Top End down
30 Nov - 3 Dec, Ian
If you ever plan a trip round Australia I can
recommend Kakadu. After our one night in Darwin we had a couple of days out
there in the National Park. Without really meaning to, as far as I understand
it, Paula had booked us on a coach tour. This is something I would never have
done: sitting in a coach induces a sense of panic in me, like vertigo, and
overcoming it is akin to an Augustinian exercise. The feeling of being in leg
irons only gets worse as the scenery improves; there were plenty of times that
I'd have stopped and wandered round and shot a few photo's if I'd been able to.
The "leg irons" metaphor illustrates why we wont be moving to Melbourne: the
history of Australia as a penal dumping ground is ingrained into the country's
inscription in my imagination. And it's not only me: Tonna perspicaciously
detected and understood the sense of
banishment
that I'd fear if we moved here and even Aussies seem to feel locked off from the
rest of the world in a way that isn't satisfactorily explained by geography
alone (I've done a two day business trip to Sydney before now - it's only as
remote as you think it is).
But Kakadu is beautiful, and there was no rational reason to worry about the coach: we were on and off it for two days, and we shared it with only six other people on the first day and four on the second. When you live within earshot of a well-used road there is a threshold that's passed when you hear a constant roar of traffic rather than individual vehicles. Similarly, when you live in the city rather than in the country there are just too many people to treat them as individuals, which is why we know our few neighbours in Somerset much better than we knew any of our neighbours when we lived in London. And when travelling we all hate the feeling that we're experiencing something so routine that through the realities of scale we're necessarily being rendered into tourists; when you're 50% of the party you can hope that you have a different, more human relationship with your guide than you do when you're in a group of 60. And indeed the coach thing proved to be okay, once I'd calmed my hormonal spikiness.
The Park extends to around 20,000 sq km and at times it felt as though we were the only people in it. The peak season is mid year. Around now there are bush flies everywhere. They don't sting or bite - rather they try to suck salts out of your sweat, and although the temperatures didn't rise beyond the thirties while we were there the humidity makes perspiration unavoidable. So these flies seemed to have chased away pretty much everyone else. Right now the "top end" is between two seasons: the dry season is over and the wet is yet to come. We saw a couple of light showers but that's nothing: when the monsoon season gets going they can get 16 or 17 solid days of rain without a break.
The wildlife is exceptional. In our two days in Kakadu the choice place was the Yellow River, where we went on the first of a couple of boat cruises; again, the boat was quiet. In Africa I saw many more kingfishers than I'd ever seen before, and in many more flavours; this time we saw two further new ones - the little kingfisher and the azure kingfisher - both of which are exotically coloured and both of which are also genuine fishers (many kingfishers actually eat insects rather than fish). Here's a snap of the azure kingfisher, which reveals primarily a very rich deep royal blue as it fizzes past:
Other birds we saw included black cockatoos, whistling kites (they were everywhere in the top end), sea eagles (which have a 2m wingspan), broglas (large red-headed cranes), darters, blue-winged kookaburras, pied cormorants, whistling ducks, coucal pheasants, sulphur-winged cockatoos, jacanas, magpie geese and jabirus (the only Aussie stork). And we saw crocodiles; they're easier to pick out in the dry season but we had half a dozen sightings, the best of which was a croc swallowing down a large fish. They're genuinely dangerous: in the past 8 weeks there have been a couple of deaths in the area; Paula picked up a book called Crocodile Attack for more gruesome stories.
The croc's aren't the only danger. I don't know if any of the 1,000 species of flies (really!) are dangerous but there are snakes and spiders, and perhaps even more worrying in real life are the frilled lizards: these aren't objectively dangerous but if you confront them and freeze we were told they're liable to mistake you for a tree and run up you - and if they get entangled in your hair they'll need to be cut out as they writhe.
