Schedule, Part 1: Perth & Darwin

In the slight chance that someone may want to use my experiences to plan their own trip to Australia, I should point out that the posting dates don't reflect my actual schedule.

My schedule for Perth and Darwin was:
22 Sept: Arrive Perth
23-25 & 29 Sept: Day trips from Perth
2 Oct: Fly Perth-Darwin
2-7 Oct: Campervan rental (first night in Darwin)
2-7 Oct: Kakadu
8 Oct: Hotel in Darwin
8 Oct: Fly Darwin-Alice Springs

Darwin for biologists

The name of the town of Darwin is difficult to live up to for biologists: the Charles Darwin National Park is chiefly a site of importance for its WWII installations (- surely they could have found a site of primarily biological interest?), the town caters mainly to the bar-loving tourist trade,



and the architecture of the hotel that I stayed at seemed to have been inspired by British prisons from the Victorian era.

The town wasn’t all bad though. The hotel redeemed itself with some wonderful corridor artwork,

the legislative assembly building has some zoology creeping in,

and the sea and the sky conspired to produce a display that could only be found in the tropics:

Lastly, on Oz’s recommendation I visited ‘Aquascene’ – open each day for two hours over high tide for a fishy spectacle. The fish have learnt to come around high tide to be hand fed, and by coincidence I arrived at exactly the right time.

Most of the fish are Diamond scaled mullet,

but who could resist the fishy lips of the Bat fish?

How to be a hunter-gatherer

Before I went to Australia, my knowledge of aboriginal Australians was sketchy, to say the least, and in retrospect what I learnt about them at school was in part based on propaganda supporting the interests of the British government: aborigines constituted a tiny population eeking out a living in the desert regions of central Australia. In this cartoon world, they lived around Ayers Rock (now known by its aboriginal name, Uluru) and - apparently - nowhere else. I'd not really had cause to think about this since, and was given food for thought when visiting the dense jarrah woodlands which supported a thriving forestry industry under Europeans to find that the area had had an indigenous population - as had all the other areas that I visited.

I began asking the straightforward question of how big the aboriginal population was before the Europeans arrived. Since no-one could answer this, I searched on the internet, and discovered that current estimates are about 750,000, and maybe as many as a million people. I was struck by how large a population was supported by a largely hunter-gatherer economy, compared with the total current population of Australia (including indigenous peoples) of about 21 million. Not surprisingly, the population wasn't centred in the desert, but in the areas now supporting the largest populations of European descent: around the coast, particularly in south-east Australia along the Murray River. Within a hundred years of the European invasion, the indigenous population was reduced to 60,000, largely through the ravages of the infectious diseases that the Europeans brought with them, but also through direct massacre.

This context makes the legal principle governing aboriginal lands of terra nullius - that the land was empty before the British arrived, belonged to no-one, and could legitimately be taken over - dubiously tenable. In 1992, it was overturned, and some land has been returned to its indigenous owners. Parts of this land are leased back to the government as national parks (including some of the best known natural areas, such as Kakadu, and the area around Uluru and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas)).

The whole situation is far too complex, and I know far too little, for glib statements on my part, but I was interested in learning more about how the aborigines lived, and the current climate is clearly to inform both non-indigenous Australians and foreign visitors as much as possible about aboriginal ways of life.

Apart from widespread information at cultural centres and on display boards, I also went on two cultural 'experiences'. The first was incidental to a night trip on a billabong to look for wildlife, and an introduction from the campsite warden - mostly about crocodiles, and delivered largely in the style of a British army sergeant during the national service years (if my O level study of Arnold Wesker's play 'Chips with everything' is anything to go by) - was followed by the arrival of Jenny and the question what was the object that looked like a smoking cigar that she was carrying. Avid readers of this blog will know that the answer was a Banksia cone used for carrying fire from one camp to another. What was fascinating was that in the jarrah forests of Western Australia the cones are from Banksia grandis and burn for up to 24 hours, while in Kakadu, the aborigines must make do with Banksia dentata, a much smaller cone that burns for only two or so hours.

Jenny also showed us how the leaves of Pandanus (a kind of tree) are prepared and used for basket making, and how earth ovens are constructed and used, and which herbs are used with the cooking. The more practical parts of the evening involved spear throwing and didgeridoo playing: neither activities that aboriginal women normally partake in. For the record, I was as bad as everyone else at using a spear thrower, and somewhat better than most with a didgeridoo (I did get a sound out of it).

