More Field Food Failure

When available, I eat fresh fruit at breakfast.  On the first shopping trip in Newman, I was thus pleased to see lots of apples and bananas on the shelves.  There were also green bananas.  I thought, hmmm; better get some of them too.  They should ripen once the yellow ones are gone or too bruised to eat.  So I added four green bananas to the overflowing shopping cart.  I put them in the breakfast food box, and forgot about them.

A week later, the yellow bananas were getting scarce.  I dug out the green bananas.  They still seemed hard.  I tried to peel one.  No dice.  I attacked it with a knife.  Slow going: I could barely pierce its now blotchy green skin.  I broke it in half.  It snapped when it broke, and smelled unbanana-like.  Definitely not ready to eat.  I put the remaining green bananas back in the box, wrapped in plastic.

The bananas continued to annoy me.  They were impervious to any persuasion about becoming edible.  I put them in the sun.  I added a ripe banana to their bag as a role model and as a source of ethylene gas.  I considered putting them on the engine block out of spite.  Field time was almost over.  Tactically, I began to ponder how to use them effectively in their unripe state.  The engine option was a clue.  Heat would be required.

Final swag out seemed to require a final dessert.  I thought about making fried green bananas.  However, when it came time to make dinner (my turn), I was very tired.  The effort of slicing bananas, exhuming the frying pan, heating margarine, and doing the actual frying seemed too taxing, especially when the final product was dubious.  I am sure we had enough brown sugar and honey to make any result edible, but in the moment exhaustion won out.  We had plenty of biscuits and chocolate anyway. 

I ran through this thought train while watching the fire, before cooking.  As Louis and I talked we expressed the mutual regret that we were not able to have a meal of Chernobyl Potatoes on Australia Fifteen.  When we’d last shopped, the Tom Price Coles store had amazingly been empty shelved with respect to root vegetables.  Sadness.  This conversation triggered mental synthesis.  Why not make Chernobyl Bananas?  This had many advantages.  It would use up aluminum foil.  The fire was not large, but we had plenty of wood to create coals.  It would be a lot easier than frying bananas.  It would be revenge.  Finally, it might work. 

I got the three remaining bananas, punctured each one, and wrapped them carefully in foil.  When the coals were sufficient, I made a cavity in the fire pit, inserted the bananas and buried them.  Of course, I had no idea how long it takes a banana to stew in its own juice, or even if bananas will cook this way.  I worked on dinner.  I checked one of the bananas in fifteen minutes.  It was still hard. 

Dinner was served.  I forgot about the bananas.  I assume Louis did too.  I remembered them oh, about an hour later when I caught a silvery glint from the fire pit.  I got the shovel and excavated all three bananas.  They seemed very light.  Their aluminum shells were intact, but stained with soot from the fire.  No steam came from the shells, only smoke.  I knew what was coming.  The shells cooled.  I pried one open.  At its core was a banana-shaped curved blob of carbon.  Oh well.

Opened banana on left; sealed on right

I don’t know if Chernobyl Bananas would have worked, given the right bananas and the right amount of roasting time.  Interestingly, the results of my experiment weren’t just blobs of carbon; the skin and tripartite sections of each banana were still distinct.  I don’t know what this means in terms of cooking potential.  In any event, while this experiment failed to produce something edible, it did succeed in using up supplies, enacting green banana punishment, and teaching me something about cooking.  And biscuits and chocolate is always a fine dessert.

Coda: Field Food Cleverness

Reverse the setting back to that initial shopping trip at the Woolworths in Newman. 

I wanted to make an Indian curry dinner.  No worries; Patak’s sauces are readily available in Australia.  While selecting a flavor of simmer sauce, I noticed packages of naan.  They were fresh, sealed in plastic.  I thought, hmm, can’t exactly be fresh, but would be a change from rice.  I added a package of garlic naan to the cart. 

Two nights later, swagged out south of Weeli Wolli, it was time to use the naan.  I’d looked at the package earlier in the day.  It recommended warming the breads before serving.  I knew this was preferable, for the sake of cuisine as well as thwarting staleness.  Two immediate warming options came to my mind:

1.  Heat the naan in the fire: temperature control would be tricky.     
2.  Warm the naan in my frying pan: it was small, and I only had a one burner stove.

