Alice Springs

Our second stop was Alice Springs. I guess that this is an oasis in the very centre of Australia. The McDonell Ranges go 300 km in both directions from here, and Alice Springs itself is in a valley surrounded by the mountains (hills). It gets a bit more rain, so although it’s surrounded by deserts (Tamini, Great Sandy, Simpsons, Gibson and the Great Victoria Desert) it technically isn’t desert. It must have been an important refuge for aborigines before white men came. 

In the 1800s (and even today) most of the Australian population were in the southeast. An undersea cable was needed from Indonesia for the telegraph, so overseas communications could be reduced from two months. Darwin, or further east was the obvious landing site for the cable, but then it needed to go overland. As South Australia included the Northern Territory from 1863, they saw that they could gain advantage by having the overland cable. However, no white person had crossed central Australia, and the land was almost totally unexplored. The competition for an overland telegraph was fierce - Victoria financed the Burke and Wills expedition in 1860 (they actually did it but they died), while South Australia offered £2000 reward for the first explorer to cross the centre of the continent. John McDouall Stuart did it in 1862 and came back alive. In the process, he found a spring and a waterhole that he called Alice Springs.

The telegraph line was built in 1871, and the telegraph station was established next to the spring and waterhole. (Katherine, where we were yesterday was also established as a repeater station.)

Tonight we had our dinner at the telegraph station.

The telegraph station became a home for half caste aboriginal children in 1911 when the commonwealth took over the Northern Territory from South Australia. At the time, the government considered that only children whose parents were both aborigines should be treated as aboriginal. The children of a white and an aboriginal were taken away to be assimilated into white society, thus starting or perpetuating what are known as the Stolen Generations.

It later became an army camp during World War Two, and then a mission station where aborigines lived. Recently it was derelict, and it’s been renovated to be a museum showing the history of its usage.

Before that, my off train experience was to see an art gallery in Alice Springs, and go to the top of Anzac Hill, where you have a good view of the town.

We went to lunch at the Alice Springs Desert Park, which has a large collection of local desert plants that I saw, as well as a lot of animals.

Then, after lunch we visited Simpsons Gap and did three walks - to the top of Cassia Hill

Simpsons Gap (which was really beautiful)

And a large ghost gum.

Katherine

You probably know the story already, but back in the 1800s, it was difficult to transport stuff around the centre of Australia. It’s mainly desert, and apart from the east coast, the remaining areas suited to productive use are isolated and far apart. Horses were unsuitable for desert conditions, so camels and their cameleers came to Australia. According to folklore, the cameleers were Afghans from Afghanistan, but actually they were mainly Pakistanis. They provided transport through these areas until trucks and roads became cheaper and put them out of business. The cameleers then released their camels into the wild, and the camels became another major feral animal disaster for Australia. We have more wild camels than anywhere else in the world. The camels destroy waterholes that other animals depend upon. They’re huge - more than 10 times the size of a kangaroo - so they eat a lot of food our native animals could have available to them. Other animals were also used - donkeys and water buffalo are also feral.

But the main transport was the Afghan camel train. So when the train line was built from Adelaide to Darwin, it was called the Ghan. In the late 1800s South Australia included the Northern Territory, and the state tried to build the entire railway line. Unfortunately, according to our bus driver, they ran out of money for it when it had been partly built in South Australia, and became bankrupt as a result. So the commonwealth government stepped in and bought the Northern Territory from South Australia, and helped to complete the line as far as Alice Springs. The story seems a bit more prosaic - South Australia is probably the poorest state, and the Northern Territory has always cost a lot of money and has a really tiny population, so South Australia asked the commonwealth to take it over. The rest wasn’t completed until 2004. It’s now one of the long rail journeys of the world, and today I’m on it.

The passenger train is a commercial tourist journey, so you travel for a bit, have an “off train experience”, then travel for a bit more. It’s three days from Adelaide to Darwin and four the way I’m going, from Darwin to Adelaide. The first stop is Katherine, where you can do various off train experiences in Katherine or Nitmiluk Gorge, or do what I did, and go to Cutta Cutta caves.

Like Darwin, Katherine is a wet tropical climate, and there are lots of farms in the area, growing mangos amongst other things.

The area is karst - limestone country - and I saw lots of it as we went to the caves.

I really enjoyed the caves, although they were quite hot and humid towards the end, as the cave has only one entrance and the hot air comes in and heats up in the cave. The cave’s floor is mud, so there are few stalagmites, and the decorative features are muddy coloured, but it was very wide and spacious. During the wet season the cave fills with water almost to the top. 

There’s some petrified mud in the cave, and the scientists are waiting for it to drop so they can analyse it.

I was glad I did this experience, as it was 41C, and at least one person on the Nitmiluk Gouge Cruise got heat stroke.

Day off

Today was too hot, so I decided to rest. I’ll probably have no wifi for the next few days, so I won’t update until Saturday.

Darwin

It was sad to leave the cruise today. The company has been excellent, the staff fantastic, the weather superb, and the itinerary made the most of wonderful points of interest. This area really needs you to do stuff at exactly the right time of day and month to suit the tides. The water is much clearer for snorkelling at neap tide. The dramatic tidal differences of spring tide highlight things like the horizontal falls and Montgomery Reef. We almost got no wind at all. The ocean was absolutely smooth. Other trips here have not been as good. We had several passengers on the cruise who needed help to get places, and the staff made it their business to enable everyone to see everything.