The boat trip we did the next day had much less wildlife but I'd been looking forward to it as we were promised an aboriginal guide. He did say that he was from the local aboriginal clan but you'd never know it from looking at him - and to listen to he was the Bruciest aboriginal you've ever heard. Although he was less convincingly "of the people" than the kids we met having our picnic lunch at a nearby airstrip, many of the things he said, particularly in response to direct questions, had the ring of truth. He told us about the bush tucker and gave us some bush almonds to try - they were tiny but very tasty; parenthetically he admitted that gathering food became much easier when the supermarket opened up. He showed us a variety of different types of spear and gave us a demo of spear throwing that was less impressive than his tales of the deadly accuracy of the elders ("they could take your left ear off while you were running away"). When I asked him whether they still use these traditional skills he said Yes but admitted that these days it will be one guy heading out in a Toyota with a shotgun rather than a posse of several dozen using specialised spears to rain offer flocks of geese. Efficiency! And when I asked him whether the young are choosing to hang out in the bush or move to towns he replied without hesitation that they prefer the towns. Apparently, in their traditional communities the government benefits are taken centrally and only given out by the community leaders in exchange for work, such as litter clearance. If they don't fancy litter clearance the youths can simply up sticks and move to Darwin where they're given their dole money individually with no strings. I was depressed to have this explanation spontaneously offered: if Zoe or Heidi had no higher aspiration than to receive state benefits in the easiest way I'd be appalled. But as I wrote last time the status of the aboriginal people here represents a disturbing societal dysfunction. Last night I offered to Brett and Nat to take any bets that Vietnamese will attain Cabinet positions in the government before full-blood Aboriginals. It turns out that I was predicting the past: two Vietnamese have already made the Cabinet, and the current mayor of Melbourne is a very Chinese Chinese guy, and he's doing well.
As at Uluru, there were no aboriginal people working in the Cultural Centre or in the Visitors Centre or in the traditional arts shop. Apart from the jolly kids we came across at lunch and their smiley parents and a few people lying around on the grass, most of the evidence of an aboriginal presence was in the rock art dating back up to 50,000 years. That's far older than the rock art we saw in Africa (which dates back only up to about 6,000 years) and it was also more impressive. The difficulty the aboriginal peoples have had with white Aussies started as soon as the two cultures met: within 70 years of the "founding" of Darwin 95% of the local aboriginal people had fallen victim to violence and exotic disease. Since they never had a written language much of the aboriginal culture is disappearing with them. In recent times there have been efforts to capture the languages in written form but it's proving to be very tricky work. The notes I picked up report that there are five tenses in the local language - as I understand it, these are perfect (past), imperfect (past), a tense to express the negative termed "irreal" (also past), an imperative and one "non-past" tense that appears to have to serve for both present and future.
The Brucey aboriginal guide also gave us some interesting info regarding their regime of discipline. Apparently the main tool of law enforcement is the punishment beating. Sinning women are clubbed with sticks and their bones are broken - it could be a collar bone or an ankle depending on the specifics of the crime - and it will be inflicted by the family (which I guess means the men). Men who commit crimes are speared, typically in the calf or the thigh. For sex crimes the Achilles tendon will be speared so that they're marked with a limp for life. Recalcitrant kids have their lower lips smeared with paste from itchy bugs that causes them to swell painfully, preventing talking and eating for a couple of days.
Skipping around the painted rocks there were also many wallabies - both agile wallabies (they're very agile) and rock wallabies (you see them by the rocks). There were only the eight of us, plus the guide, at the rocks: in the high season there are hundreds of people enjoying the moderate conditions and the relative absence of flies, and the coaches are often backed up unable to park.
Our two day tour also took in a quick spin round the uranium mine: in the midst of the splendour of the Park, which is possibly the most beautiful place I've seen in Australia, is an enormous undisguised quarry decorated with a full complement of mechanical plant. You may wander how they get away with this in a National Park that's also listed as one of only 25 World Heritage Sites anywhere of both cultural and national significance. Well, it's simple: they just announced that the area surrounding the mine is not part of the Park. The aboriginal "owners" of the Park have taken the privately owned mining company to court to prevent further expansion of the mines - so far they've been successful but there are appeals underway and my money's on the mining company getting their way in the end.
As well as machinery, the periphery of the quarry is adorned with large piles of luminous yellow sulphur, shipped from Canada. This is turned on site into sulphuric acid and is used in the extraction process. The grey uranium oxide is trucked over to Darwin and processed further; from there 95% of it is shipped to France for the generation of nuclear power. The price of the uranium was fixed when the French initially bought it. Subsequently the price of uranium fell on world markets and France tried to wriggle out of the contract. They failed, fortunately for them as the price of uranium later rose and the contract is now much to their favour.
I could happily have missed the mine tour, though it was only short. With or without this the coach trip turned out well, and, as I said, Kakadu is a destination I'd strongly recommend. Our hotel, which is probably the one you'd choose unless you braved camping, was in the shape of a crocodile: we were told that at night its eyes light up authentically, but sadly we forgot to check. More significant was the fact that the hotel also seemed unastonished by the fact that parents had turned up with their children and gave us two comfortable rooms with a connecting door.