As we found and parked at the swag out site, the solution came to me.  The Patrol had a turbocharger, which had a vent on top of the hood.  I check it.  Plenty hot.  I quickly took the naan out of its plastic, wrapped it in aluminum foil, and pushed it into the vent onto the engine.  This worked very well.

Naan - inserted

I made too much food.  Louis finished the naan at lunch the next day. 

On to the Pilbara: A First Week

7/3:  quick flight to Perth, adios to Paul, hola to Louis. 

7/4: Eighteen hours in town, chilly in the morning, close to zero.  A late morning flight to Newman.  I chatted with a gent who worked as a safety trainer for a bunch of the mining contractors.  He was also in the Australian Navy Reserve, and Commander of the Sea Cadets.  He had many interesting stories. 

Newman and suddenly the weather was temperate again.  I found the truck – vehicle number four of this trip – in the car park.  It is a Nissan Patrol, which I had expected with some regret.  It’s Landcruiser Lite –a powerful engine and plenty of truckness, it’s not as taut in the gearbox or suspension as the Toyotas.  No worries – this will keep me from getting too far off road.  It was Sunday.  All of the town businesses save for the pub were closed.  We sorted gear and packed the truck.

7/5: A return to the end of last year’s field season: the gate at Orebody 18.  Last year, they pretended I had not been in contact.  This year, Phil, a BHP geo, was there to meet us within fifteen minutes of contact.  He was a young bloke, a mine geologist.  He and a couple other geos had been intrigued by the project.  Too bad only he was available on Monday. 

Our first stop was to gather safety gear and read a safety briefing.  All of the companies have gotten very serious about this, which is a good thing I suppose.  It’s a bit strange to see the uniformity of all staff in safety gear all the time, even the receptionists. 

I read the briefing materials after rolling my shirt sleeves down, as requested, to comply with the safety code.  I signed on the appropriate line.  I handed it to the safety officer.  She said, you didn’t fill it out.  I said – huh?  It was a quiz.  Oh.  This wasn’t apparent, but now I’ll never forget that I should call for help on Channel 84.  We put on our safety vests, hard hats, safety glasses, and stowed our gloves and ear plugs, and headed out in Phil’s truck. 

I had not been to this research site for nine years; on that visit I was jet lagged so it was a haze anyway.  Nonetheless, the scenery began to look familiar.  We parked, and within thirty minutes I’d found the spherule layer. 

It’s remarkable to me that my long term memory retains the visual map of this spot in the Pilbara, much less that I can so unerringly look at the rocks anywhere out here and find what I am after.  If it were possible to quantify the last twenty-five years, I’ve spent relatively little time in the Pilbara, and even less looking at its rocks.  Yet this place is ingrained in me.  I don’t think I’ll ever loose the capacity and knowledge of here.  I suppose this is true of places that are significant in one’s life.  My time here has consistently been a catalyst in my maturation through the various stages of life.  That has to help.

Anyway, Phil was delighted to see the impact layer and hear about how we think it formed. He waited patiently while Louis and I did our work.  We were off-site – free of safety gear and able to take risks again – by early afternoon. 

The shops in Newman were open.  $450 later, we had enough chairs, ice, gas, food, water, and other random gear to last a week or two.  There was still time to drive west on Rt. 95, shoot the gap north through Cathedral Gorge, and swag out off of the track to Weeli Wolli. 

7/6:  Oh, the pleasure of a first night under the Southern Cross, with the only noise the very distant murmur of road trains.  A partially cloudy sky; the weather seemed unsettled.  Louis was still asleep.  I got up and stared at the back of the truck.  Well, I opened it first.  I’d quickly sorted and packed all of the food, water and gear the previous evening.  With each new vehicle, it’s a geometric challenge to fit everything in ways that don’t rattle, abrade the truck, or cause self destruction.  It’s was made a bit more challenging by the second spare tyre, which hogged a large inconvenient section of storage space.  However, the current set up of the Patrol looked pretty good, although the chairs, shovel, and stove seemed ready to fall out.

After breakfast, I drove us on to Weeli Wolli.  This was another return to the scene of the crime from last year, only this time I was in search of the new spherule layer.  With minimal effort, we found the track we took to the research site last year.  It was a rubbly and rough drive, but at least there was a track.  We eventually came to a reasonable outcrop of dolomite; the main type of limestone that makes up the lower Wittenoom Formation, where the Paraburdoo Layer is located.  I don’t know these rocks as well. They are poorly exposed, and when you do see them, they comprise thin layers of brown laminated rock.  Yawn.  Nonetheless, it was time to learn them, in order to find the Paraburdoo Layer. 

