

Tribute is paid to the famed droving queen Edna Jessop. In 1950, aged 23, she became Australia’s first female boss drover, taking over from her father Harry Zigenbine. With her brother Harry and four ringers she pushed 1550 bullocks 2240km, from Halls Creek in Western Australia across the Barkly Tableland to the Dajarra railhead.

The eye-catching rider drove cattle across the Top End until the droving days came to an end 20 years later.

We wended our way down the old stock routes to Urandangie, one of the last pubs on the stock route before the drovers arrived at Dajarra. It’s hard to envisage Dajarra when it was the biggest cattle rail had in the world, marshalling more cattle each year than Abilene, Texas.

Little sign of its auspicious past remains. The rail line has long been torn up. A flapping hut might have been a railway platform. The pub has a lonely feel. Simon from Holland and Emily from Minnesota materialise in the service station: how would outback Australia open its doors if it could not employ wandering young foreigners who need to do three months work in the bush to get their visas extended to two years?

Across the road is a new set of yards for loading cattle on to road trains. The yards are substantial but barely noticeable on empty flat land stretching to the horizon. This is where Edna et al brought their cattle mobs to mill and bellow briefly before being shipped out by rail to travel east.

A thousand and more a day were herded up the ramps and on to the wagons. Those are the days the old drovers talk about when they fly to Camooweal on the fourth weekend of August.

They come from all over Australia to meet at the Drovers Camp, a kilometre east of the town. Like war veterans, their numbers are starting to dwindle every year but the history of the droving days will now endure.

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Yep. That qualifies as a panther in the Australian bush

7/24/2014

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In a couple of hundred kilometres along the peaceful Buntine Highway we met two vehicles and a panther.

A lithe panther and a laughing Pauline crossed our path in quick succession as we prowled the back roads and stock routes from Western Australia across the Territory into Queensland.

Panthers are elusive in dictionaries. A variety of definitions exist revolving mainly around large black cats – leopards, jaguars or any other feline species. We decided the black cat about the size of a kelpie qualified.

We had wandered down the Duncan Road on the eastern side of Lake Argyle, highly recommended as a well maintained dirt road with plenty of scenic camp spots. Overnighting on a grassy site overlooking the Negri River, Tony lit a campfire and swept a torch along the river, picking out red crocodile eyes in the dark.

This was freshwater croc territory above Lake Argyle but we were curious to spot one set of eyes 20cm or more apart. We never went close enough to determine if it was a giant freshie, a stray saltie or two small freshies teasing by staring at us with their heads snugly together, inside eyes closed.

Traffic was light and almost non-existent after we turned east on to the unsealed Buntine Highway. That suited us well for leisurely travel and peaceful campfire nights in the bush soaking up the moon and stars.

Pulling up for morning coffee on the side of the Buntine, our eyes widened as our panther – the largest feral cat I had ever seen – padded arrogantly across the road in front of us. Solid black and swaying its long tail languidly, it barely cast a disdainful glance in Isabel’s direction.

“That’s why you hear stories about panthers being spotted in the bush,” said Tony before we launched into an animated discussion about the growing feral cat problem in Australia – growing both in terms of numbers and the size of the animals.

For some reason the conservation movement doesn’t see the destruction of feral animals or exotic weeds as a priority yet both pose a far bigger threat to Australia’s flora and fauna than people. Perhaps it’s because shooting is the only effective way to destroy feral pigs and cats: girly greenies don’t like anything to do with guns.

We saw our panther for only a few seconds but contemplated for hours on the how many small, timid native animals it would slaughter in a night. Bilbies, quolls, bandicoots, birds and frogs are defenceless in the night vision of a stalking cat; lizards and snakes are easy prey in the day.

An hour later the day took a cheerier turn at Top Springs where we met the “unbelievable” manager Pauline Heseldine, crackling with life and fun. Pauline, somewhere in her 60s, is one of those sparkling characters you find in the bush where fresh food is scarce and cheap fuel is non-existent.

In 2002 she left Adelaide to visit a friend in Katherine. She took a three-week post as a cook at Montejinni Station, 15km south-west of Top Springs. “It just sort of kept extending,” she said.

Six months later she sold her house in Adelaide; seven years ago she moved to Top Springs to manage the service station and pub, 21 accommodation units and camping grounds. In that time she has become something of a legend in the district.

The complex at the junction of the Buntine and Buchanan highways is owned by the Jones family, featured in the TV series “Keeping up with the Joneses.”

“Everyone who comes to the Northern Territory should meet Pauline,” said Oriel Wright. “She’s an unbelievable cook and an unbelievable person. She’s so well loved around here it just blows me away.”

Oriel and her husband Wally are fossickers from the north coast of NSW. They have been coming to the Top Springs area for 15 years.

“We love the people here and the country. You don’t travel three and a half thousand kilometres for nothing.”

Especially they love Pauline, who gets on so well with the station crews, itinerant workers, anyone in need and the indigenous people from Kalkaringa community. (In 1966 Kalkaringa was the scene of a seven-year strike by 200 Aboriginal station hands and house workers who walked off the adjacent Wave Hill station, first seeking improved pay and conditions but escalating into a demand for their land back from the Vestey empire.)

“Pauline helps so many people – anything that needs doing, she’s there like a mum. She goes out to bad accidents, or organises tows for people who break down. She pinches the young ringers on the bum in the bar … she’s just a good person, funny and naughty with a wicked sense of humour.

I mentioned Pauline had said she might not be around much longer – she was thinking of moving back to Adelaide – and the Top Springs area would be poorer without her.

Oriel smiled and raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Three or four years ago we made a point of coming here to spend the last few days with Pauline before she retired and went back to Adelaide. I reckon she’ll be here a while yet.”

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