On Thursday we flew overnight, returning to Melbourne on Friday morning. While we waited to board I used the free wifi at Darwin airport to fix the problems that had prevented me posting my last blog. Astute readers may notice that there are still some issues with the blog site, and I'll get round to these next time I have a good chunk of free on-line time. I had two lattes worth of wireless this morning and spent most of it failing to get Zoe's newsletter from Rangiroa on the web. I really feel that I'm on the contemporary equivalent of a road trip, which is this travel where instead of spending time with my head under the bonnet of a car I'm hacking around on a laptop, working around the splutterings of the software on which I rely. The newsletter problem is a stubborn one - I hope everyone can be patient but I need to sort it out or else I wont be able to post any more of the girls' newsletters.
Yesterday was another fruitful Melbourne chores day. I got my hair cut by a nice chap called Anthony (pronounced with the campy theta that you hear in the US but not the UK). We saw a friendly doctor at the local (Greek) practice and secured prescriptions for the anti-malarial Malarone for next month. And Zoe had her second filling and Heidi had the first of each of her two fillings and extractions; the girls were brave and both went well. And last night we had a real treat: we went to Donovan's for Brett's birthday, which was the second of two meals that we'd booked about a year ago. While The Flower Drum has the more exceptional food, Donovan's is the restaurant that I prefer, being among my global favourites for the ambience and overall experience. Like many young Aussies (including AnTHony) our waitress had worked in London for a few years before settling back in Melly. In familiar fashion she lamented the remoteness of Aus, adding the telling sentiment, as if it were as much a psychological as a demographic fact, that Aus has a huge empty middle. If you shook people awake in the middle of the night, told them that there was an imminent nuclear disaster and asked them to choose one world city that could be protected my sense is that proportionally fewer Aussies would choose Sydney or Melbourne than non-Aussies. There's something missing in the national soul.
On the subject of "Top end down" I learnt when we were in Rangiroa with our many new French friends that they have only one phrase that is used to mean both upside down and inside out: it's a l'envers.
This evening Nat cooked up a chicken dinner and as the tree and its decorations have gone up today there's been a Christmas spirit in the house, although traditional Christmas never seems quite real to me in hot countries - hearing Frosty the Snowman sung by a choir in Orange County, CA one year was bizarre. Over dinner Brett played CD's by Missy Higgins and Sophie Ellis Bextor. The first song I ever took notice of by Sophie Ellis Bextor was Lover, which remains my favourite. I don't know whether having a mother who was a Blue Peter presenter was help or hindrance but I'm sure that her career can't have been helped by ex-B-boy Robbie Williams cruelly saying she has a face like a satellite dish.
While I've been writing we've all been watching more Kath & Kim. It's a genuine part of Aus that we can literally (in DVD form) take home with us.
But Kakadu is beautiful, and there was no rational reason to worry about the coach: we were on and off it for two days, and we shared it with only six other people on the first day and four on the second. When you live within earshot of a well-used road there is a threshold that's passed when you hear a constant roar of traffic rather than individual vehicles. Similarly, when you live in the city rather than in the country there are just too many people to treat them as individuals, which is why we know our few neighbours in Somerset much better than we knew any of our neighbours when we lived in London. And when travelling we all hate the feeling that we're experiencing something so routine that through the realities of scale we're necessarily being rendered into tourists; when you're 50% of the party you can hope that you have a different, more human relationship with your guide than you do when you're in a group of 60. And indeed the coach thing proved to be okay, once I'd calmed my hormonal spikiness.
The Park extends to around 20,000 sq km and at times it felt as though we were the only people in it. The peak season is mid year. Around now there are bush flies everywhere. They don't sting or bite - rather they try to suck salts out of your sweat, and although the temperatures didn't rise beyond the thirties while we were there the humidity makes perspiration unavoidable. So these flies seemed to have chased away pretty much everyone else. Right now the "top end" is between two seasons: the dry season is over and the wet is yet to come. We saw a couple of light showers but that's nothing: when the monsoon season gets going they can get 16 or 17 solid days of rain without a break.