Weeli Wolli is a fairly large drainage, typical of the southern Hamersley Basin.  It occurs in the soft rocks – the Wittenoom – and takes advantage of the abundant folds and faults in the area.  To us, this meant that the dolomite exposures we looked at were isolated hill-sized blobs.  Well, time to work with what nature provided.  We worked uphill.  The dolomite began to show a consistent stratigraphy that we could trace from outcrop to outcrop.  This was a relief.  However, we couldn’t find the spherule layer. 

I could tell that the dolomite continued downhill and across the creek from where the truck sat.  Near the northern edge of the drainage, there was a nice ravine with good outcrop on both sides.  This seemed like a good target.  After lunch we set out.

Back to walking on rubbly stumbly outcrops, through and around spinifex, and scrambling down cliffs.  My route hit the main Weeli Wolli drainage.  It showed evidence of recent flooding; large gum trees lay horizontal in the channels, their roots and branches packed with debris.  The bare dolomite outcrops were polished and scoured.  Large bars of gravel and cobbles partially covered them, and made walking tricky. 

We made it across, and got to my target ravine.  I left Louis there to look for the spherule layer, while I walked uphill to tie us into the stratigraphy we’d looked at earlier in the day.  Of course, I went slowly so I could look for the spherule layer.  This means staring at every visible bed, a slow process. 

I performed my once-a-field season fall into the spinifex.  A couple dozen punctures in the left hand and arm, oh well.  I’d climbed high enough, it was time to turn around and find Louis.  I figured, we’d looked hard, but no layer, no regrets.

When I got back to the ravine, he waved something at me and mumbled indistinctly (a trend).  Eventually I understood that he’d found the layer!  A few very minimal outcrops at the top of the cliff on the south side of the ravine.  I was suddenly happy, and forgot the allergy-induced fatigue I had been suffering.  We had a look.  Definitely spherules.  I was bemused to have a new spherule section.  I’d essentially assumed we would not find it at Weeli Wolli.  I was happy to be surprised.  It reinforced my faith in serendipity.  If I had not gone on walkabout, and Louis weren’t so thorough and inclined to scramble up cliffs, we would have never found the one centimeter of spherules at Weeli Wolli.

7/7: The morning entertainment was a several hour drive from Weeli Wolli to my next site, Range Gorge.  More time north on Rt. 95, then west towards Wittenoom from Auski.  Range Gorge is one of the series of steep valleys that cuts the north side of the Hamersley Range.  There are no tracks into it, nor does it have access from Karijini National Park.  However, an exploration company drilled a research core here in the late 1980s.  I’ll look at that in Perth next week.  I wanted to come here to look at the above ground part of the section, in the hopes of finding the Paraburdoo Layer. 

The first challenge was to find the twenty four year old track to the drill site.  A new berm on the site of the road made this tricky, but with some high torque from the Patrol, we succeeded.  I was pleased to see that the drill site, the outcrops of dolomite behind it, and several hundred acres of the surrounding bush had recently burned.  Bare rock, burnt bushes and trees, and the ashes of spinifex – what’s not to like?  It was dramatic.  The bare rock of the plain ended right at the first cliff of dolomite; a xeriscape without the plants (currently). 

More dolomite, only this time a straightforward bottom to top section to see and learn.  I again put Louis to work at bed by bed examination, and went climbing to get perspective on the overall stratigraphy.  My coordination was a bit dicey from my allergies, but I looked, climbed, and eventually got oriented.  I’d managed to climb an isolated knob.  In the 180 degree view in front of me the Hamersley Range continued to rise.  There were a series of intriguing rock overhangs in the cliffs right below me.  I immediately thought: Aboriginal sites?  To the right (west), Range Gorge cut into the cliffs, its incision making a broad alluvium- and gum tree-filled valley.  It was a big drainage.  I wanted to walk up it and see what was there.  Maybe very long day hike In the future?  The Fortescue River plain filled the scene behind me.  Broad, flat, and mostly burned off from my vantage.  The Chichester Ranges were barely visible on the horizon.  I loved this view. 

Louis had not found the layer.  We worked it over together.  It wasn’t there, or was hiding really well.  Actually, there were a number of thick landside beds in the dolomite, which is unusual.  Their presence meant that the Paraburdoo Layer had to be deeper underground.  I hope we can find it in the core when we get back to Perth.