The other trip was a whole afternoon and evening, and led by Sean with the aid of Patsy, an aboriginal woman who grew up living a traditional lifestyle.

To the casual visitor to Kakadu, it is not obvious that there are aborigines still living partly off the land: there are no signposts to such aboriginal communities. In Kakadu, the aborigines became highly dependent on feral buffalo as a meat source. About 80 buffalo were introduced to northern Australia in the early 19th century as a source of meat. Eventually the settlements were abandoned, and despite hunting for meat, hides and trophies, the buffalos spread and became pests, both through habitat destruction, and as reservoirs for diseases of cattle. As part of an eradication program, the population in Kakdu was reduced from 20,000 in 1988 to under 250 in 1996. Because of their importance as a meat source, the aborigines negotiated permission to maintain a fenced and disease-free herd.

Modern firearms are used to kill the buffalo, and also for hunting Magpie Geese and feral pigs. These were part of our dinner:

We spent the afternoon collecting other parts of our dinner. The aborigines traditionally use different animal food sources at the times of year when they are in the best condition. The marshes are drying at this season, and the fresh-water mussels and turtles go into hibernation - or rather aestivation - deep in the drying mud. Patsy showed us how to find mussels by probing with a digging stick and listening for the sound as it hit a mussel, and we were let loose to try for ourselves. Traditionally, digging sticks are made of ironwood (a kind of tree), but nowadays they are made of metal.

Our total catch was rather modest, but Patsy deftly removed a section of bark from a paperbark tree,

and quickly fashioned a basket to carry them in:

We went to another area, and used the same technique to search for turtles, without success: the 'dry' season has been fairly wet this year, and the marshes not yet dried out to the point that the turtles are beginning aestivation.

Next we went to an area of marsh that was fairly well dried out, and broke up clods of solid mud to find the tubers of water chestnuts (a plant that looks like a grass). This is the same plant that figures in chinese cuisine, but the wild variety that we were seeking has relatively tiny tubers, maybe 5 mm across. I supect that our efforts ranked with chewing raw celery - that we used more calories obtaining the water chestnuts than we were going to obtain from them as a foodstuff.

Once we'd collected food, we collected firewood (we were relatively good at that!) and Patsy stripped some large pieces of paperbark for use in the ground oven, and there was still time for learning some other useful ways of living off the land. For example, the bulge on this tree's trunk can be cut open to obtain water:

Green ants build nests in trees using living leaves. The adults use their jaws to clamp the leaves temporarily into position, and then others use larvae as 'silk guns' to sew them together.

Unlike other ants, green ants produce ascorbic acid (vitamin C) rather than formic acid for protection. The aborigines use them for treating colds and other ailments. Patsy showed us how to crush a nest and fish out the leaf fragments to leave just the ants, which are eaten whole. And yes, they do taste like limes.

At the end of the afternoon, we went to 'goose camp' (where the huge magpie goose roost was) and built two fires - one for Sean to boil tea, mussels and water chestnuts, and make 'damper' (bread made from water, self-raising flour, and salt) , and the other for a ground oven for the meat and fish.

While the fires were reaching the right stage, Patsy plucked the geese and singed off the down in the flames.

The meat and fish were put onto the embers of the fire on a bed of herbs, and covered with paperbark to cook ...

The mussels were chewy and had a muddy flavour, but the water chestnuts tasted good. As well as the magpie geese, buffalo and feral pig meat, along with barramundi, came out of the oven. They were all good, although the meat was less cooked than Europeans are used to: in aboriginal culture it is an offence to over-cook meat as it results in the loss of the fat which is a vital contribution to the (traditional) diet.

Although not surprising, the half-day emphasized how hard it is to live off the land: the food that we had collected ourselves - the mussels and water chestnuts - were a trivial contribution to what we ate. Perhaps more interesting was watching Patsy at work with a level of dexterity born out of long practice, without which this way of living would not be viable. Nevertheless, as Sean said in his introduction earlier in the day, we were witnessing a culture in the process of extinction.

Crocodiles crossing

To the east, Kakadu National Park is bordered by the East Alligator River. Beyond, is Arnhem Land – an aboriginal area that can only be visited with a permit. The road crosses the river into Arnhem Land at Cahill’s crossing – which I’d assumed was a ferry crossing, -, so I was somewhat surprised to see a pickup truck in mid-river as I left Manngarre forest.