The wildlife is exceptional. In our two days in Kakadu the choice place was the Yellow River, where we went on the first of a couple of boat cruises; again, the boat was quiet. In Africa I saw many more kingfishers than I'd ever seen before, and in many more flavours; this time we saw two further new ones - the little kingfisher and the azure kingfisher - both of which are exotically coloured and both of which are also genuine fishers (many kingfishers actually eat insects rather than fish). Here's a snap of the azure kingfisher, which reveals primarily a very rich deep royal blue as it fizzes past:
Other birds we saw included black cockatoos, whistling kites (they were everywhere in the top end), sea eagles (which have a 2m wingspan), broglas (large red-headed cranes), darters, blue-winged kookaburras, pied cormorants, whistling ducks, coucal pheasants, sulphur-winged cockatoos, jacanas, magpie geese and jabirus (the only Aussie stork). And we saw crocodiles; they're easier to pick out in the dry season but we had half a dozen sightings, the best of which was a croc swallowing down a large fish. They're genuinely dangerous: in the past 8 weeks there have been a couple of deaths in the area; Paula picked up a book called Crocodile Attack for more gruesome stories.
The croc's aren't the only danger. I don't know if any of the 1,000 species of flies (really!) are dangerous but there are snakes and spiders, and perhaps even more worrying in real life are the frilled lizards: these aren't objectively dangerous but if you confront them and freeze we were told they're liable to mistake you for a tree and run up you - and if they get entangled in your hair they'll need to be cut out as they writhe.
The boat trip we did the next day had much less wildlife but I'd been looking forward to it as we were promised an aboriginal guide. He did say that he was from the local aboriginal clan but you'd never know it from looking at him - and to listen to he was the Bruciest aboriginal you've ever heard. Although he was less convincingly "of the people" than the kids we met having our picnic lunch at a nearby airstrip, many of the things he said, particularly in response to direct questions, had the ring of truth. He told us about the bush tucker and gave us some bush almonds to try - they were tiny but very tasty; parenthetically he admitted that gathering food became much easier when the supermarket opened up. He showed us a variety of different types of spear and gave us a demo of spear throwing that was less impressive than his tales of the deadly accuracy of the elders ("they could take your left ear off while you were running away"). When I asked him whether they still use these traditional skills he said Yes but admitted that these days it will be one guy heading out in a Toyota with a shotgun rather than a posse of several dozen using specialised spears to rain offer flocks of geese. Efficiency! And when I asked him whether the young are choosing to hang out in the bush or move to towns he replied without hesitation that they prefer the towns. Apparently, in their traditional communities the government benefits are taken centrally and only given out by the community leaders in exchange for work, such as litter clearance. If they don't fancy litter clearance the youths can simply up sticks and move to Darwin where they're given their dole money individually with no strings. I was depressed to have this explanation spontaneously offered: if Zoe or Heidi had no higher aspiration than to receive state benefits in the easiest way I'd be appalled. But as I wrote last time the status of the aboriginal people here represents a disturbing societal dysfunction. Last night I offered to Brett and Nat to take any bets that Vietnamese will attain Cabinet positions in the government before full-blood Aboriginals. It turns out that I was predicting the past: two Vietnamese have already made the Cabinet, and the current mayor of Melbourne is a very Chinese Chinese guy, and he's doing well.
As at Uluru, there were no aboriginal people working in the Cultural Centre or in the Visitors Centre or in the traditional arts shop. Apart from the jolly kids we came across at lunch and their smiley parents and a few people lying around on the grass, most of the evidence of an aboriginal presence was in the rock art dating back up to 50,000 years. That's far older than the rock art we saw in Africa (which dates back only up to about 6,000 years) and it was also more impressive. The difficulty the aboriginal peoples have had with white Aussies started as soon as the two cultures met: within 70 years of the "founding" of Darwin 95% of the local aboriginal people had fallen victim to violence and exotic disease. Since they never had a written language much of the aboriginal culture is disappearing with them. In recent times there have been efforts to capture the languages in written form but it's proving to be very tricky work. The notes I picked up report that there are five tenses in the local language - as I understand it, these are perfect (past), imperfect (past), a tense to express the negative termed "irreal" (also past), an imperative and one "non-past" tense that appears to have to serve for both present and future.
The Brucey aboriginal guide also gave us some interesting info regarding their regime of discipline. Apparently the main tool of law enforcement is the punishment beating. Sinning women are clubbed with sticks and their bones are broken - it could be a collar bone or an ankle depending on the specifics of the crime - and it will be inflicted by the family (which I guess means the men). Men who commit crimes are speared, typically in the calf or the thigh. For sex crimes the Achilles tendon will be speared so that they're marked with a limp for life. Recalcitrant kids have their lower lips smeared with paste from itchy bugs that causes them to swell painfully, preventing talking and eating for a couple of days.
Skipping around the painted rocks there were also many wallabies - both agile wallabies (they're very agile) and rock wallabies (you see them by the rocks). There were only the eight of us, plus the guide, at the rocks: in the high season there are hundreds of people enjoying the moderate conditions and the relative absence of flies, and the coaches are often backed up unable to park.