Our work done, I suggested a walk to look at the overhangs I’d seen.  We scrambled up the burned over drainage.  There was still plenty of loose rock.  The overhangs were all at the top of steep talus piles.  They turned out to be kangaroo hostels, based on the tracks and droppings covering the area.  If the Aboriginals used these sites, they did not leave any evidence. 

Time to explore was good.  This is one beneficial aspect of this research project.  The rock unit we are looking for is so specific that I can definitely say we’ve looked hard for it, time to cease.  Projects covering a broader areas require more self-control.  It’s thus a luxury to have energy and time for a post-work stroll in the bush.

7/8: A cloudy morning, especially in the west.  That was our direction of travel.  I thought, a good day for driving; my plan was to commute to the west edge of the Hamersley Basin, where there was a potential Paraburdoo Layer exposure.  Escaping from Range Gorge, I pointed the truck west on the Wittenoom-Pannawonica road.  Time to sit and drive, racing over the Fortescue River floodplain at maximum safe speed.  A landscape covered with mulga and gum trees; frequent cattle sightings too.  We passed the Mt. Florance Station turnoff.  Coolawanyah Station was next.  Coolawanyah had done a particularly nice job marking their turnoff, using a pair of nicely painted tractor tyres. 

A pause at the Rio Tinto railway to watch an ore train roll by, headed north.  A bit more than a kilometer long.  I lost count of the number of ore cars.  All that rock, going to China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.  I wonder how many of my home appliances are made with Pilbara iron ore? 

The sky was darker.  I could see rain bands in the west.  Oh crap.  Nothing to do but drive onwards.  A light sprinkle began at lunch time.  Good, the Patrol windshield wipers were in decent shape.  The rain got heavier.  I was relieved we were on a main track.  It was unsealed, but the surface was well-compacted so it wasn’t immediately going to turn into a sea of red mud. 

I had to put the wipers on high and slow down.  Water began to puddle on the road.  About forty kilometers from Pannawonica, the sky lightened.  The rain stopped.  The wet track was doing just fine.  I slowed for the numerous muddy patches.  Splash!  Oops, that big puddle was more of a pool.  The white Patrol was now largely red, up to about mid-window height.  No worries, we did not loose traction.

Stopping in Pannawonica seemed like a good idea.  I wanted a tarp for weather security.  Panna is another mining town.  It was founded in the early 1960s like Tom Price and Newman.  Its independent operation was absorbed by Rio Tinto in the 1990s.  It’s a small place.  Luckily the store had a tarp, bread, and the other few things that we needed.

OK, the clouds seemed to have dissipated, but where to go?  I saw a sign that said Bungaroo Project, pointing south down a wide track.  Hmm, Bungaroo Creek was pretty close to where I wanted to look the Paraburdoo Layer.  The track was good, built by Rio Tinto.  Definitely for exploration; roads cut off from it at intervals to drill sites.  We eventually found a old, unused side track and swagged out. 

The clouds gradually returned.  We were at a relatively low elevation at 360 meters.  It was warm and after the rain, strangely humid with a strong smell of damp rocks.  We swagged close to the Patrol, and prepared for a quick evacuation.  I fell asleep right away.

Only to wake up with rain falling on my face at 12:30 am.  Time to bolt.  We threw our stuff in the Patrol and headed back to the main road, stopping just at the berm.  Slow, somewhat anxious driving through a heavy downpour.  Parked, we sat in the truck.  The downpour stopped.  Louis bravely set up his tent.  I went to sleep again, in the driver’s seat.  No worse that economy class on a Qantas 747.

7/9: I woke up at 4 am.  The stars were out.  I spread out my swag and got a bit more rest.  Dawn and the weather looked a bit more settled.  Still partially cloudy: numerous blue patches.  The brief storms had soaked the ground to a depth of six centimeters at most.

We went in search of the old Pannawonica to Millstream road.  When I came to the Pilbara in 1985, this was the main route from Wittenoom to Panna and beyond to the coast road.  The Bungaroo Project road had bisected it somewhere.  I’d missed it the night before in haste to make a wet swag out. 