When I’d arrived the tide was lower, and I’d noticed the line of rocks across the river, but hadn’t realised they marked, and protected, a ford.

I’d planned to take a look at the crossing anyway, so I headed that way, hoping that I would get the chance to see other vehicles crossing. There’s a small lookout which gives a good view of the river, and there was already a little crowd there when I arrived. The reason soon became clear, as there was a white van stationary in the middle of the river. The incoming tide was streaming over the crossing.

I’d only got my telephoto lens with me, so had to tilt it to get everything in. In the part of the river shaded by the bushes, you can just make out a crocodile:

It’s easier to see the one down-river from the crossing:

In fact there were at least three crocodiles up-river, and two down-river. There was one large croc that was circling, swimming up the fan of calmer water down-(tidal)stream (and up-river) of the stranded van, before allowing itself to be swept away in the current.

It didn’t have a can-opener with it, but crocodiles are curious animals. The occupants of the van were wisely staying firmly put, and attaching a tow line clearly wasn’t a safe proposition.

There is something compelling about needing to know the outcome of life-threatening situations. In the case of motorway pile-ups, the voyeurism is just plain grisly, but here it was clearer that the compulsion might have survival value in learning how to deal with predators. Presently, it occurred to me that it would be possible to push the van out with another vehicle, and later still a Land Cruiser edged out onto the crossing.

Once it reached the stranded vehicle, a man climbed from the bonnet onto the van’s roof and talked with the van’s occupants:

Then bonnet-man climbed back from where he’d come, and the Land Cruiser backed slowly out of the river.

I needed to head back west, so walked round to have a look at the entrance to the crossing before I left. Bonnet-man was there taking his own photos, so I had a chance to ask what was happening.

The plan was, indeed, to push the van out. However, bonnet-man said that the tidal stream was so strong that he could feel the van rocking when he was on the roof, and that pushing the van could destabilize it entirely. The park ranger (in the Land Cruiser) had said that they would try again at slack water in an hour’s time. I drove away imagining what it would feel like sitting in a rocking van in mid-stream with crocodiles on either side for two hours.

I don’t know the end of the story. When I stopped to buy petrol on my way out of the park the following day, I asked the attendant if she’d heard the local news. I figured that it would have made the news if the story hadn’t ended happily. But she hadn’t.

Manngarre monsoon forest

Kakadu National Park comprises six main habitats: the monotonous savanna woodlands, floodplains and biilabongs, the southern hills and ridges (of which I had seen a little while visiting the rock art), the stone country (the Arnhem land plateau) , the tidal flats where the land meets the ocean in the north, and the monsoon forests. The latter form a tiny part of the total landscape, but intrigued me, and as there was a small monsoon forest with a marked walking trail close to Ubirr, one of the rock art sites that I visited, I decided to visit.

I was the first person to arrive at the car park in the morning – if you don’t count the pair of chicken like birds strutting around. They were sturdily built, and had small crests and orange legs and feet. I’d seen them before, but hadn’t been able to identify them. Like all the walking trails, Manngarre has an explanatory board at the beginning. It said that if I was lucky I might see two interesting bird species on the walk. The first was the orange-footed scrubfowl. Ah, so that’s what they were. And the other was the rainbow pitta. Apart from being a kind of bread, pittas are rainforest birds. In the bird books, they stand out in their bright colours, but in reality they are shy birds whose bright colours blend in with the dappled light. I set off along the trail, and rounded the first corner. There was a rainbow pitta in the middle of the track. It was kind enough to stay just long enough for me to change the lens on my camera and take one (not very good) photo. I saw two more later but fleetingly as they quickly hid in the vegetation.

I hadn’t gone much further when I was assaulted by the sound – and smell – of a roost of a hundred or so fruit bats. They were squabbling and bickering as fruit bats seem to.

The forest was very different from the savanna woodlands that I’d been driving through: more luxuriant and darker.

Animal life is always hard to find in rain forests, but I did see some butterflies:

The forest also contained a sacred aboriginal site. It’s a women’s site, and aboriginal men don’t go there, and notice boards ask that other men don’t visit either. The rainbow snake travelled to Ubirr where she left her shadow on the rock in the shape of a rainbow.

Later she changed into an old woman and came to the forest, where she rested during her menstrual period, before continuing across the river. While she rested she piled up sand around her which became a boulder, and her form is given by the roots of a banyan tree that are wrapped around the boulder. The site is known as “The old lady sits”.

