Journey to Lightning Ridge

Today I travelled from Dubbo to Lightning Ridge. It started being quite foggy, but after a while the fog cleared. By this time I was definitely going through the western plains. Not a hill to be seen, and I was in sheep and wheat country.

One of the reasons I’m taking the route I am is to see places I’ve heard of through folk music over the years. Australia has lots of songs about drovers and shearers moving from place to place. The western plains figured in several, as did Gilgandra, which I came across soon after leaving Dubbo. It’s very flat.

I came across Gulargambone shortly after leaving Gilgandra. For many years there has been a radio program called Australia All Over (also known as Maccas on a Sunday morning). The host rocked up to a country town that no one bar the inhabitants has ever heard of, and they all line up to talk to him, or tell stories or play music… People also ring in from all around Australia to report on strange stuff, like leaches. I was in Narrandera one weekend for their annual parade. Everyone in the town and for miles around seemed to be in the parade - the primary schools, the sports teams, the police, fire brigade, … That was on the Saturday. Then, bright and early on Sunday morning, when everyone should have been bleary eyed from everything on Saturday, there was macca on stage in the park with this enormous queue of people waiting to talk to him for a few seconds. This started before 7am (the show goes live at 7:30am). It was a tremendously popular show.

You may wonder what this has to do with Gulargumbone. Somehow, the town featured more often than you’d expect on the show when I used to listen to it. It also came first in NSW in the tidy towns competition in 2004.

This century quite a few towns have been painting pictures on their silos. I passed my first one for this trip at Coonamble and I didn’t see any others, although many properties had silos, and there were the massive piles of wheat covered with blue tarpaulins that you see in wheatbelts at this time of year all around Australia.

I also passed a memorial to John Oxley’s 1818 expedition. But the best thing I passed was the giant emu near Lightning Ridge. It’s astoundingly tall and is made out of several satellite dishes and two Volkswagens amongst other pieces of metal.

Then I arrived in Lightning Ridge. They mine black opals. I think it’s the only place in the world that has black opals, which are more impressive than any other opals. Way back when I was a child, in the middle of summer, my grandparents took me from Melbourne to Brisbane, and we visited Lightning Ridge. I had never seen a place so poor. It would have been very hot - probably over 40C. People were living in hessian tents. Someone had made their home from beer bottles. Everyone lived among mullock heaps. The roads meandered between the dwellings which were all on claims, so there were lots of holes in the ground.

Today Lightning Ridge is a proper town, with houses with fences and gardens. There are all sorts of facilities. There are some outstanding tourist attractions (one of which was voted the second best tourist attraction in Australia). It’s better than either of the other opal mining towns I’ve visited. Unfortunately, the mines here have to be braced with timbers. In Cooper Pedy the rock doesn’t need to be braced and they have lots of underground buildings, including a hotel, so the people can avoid hot summer weather. I went around the workings, and saw the Lunatic Hill open cut, which shows the rock strata and where the opals are found.

Dubbo

Today I started my epic adventure. I went to Dubbo, which I’ve been to a number of times before although I haven’t seen any of its well known attractions, and I’m not going to this time either. I’ve also been to most of the places I passed on the way.

I went to Cowra, which has incredible Japanese connections since it had a POW camp that included a Japanese section. One night the Japanese rioted and escaped, overwhelming the Australians manning the gun emplacements, and killing several with baseball bats and knives. Over 200 Japanese died, over 100 were wounded and over 300 escaped. A war cemetery was built for them, and every Japanese soldier who died in Australia (including those shot down in Darwin) is buried there. Cowra is the site of the first Australian peace bell and they have the best Japanese garden in Australia. 

I’ve visited all these on previous occasions, but I’ve never been to the visitors centre before. It has a hologram of the POW camp which was very interesting. It mentioned that there was also a contingent of Indonesian POWs who the Dutch had convinced Australia to intern. At some stage (before the riot) Australia decided that they weren’t POWs but were political prisoners, so they were released. There were also Germans and Italians at the POW camp.

Outside the visitors centre is the Cowra rose garden.

As I arrived in Boorowa I noticed that the sign said they were home to the best merinos in Australia. Since Australian merinos are the best in the world, I don’t know why they didn’t say that they were the best anywhere. Anyway, I thought that was a pretty tall order, so I stopped at the visitors centre and asked why they were the best. I was told that the family that started merinos in Boorowa started them in Australia (wasn’t that the McArthurs I said - well they took over from the McArthurs) and still, to this day they win prizes every year for their fine merinos. Which probably means that they ARE the best in the world.

Parkes was also on my way to Dubbo. Usually I go to Canowindra and visit the age of fishes museum and marvel at the Devonian rocks there. So this time I went a different way, via Parkes. As I was on my way there, I wondered how it got its name. It was obviously named after Henry Parkes (generally credited with being the father of Australian federation after he gave the Tenterfield address). However, Parkes would have existed before Henry Parkes was famous. Evidently the town decided to name itself Parkes after Henry visited it in 1873. It was called Bushman before that.