This trip has been much more about hunt and find than Australia Fourteen.  We’ve done all the easy sites.  The project has pushed into the peripheries of the Hamersley Basin: more remote, old, and less traveled tracks.  Finding the old Millstream Road is a good example.  It was on my Pilbara Tourist map (1:1000000 scale) and on my topographic map (1:100000 scale).  My GPS, which includes the topo database, showed us where we were: not on the Millstream Road.  However, this was useless.  We could tell the geographic direction to go, but which route to take to get to it?  All of the new mining tracks weren’t on any map or the GPS.  Finally, I decided, let’s just try this one: a straight track, probably a mining survey line, plowed through the bush.  It cut the Millstream Road in about 2 kilometers.  The GPS confirmed our location.  Easy continued.

I’d wanted to find the Millstream Road in order to get to the Jimmawurranda Creek area.  I’d been there in 1985 with Bruce, and subsequently for some of my Ph. D work.  It had dolomite.  Thirty kilometers of damp dirt track, and a couple road encounters (see a future post) later, wee found a good site.  It was mid-morning.  The sky was clear enough to seriously boost my morale.

This project requires optimism.  As I wrote in the introduction, the Paraburdoo Layer is at most a couple of centimeters thick: fingernail-scale.  Imagine trying to find this amidst discontinuous outcrops, talus, spinifex, faults, fold, streams, and other complexifiers and the need for hope should be clear.  One helpful bit is that the spherule layer weathers to a grey-green color, which is unlike the usual brown dolomite, black to grey to ochre to red cherts, tan shales, and green volcanic rocks.  Unless of course, any or all of the above are covered by an orange-red iron stain, whitish caliche, or purple-black desert varnish. 

Does this mean I’m an optimist?  Well, at minimum I’m persistent.  I like the feeling of success.  There is also the hope of finding something new, unusual, and exciting.  This is also a great excuse to be outdoors, in Aus, and looking at rocks.

We went south of the road.  Lots of dolomite exposures, along with abundant folds and faults.  Déjà vu for the Weeli Wolli sections.  However, just like that site, my observations began to crystallize quickly into stratigraphic patterns.  Ok, these two black chert/golden carbonate sequences are here, above the think dolomite beds…  Intensely creative and useful as long as I wrote it down. 

Lunch and time to work to the north.  It seemed a good idea to pick a campsite first.  The bush was thick and unburned throughout the area.  I think it always has been.  This meant that best bet for swag out was a stream drainage.  Drainages always have plenty of wood stacked up from past floods, a reasonable sky view for star patrol, and the stream sediments are often softer than typical Pilbara soils.  So how do you find a good place to swag out in a stream?  Bruce and I evolved the following technique in the late 1980s:

1)      Aim the truck along a fairly wide drainage: one that’s pretty open, where there’s potential to get far of the road.

2)      If tyre tracks exist, follow them.  They usually mean some one has successfully followed the drainage, and returned (hopefully).

3)      Bounce along as far as you can stand, trying to control the truck as it groans in 4WD over bars of sand, gravel and small boulders.

4)      Back up frequently to avoid drop offs that would bog the truck.

5)      Get tired.

6)      See the right place to stop: room for swags, a fire pit, a kitchen, and the truck.

7)      Park, fall out of the truck and recover.

Louis and I did this.  He’s initiated now. 

The rocks to the north called.  We walked several kilometers and looked at a dozen outcrops.  The rocks showed the same sequence as south of the road.  Interesting but disappointing; we were not getting any deeper in the stratigraphic section, meaning that the Paraburdoo Layer was buried.  Just like Range Gorge

.

7/10: I’d driven at least 760 kilometers since July 4^th, mostly on unsealed roads.  A good night’s sleep in the Jimmawurranda Creek drainage had helped, but I was still tired after the rainy night.  Louis was developing a cold.  My allergies were fading but still taxing.  Another long drive was next on the agenda.  It seemed like a good time for a break.  We followed the Millstream Road to Millstream.

Millstream is a part of national park.  It’s historical; Millstream Station opened in the late 19^th century as a cattle station and sheep station.  The sheep didn’t last, at minimum because dingoes find lambs to be delectable.  The cattle station persisted into the 1980s, when the government took over the lease, i.e., no more cows.  Well, this is the colonial history of Millstream.  The station site was a in a logical site because it is where a major aquifer breaches to the Earth’s surface.  This has formed fairly permanent spring-fed pools.  Of course, the Aboriginals knew this was an important place a good 20,000 years ago.  New signs at the station indicated that Millstream has been an important gathering site for a number of different groups for at least that long. 