The territory's own

It took me two whole days in Kakadu before I tried iced coffee. I was under the impression that it was nothing more than cold black coffee. In fact, it’s basically coffee milk shake: milk with coffee added, plus an irresistible amount of sugar.

The place that I bought my first fix was a rare beast – a store that catered to those who were not embarked on road journeys. It sold the standard version, plus a decaffeinated version. I soon discovered, though, that the convenience stores associated with every petrol station sold the real McCoy: “Double Shot”- a little something to get you through those endless woodland kilometers.

Two whole days of my life wasted …

Rock art

Starting to the east of Kakadu National Park, and running south west across the park, is an inland cliff that forms the edge of the Arnhem Land plateau. The sandstone forming the plateau is ancient: it was laid down 1,000 million years ago – 450 million years before the first multicellular organisms evolved. From 500-140 million years ago, the sea spread into the area, eroding the sandstone into sea cliffs and leaving a few small islands, which are now rocky outliers, like this one at Ubirr with the Arnhem Land escarpment in the distance:

Both the plateau and the rocky outcrops are ecologically interesting, but the rock outcrops are much visited for another reason. The rock formations often provided sheltered sites where the aborigines could live – and which also offered a canvas on which to express their artistic talents.

Some of the artwork is quite old. These small human figures are thought to be about 5,000 years old:

- while some of it is clearly more recent:

Determining the age of the artwork is complicated: the rocky overhangs only partially protect it so it gradually disappears. Generations of aborigines have both ‘touched-up’ previous artwork, and drawn totally new images over faded older ones. Dating the artwork is further complicated because the red, yellow and white pigments used are all mineral ‘ochres’, so only the black charcoal areas can be aged using carbon-dating. Really it’s best to forget about the peculiar obsession of western cultures with the antiquity of artwork and just enjoy the images.

Some of the images are of food, like this long-necked turtle …

… and these fishes, which form part of a magnificent frieze, in which several different kinds of fish are clearly differentiated:

This last piece of artwork in this blog was done by ‘Barramundi Charlie’ in the 1960s, a couple of years before his death. He was the last of his clan to have the ‘right’ to produce artwork at this particular site (there are three sites that are open to visitors in Kakadu), so no more will be added there. The figure in white on the right is Namarrgan, the lightning man, and the figure on the left is his wife Barrginj. The two of them are the parents of Aljurr – or Leichhardt’s grasshopper – an important species to the aborigines in the area because their appearance each year presages the first storms of the rains. Namarrgan wears his lightning as a band around him, connecting his arms, legs and head, and the stone axes on his elbows and knees produce thunder.

Namurrgan lives at the lightning dreaming on the Arnhem Land escarpment – the three pillar-like bulges in the escarpment in the centre of the photo below. It is a dangerous sacred place, and the aboriginies avoid going there, as trouble will result if Namarrgan is disturbed.

Captivating Corellas

Corellas are smallish (for cockatoos) white cockatoos, but whoever it was who was responsible for the design, I feel that the bald patches around the eye weren’t such a good idea in the looks stakes. The Little Corella got off relatively lightly as the blue is, at least, fairly original.

Corellas are fairly common and are particularly noisy at dusk when going through their bedtime routine. I didn’t get a chance to photograph them, though, until I was on my way to the supermarket in Jabiru. Jabiru’s the largest – uh, the only – town in Kakadu National Park. Like many towns that have grown as administrative centres, it has a slightly expanded feel about it, as if someone drew the town plan on an elastic sheet and stretched it by pulling at the corners. Supermarket, medical centre and other civic amenities were laid out in a spacious grassy area – and a flock of Corellas were enjoying the facilities. Fortunately the roads were also considerably wider than they needed to be, so I could stop and watch them from the car.

The Corellas were feeding on long thin seed pods. Clearly their motto was one foot good …

… but two feet better:

An alternative to finding the seed pods yourself seemed to be to sidle up to a flock-mate who was attempting to subdue one on the ground, and try and put your own foot down on it:

Even the ensuing fights were conducted at an exaggeratedly slow pace:

Their final piece de resistance in their clowning - which I never managed to photograph - was a slow forward somersault. It looked almost as though they were leaning forward to pick up something small from the ground, and tumbled over. Either that, or it was just part of a Corella’s mission in life to be utterly captivating.