Anyway, Parkes is famous partly because of its telescope and the lies of a film called “The Dish”. “The Dish” is about the first human landing on the moon and the role Australian telescopes had in it. However, the Parkes telescope wasn’t the only one involved, and, in fact the actual first footsteps on the moon were recorded by the Honeysuckle Creek telescope, a few kilometres from where I live, because the astronauts decided to jump ship early, and Honeysuckle Creek was the only telescope in transmission range at the time. That’s why the first steps are so blurry. Parkes took over about five minutes later, and because it’s much bigger, the rest of the transmission isn’t as bad. I was surprised that the Parkes telescope is in a valley. All the telescopes around home are on the tops of peaks and I thought that’s where you tried to build them. The area is pretty flat, being on the edge of the western plains. Parkes itself is quite a large town and is on the top of the biggest hill in the area. The telescope is a radio telescope and is some kilometres out of town.

Okinoerabujima

Today we reached Okinoerabu Island, the second most southerly of the Amami Islands, famous for its limestone caves. 

This is a tropical coral island. I went to the Shoryudo Cave. 

I was one of the last to walk down to the cave, and at the entrance, the sight of the people ahead of me gave me a good impression of the size of the cave - it’s enormous! 

It has lots of stalactites and stalagmites, and features that are sacred to the local people. 

There’s even a Tori gate in the cave to indicate a significant part of it. 

Most of the lights were plain white, but several areas of the cave had been lit in saturated colours that changed as you looked. 

Eventually we came out of the cave.

We then visited the town, 

where they were having the Okinoerabu Agricultural Festival.

In the afternoon, we visited the limestone coast at the Fucha Blowhole, which reminded me of Christmas Island. 

There were several blowholes, but we weren’t there at the right time for them to blow. 

We then visited Japan’s most majestic banyan tree at the local school.

As we prepared to leave, the islanders danced for us.

Amami Ōshima

Today we’re at Amami Oshima which has the second largest mangrove forest in Japan. We docked this morning, and went to Oshima Tsumugimura to see traditional Tsumugi silk being made. This is a very long, labour intensive precision dying and weaving process. Firstly, silk thread is wound into bundles the width of the weft of a loom (the thread is very long, as it will be used in either the warp or weft of the final cloth). These bundles are woven into a cotton fabric. 

Starch is precisely applied to this cotton and silk fabric to act as a resist in the dying process so that exact parts of the silk thread will be undyed. 

Before the cotton and silk fabric is dyed, it is washed in a mineral rich mud for between five and twenty minutes. I think the mud acts as a mordant, and, like many mordants, it changes the colour produced by the dye. 

The dye is made from pieces of wood from this tree, 

which are then chipped and boiled for two hours 

to create a vat full of dye. 

The cotton and silk fabric is dipped repeatedly into the dye vat (between one and five times), and then dried. The dye will give it colours ranging from brown to black. The silk bundles in the pictures show how the colour varies depending on the amount of dipping.

If other colours are wanted, once the starch has been removed, areas of the silk are coloured. 

The cotton and silk fabric is then cut and the cotton is discarded, while the silk is wrapped on spools. The silk that is to be the warp is used to dress the loom. 

Then the weavers weave the weft threads which have also come from a cotton and silk fabric that’s been through the process. 

The weavers check every thread they weave to ensure its placement is correct.

The resulting pure silk fabric would have to be some of the most expensive, given the process. I was really happy that I’d been able to visit.

After we finished there, we visited the Tanaka Isson Art Museum, dedicated to the vibrant work of this renowned artist. The building was very interesting, and, although we weren’t allowed to take photos, they allowed me to take a photo of the building from inside.

I visited a museum that depicted life on the island in the afternoon. 

At night, the local people gave us a dance display wearing traditional costumes as we prepared to depart. Like most of the islands, before the Japanese took over, it was a matrilineal society, with female priestesses at the top echelon of society.

Suwanosejima

Today we visited another active volcano. Japan has over 100 of them, more than just about every other country, and accounts for more than 10% of all active volcanoes in the world. Today we sailed around one, on our way south to see more of the Japanese island chain. Suwanosejima is one of the most active, and the island has been in a near continuous state of eruption since 1949. It emits a lot of ash, so the ground isn’t very stable, and landslides occur frequently. It was interesting seeing how verdant it was, and the amount of erosion.

Yakushima

Today we visited Yakushima island, home of an extensive old cedar forest. The cedars that are over 1000 years old change their composition, and the wood becomes much sought after. We docked at the port of Miyanoura, and travelled by bus to the Shiratani Unsuikyo ravine,

 where we crossed the river, 

and wandered through the forest, 

seeing moss 

and waterfalls 

and monkeys. 

There were plenty of stairs, and some areas had been rerouted due to landslides.

We then went back to the ship and were taught how to make chopsticks from 1000 year old cedar.