I was happy to be someplace that was verdant and wet.  We had enough energy for a couple of short walks among the pools.  It was quite strange to hear and see running water: well, water running on the ground, not falling from clouds.  Millstream had a real feeling of oasis.  This was most poignant at the lily pond; a pool full of flowers, seeded there by one of the station women over one hundred years ago.  I’ve never seen wild water lilies before. 

Most of the large Millstream pools follow old channels of the Fortescue River, creating long curved water bodies.  A swim in one of these was indicated as a pre-lunch activity.  I jumped in, and happily floated in the cloud of dust, sweat, and grime dissolved from my skin as I paddled about. 

Back to work.  More dolomite called to the south, along the Hamersley Front.  Back to hunt and find.  Ok, Millstream was on the maps, so we knew where we were starting from.  How about this track?  Damn, a “Pastoral Lease – No Passage” sign, hand lettered in green paint on a sheet of corrugated iron.  It didn’t say which station this was: no one to call about access.  OK, let’s go seventeen kilometers and try this one.  A locked gate, another hand lettered sign.  This trend continued monotonically.  I was annoyed and somewhat frustrated; the day was passing, it was time to find a swag out spot. 

The road intersected the Pilbara Iron railway line (Karratha-Tom Price-Paraburdoo).  I’d gotten an access permit, so we headed south along the tracks.  More locked gates.  Finally, the power line road, following the same trend as the railway, but here cutting across the bush – pretty close to a dolomite exposure.  We took it.  We swagged out close to the Front, in hopeful site a good outcrop for the next morning’s work.

Magnetic Termite Mounds?

A typical Pilbara termite mound

Termite mounds are ubiquitous in arid Australia.  I’ve looked at them with variations of awe and boredom for twenty five years – mostly from trucks.  For some reason, they are not very abundant in the areas I’ve studied the geology.  So most of my observations below are passing, literally.  Termite mounds aren’t anthills; I’ve seen one over four meters – seventeen feet - high and with a volume of at least three couple cubic meters.  They’re commonly at least a meter high.  Whatever the size, mounds are truly edifices.  They have vaguely columnar shapes with rounded tops, and rise abruptly from the surrounding landscape, whether it’s a grassy plain or a rocky slope.  They seem anomalous and clearly organic.  Texturally, the surfaces of the mounds are composed of several thousand oval blobs the size of a finger accreted together to form a single mass.  Imagine making a sculpture out of toothpaste squeezed from tubes, and you’ll get the idea.  Internally, they are a honeycomb of passageways, based on the abandoned and decayed mounds I’ve come across. 

Close up of a Pilbara termite mound

Termite mounds seem to vary geographically in two ways: color and shape.  Color certainly reflects the underlying soil.  In the Pilbara they’re most frequently deep red-brown.  In the Red Centre, they are a lighter orange-red.  In the East Kimberley and NT, they are tan to brown.  Mounds seem to be biggest in the NT and smallest in the Red Centre.  In terms of shape, Pilbara mounds are massive, and often seem to have a point on top.  Red Centre mounds are more truly columnar in shape.  NT mounds are particularly elaborate; many feature multiple columns amalgamated into a single mass.  I wonder if this more complex structure reflects erosion caused by higher annual rainfall.

I should also say that in all three areas, termite mounds are either loners or joiners.  The joiners occur in fields of up to several dozen mounds, each a unique shape and size.  I plead etymological ignorance: I don’t know how connected they are underground, nor how mounds propagate within a field.  On the other hand, in the Pilbara at least, the really big mounds are isolated.  It’s possible that these variations reflect different termite species.

Pilbara - a field of termite mounds

So what about the so called Magnetic Termite Mounds?  When I read that these things existed in Litchfield National Park in the NT, I filed them away as something to go see if time allowed.  The MTMs, as I’ll call them, sounded like a variation on my categories of termite moundness.  I figured that the termites either incorporated magnetic minerals into their mounds, or that they were magnetically oriented in some way.  Intriguing, but seeing them was a back burner plan: termite mounds are interesting, but hey, they are not rocks.  Time allowed, so as I wrote in an earlier post, Paul and I headed to Litchfield in hope of a final night outdoors in the NT.  We were thwarted by the heat and crowds, but not before seeing the MTMs.