Our two day tour also took in a quick spin round the uranium mine: in the midst of the splendour of the Park, which is possibly the most beautiful place I've seen in Australia, is an enormous undisguised quarry decorated with a full complement of mechanical plant. You may wander how they get away with this in a National Park that's also listed as one of only 25 World Heritage Sites anywhere of both cultural and national significance. Well, it's simple: they just announced that the area surrounding the mine is not part of the Park. The aboriginal "owners" of the Park have taken the privately owned mining company to court to prevent further expansion of the mines - so far they've been successful but there are appeals underway and my money's on the mining company getting their way in the end.
As well as machinery, the periphery of the quarry is adorned with large piles of luminous yellow sulphur, shipped from Canada. This is turned on site into sulphuric acid and is used in the extraction process. The grey uranium oxide is trucked over to Darwin and processed further; from there 95% of it is shipped to France for the generation of nuclear power. The price of the uranium was fixed when the French initially bought it. Subsequently the price of uranium fell on world markets and France tried to wriggle out of the contract. They failed, fortunately for them as the price of uranium later rose and the contract is now much to their favour.
I could happily have missed the mine tour, though it was only short. With or without this the coach trip turned out well, and, as I said, Kakadu is a destination I'd strongly recommend. Our hotel, which is probably the one you'd choose unless you braved camping, was in the shape of a crocodile: we were told that at night its eyes light up authentically, but sadly we forgot to check. More significant was the fact that the hotel also seemed unastonished by the fact that parents had turned up with their children and gave us two comfortable rooms with a connecting door.
On Thursday we flew overnight, returning to Melbourne on Friday morning. While we waited to board I used the free wifi at Darwin airport to fix the problems that had prevented me posting my last blog. Astute readers may notice that there are still some issues with the blog site, and I'll get round to these next time I have a good chunk of free on-line time. I had two lattes worth of wireless this morning and spent most of it failing to get Zoe's newsletter from Rangiroa on the web. I really feel that I'm on the contemporary equivalent of a road trip, which is this travel where instead of spending time with my head under the bonnet of a car I'm hacking around on a laptop, working around the splutterings of the software on which I rely. The newsletter problem is a stubborn one - I hope everyone can be patient but I need to sort it out or else I wont be able to post any more of the girls' newsletters.
Yesterday was another fruitful Melbourne chores day. I got my hair cut by a nice chap called Anthony (pronounced with the campy theta that you hear in the US but not the UK). We saw a friendly doctor at the local (Greek) practice and secured prescriptions for the anti-malarial Malarone for next month. And Zoe had her second filling and Heidi had the first of each of her two fillings and extractions; the girls were brave and both went well. And last night we had a real treat: we went to Donovan's for Brett's birthday, which was the second of two meals that we'd booked about a year ago. While The Flower Drum has the more exceptional food, Donovan's is the restaurant that I prefer, being among my global favourites for the ambience and overall experience. Like many young Aussies (including AnTHony) our waitress had worked in London for a few years before settling back in Melly. In familiar fashion she lamented the remoteness of Aus, adding the telling sentiment, as if it were as much a psychological as a demographic fact, that Aus has a huge empty middle. If you shook people awake in the middle of the night, told them that there was an imminent nuclear disaster and asked them to choose one world city that could be protected my sense is that proportionally fewer Aussies would choose Sydney or Melbourne than non-Aussies. There's something missing in the national soul.
On the subject of "Top end down" I learnt when we were in Rangiroa with our many new French friends that they have only one phrase that is used to mean both upside down and inside out: it's a l'envers.
This evening Nat cooked up a chicken dinner and as the tree and its decorations have gone up today there's been a Christmas spirit in the house, although traditional Christmas never seems quite real to me in hot countries - hearing Frosty the Snowman sung by a choir in Orange County, CA one year was bizarre. Over dinner Brett played CD's by Missy Higgins and Sophie Ellis Bextor. The first song I ever took notice of by Sophie Ellis Bextor was Lover, which remains my favourite. I don't know whether having a mother who was a Blue Peter presenter was help or hindrance but I'm sure that her career can't have been helped by ex-B-boy Robbie Williams cruelly saying she has a face like a satellite dish.
While I've been writing we've all been watching more Kath & Kim. It's a genuine part of Aus that we can literally (in DVD form) take home with us.
Posted: Sat - December 3, 2005 at 06:33 PM
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Published On: Dec 05, 2005 09:46 AM
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Published On: Dec 05, 2005 09:46 AM