We saw all sorts of things I haven’t talked about - flying fish, sea snakes, whales breaching, whales with whale calves really close to the boat (it’s the time of year when humpback whales have bred in Australian waters and are going north), crocodiles, dugongs… 

But this morning we finished the cruise in Darwin. 

It’s a city that’s been destroyed twice. Once during the Second World War, when it was bombed by the Japanese in 1942, and then taken over by the army for the rest of the war. Not many buildings were left standing after the bombing. Then at midnight on Christmas Eve in 1974, cyclone Tracey went straight over the top of Darwin - buildings were destroyed, then the calm of the eye came, and everyone went out and thought things could be worse, and then everything that had been ripped off came back to do much more damage when they were out of the eye. Only four buildings are still whole after both those calamities. I went to the museum and art gallery today, and saw the devastation from the cyclone documented there.

They also had displays of the indigenous art awards that have recently been given. It was fantastic, but I didn’t take any photos.

And then, I saw the display about Sweetheart, the crocodile that attacked motorboats and detached their outboard engines. It didn’t eat anyone, but it struck terror in the neighbourhood.

Mount Rushmore eat your heart out

The tropics have a wet and a dry season, and this is the end of the dry season. You may have noticed that we’ve had no rain while we’ve been on this cruise, and the areas we’ve been in look like a desert or semi desert environment. We’re in the tropical dry season, and we’ve been gradually moving north and east. During the wet season in Broome it rains once or twice a week - better than a couple of hundred kilometres south, where it rarely rains, but a reasonably dry tropical area. As you move east (there’s not much north left if you still want to be in Australia) you get more rain during the wet season, but we’re still not in the wet tropics where it rains every day in the wet season.

However, the Kimberley has a lot of amazing waterfalls. One of the largest is the King George Falls (Oomari Falls), twelve kilometres up the King George River. In the wet season these twin falls thunder down and along the gorge. Of course, the scene is different in the dry season.

Today we went up the river along the gorge to the falls. Just imagine twelve kilometres of this!

Don’t a lot of them look like faces? They’re eighty meters high.

Tomorrow morning we finish in Darwin.

Winyalkin Island and Wollaston Bay

This morning they discovered baby turtles under the boat. There was obviously a turtle hatching event on the beach last night. The hatchlings all wait together just under the sand in their nest, and then scurry down the beach together towards the water. Only 20 in a thousand make it to maturity.  Some people saw brolgas on the beach early this morning, and someone mentioned a shark. But I just saw the beach.

We were moored off the island where this was happening. Further around the bay, in much shallower water, we went to our second aboriginal art gallery.

There was a thylocene, so that rock art was at least 9000 years old.

As we came back we saw dolphins, but I didn’t take any pictures.

Swift Bay

The Kimberley continental shelf is one of the widest in the world. As I’ve said before, it’s very shallow. 

During the ice age land went out 250kms to the edge of the continental shelf in places. Aborigines lived on all that land. And then the sea came in. They weren’t one nation. When Europeans came to Australia there were about 250 languages spoken (Australia is bigger than Europe and the aborigines have been here at least five times as long), so the peoples whose land went underwater were very likely to be different tribes, speaking different languages. The seas came in slowly at first and then rapidly enough that they could see the seas rising. It was a time when rock art around Australia shows war. If I’d lived then, I’d wonder whether there would be any land left. I imagine that any people would change the characteristics of their religion.

At that time, it’s calculated that the art of the Kimberley changed completely. The Wandjina style started, and the previous Gwion Gwion style was superseded. Today we visited a rock shelter. You may notice a midden in front of it. This suggests that it wasn’t a sacred site, as people lived there rather than visiting for ceremony.

With an amazing amount of rock art. Later art has been done over earlier art, and older art gradually fades away.

Later, we went to a beach to watch the sunset. 

This beach was full of shells and coral rather than sand.

The scenery was wonderful.

Ashmore Reef

Ashmore Reef and Cartier Island is an Australian external territory. One of eight - Australian Antarctic Territory, Macquarie Island, Heard and MacDonald Islands, Norfolk Island, Coral Sea Islands, Christmas Island, and Cocos Keeling Islands are the others. Most are uninhabited and difficult to get to. The purpose of this trip, for me, was to see the territory. The fact that it went to a lot of other amazing places was fantastic and the reason I chose this cruise.

Today we visited Ashmore Reef. In the morning we snorkelled in the reef. As usual, I didn’t take any pictures while snorkelling. Every single person, no matter how much snorkelling they’ve done, said it was the best snorkelling they’ve ever done. The water was clear, the coral was absolutely enormous (brain coral the size of a truck), the variety of coral was staggering, and it came in so many colours! Then there were all the fish! And clams. And stingrays. And everything else. It was just fantastic.

This afternoon we went around West Island and looked at the bird life. There were turtle tracks of at least three different species of turtles, and we saw several in the water.

There were birds in abundance. Our bird expert was beside herself.

And there was a poor Indonesian fishing boat.