The access road into Litchfield wound through outcrops of red sandstone and conglomerate.  Our progress was slowed by any number of slug-like vehicles; cars towing trailers, locals in old cars, and distracted tourists.  I passed them when I could.  Eventually the MTM pullout appeared.  It was large and full of vehicles.  There is not much else to do on the way into Litchfield except this stop, other than sweat and pass slow vehicles.  Or maybe drive one. 

We got out and geared up.  A short stroll along a boardwalk ended at the edge a flood plain.  The large, crescent-shaped area looked like it got pretty damp in the Wet.  It was full of termite mounds.  I was dumbfounded.  They had huge sheet-like shapes, like giant cooling fins.  I had brought my GPS unit along to see about the magnetic business.  Using its compass app, it was soon clear that the MTMs weren’t oriented with any relation to the Earth’s magnetic field.  This had been my assumption.  Instead, they formed a long arc that followed the broad curve of the stream drainage where they occurred.  What to make of this? 

I thought the MTMs were brilliant.  What whimsical shapes to see, what a mystery on a hot winter day.  As with much of my experience in the NT, they challenged my mental model of termite mound-ness.  They were worth the drive to Litchfield. 

MTMs?

More MTMs, note "normal" termite mound in rear.

The park signage offered an explanation for the MTMs.  Their environment is unusual; most mounds form in dry settings, while the MTMs have been built in a stream channel.  There was direct evidence of this at the MTM site.  A “normal” termite sat just off the stream drainage.  Anyway, the wet setting means that when it gets hot, the termites can’t go underground, as they apparently do in normal environments.  To avoid sauna like conditions the MTMers built these giant platy mounds, which have more surface area and thus stay cooler.  This seems plausible to me; if not it’s a good hypothesis.

One final comment: termite mounds of any shape and origin are hard.  I kicked one, and my foot hurt for several days afterward.  I doubt I could knock one over with a truck.

Bonus Time in the East Kimberley

6/27: We had originally planned four nights in the Bungle Bungle. However, after three full days, it was clear we had visited all the parts of the park that were accessible. Did I write earlier that it was hot? Several other visitors we had chatted up had recommended spending time Keep River National Park, which is just to the east of Kununurra, across the state border in the Northern Territory. It was an easy consensus to head there after our helicopter flight.

First the drive west to Rt. 95. The dirt track seemed slower during the day, but maybe this was more leisure time to observe the geology (abundant folds and faults; much contorted sedimentary and crystalline rock) and flora. Then the run north, diesel and diet Coke in Kununurra, and onto Keep River.

I’d never heard of Keep River before. My planning obsession had focused further west in the Kimberley, and east in the Kakadu. The park was thus a lovely surprise. The usual dirt track, along a flood plain covered by tall bunch grasses with a sprinkling of acacias and boabs - led to a half full campground. After a siesta to outlast the afternoon heat, we wandered out along a track following the lower Keep River.

It was still quite hot. The track meandered through what my mind was coming to categorize as a typical coastal Kimberley landscape. Quite dry in the wet, but a variety of acacias and other gums, a wide spectrum of trees I don’t know, some boabs, and a grassy ground cover. The latter thankfully did not include spinifex; plenty of time to have the repeated joys of that in the Pilbara next month. Another new and common plant was a sort of palm with razor-sharp leaves; it caught my eye because the individual palm fronds grew individually from the trunk, forming a spiral pattern - a picture above.

This was also clearly a fire landscape. At least half of the area we walked through had been burnt in the past year. Black ash covered the ground, punctuated by new grass tufts. The trunks of the larger plants; trees and the brutal palm –were blackened. The trail disturbed this ground cover; underneath the thin layer of ash and debris was lots of white quartz sand. This was clearly a floodplain. Being here in the Wet might be easier in a boat.

The trail we were following was in fact terminated by flood damage. It ended at a rock shelter. A variety of Aboriginal pictographs decorated the smooth rock faces. Emu, kangaroo, and some cryptic humanoid figures. The interpretive sign said that some of the Keep River sites have been occupied over 20,000 years. This was quite believable. Compared to the Pilbara or the Red Centre, this was an area of abundance; lots of fish, plants, and other stuff to eat. I could imagine an evening of relative repletion say 5,000 BCE; there might then be time and energy to make a painting or two.

The landscape would also be inspiring. Before reaching the rock shelter, the trail wound along the base of a rocky ridge; more sandstone and conglomerate, very similar to the Bungle Bungle. Here though the rock was less banded, and more deeply weathered and faulted. Still very pretty in the late afternoon light. I bet there were wallabies to hunt up there too.

A good end to time in the Kimberley.

The First Place: Purnululu Part 1

6/24: Woke up feeling strangely normal in Kununurra. Maybe it was my meal of barramundi the previous night, plus just enough travel to be on some semblance of a normal sleep cycle. A wait at the airport produced our 4WD: a Mitsubishi Pajero. Downtown Kununurra provided food, ice, drinks, and other random supplies, and we were off south on Rt. 95 towards Purnululu National Park.

This is the first time I’ve driven a Pajero. It’s not a field vehicle like the Land Cruisers that I idolize, but a good, practical SUV with a big diesel, a gear ratio decent for highway and unsealed roads, and carpet. Not sure about the carpet, but we’re making do: glad I don’t have to clean it.

As I wrote earlier, Purnululu is the official name for the Bungle Bungle Range, or the Bungle Bungle. This is broad plateau of Paleozoic sandstone, shaped like a very fat “U”. It’s a national park, and a World Heritage site, for its remarkable erosional patterns. More on that later. No one seems to know where the name “Bungle Bungle” came from. There are several competing whimsical hypotheses, involving ranchers, aboriginals, and a variety of miscommunications. None of them are that compelling. I just like being someplace called the Bungle Bungle.
My guidebook stated a five hour drive from Kununurra: east on Rt. 1, the Victoria Highway, and south on Rt 95. The Pajero seemed happy, stable and safe at 120 kph. I enjoyed this initial run through new territory. The landscape of the East Kimberley seemed is a series of fault controlled linear hills and mountains, separated by valleys of various widths and lengths. A lot of the bedrock looked like highly deformed sediments, with occasional interruptions of granite or other crystalline rock. This terrain was covered by a variety of bush grasses, sprinkled with low density of somewhat familiar acacias and other trees that I don’t know. A startling addition to this biota were frequent boab trees. These are the same as the baobabs of Africa; my plant books states that the first boabs arrived from shipwrecks on the Kimberley coast. Boabs have fat grey elephantine trunks, all out of proportion to “normal trees”. This barrel is topped by an often symmetrical fan of branches. Some of the boabs we passed were leafy, some just bare branches, while a few had what looked like fruit. I haven’t a clue what this variety was about. The boabs made me smile; they were a sure sign of being in a new place.

As we drove along, I kept thinking, something looks different here. After enough gazing, I think this is due to the absence of bush-sized plants. A wide variety of bushes are a part of my Australian desert biota model from my time in the Pilbara and the Red Centre. Here, it’s the trees and grasses. This gives the landscape a park-like feel, especially in areas of recent burn.

After 245 kilometers, we reached the eastward turn-off to the Bungle Bungles. Bitumen ended; the washboard dirt road began. This fifty-three kilometers was supposed to take us two hours. It was 3:45 pm; ninety minutes to sunset. The track wound across hills and through many watercourses. The Pajero was no longer white. I drove rapidly well within safe limits; I was glad the sunset was behind us. We reached the park visitor center in eighty five minutes. It was closed. We went to the nearest campground, and groped around in the dark for enough space to camp. I was asleep by 8:15.

6/25: I was awake before dawn, at 5 am. The Bungle Bungle is at about 17oS; definitely subtropical. In spite of this, I’d read that since it was winter, it should be cold a night. I guess cold is a relative thing; according to the Pajero’s digital thermometer, the low was 15oC – around 60oF. No worries, I was happy to be up before the sun wearing only shorts and a shirt. I wandered away from camp, eventually climbing a nearby limestone ridge: smeared and discontinuous beds; clearly a fault zone. The Bungle Bungle massif was beginning to glow red in the morning light. On this, its west side, the Range is a steep north-south trending cliff, pierced by a number of narrow gorges or chasms, as they call them up here. I stood and watched this brighten in the increasing light. The Bungle Bungles is largely flat-laying sedimentary rocks; the coarsest scale of this bedding gave the range a striped appearance. I knew we’d be heading there to hike soon.

I wandered back to the campground. It’s appeal was limited to being the only legal place to stay on the west side of the park. Other than that, it was dusty and crowded with 4WDs and campers. A little too promiscuous, not the kind of camping that Paul and I prefer. As I walked back into camp, Paul stuck his head out of this tent, and shared his first brainwave of the day – let’s get out of here and eat breakfast at the trailhead. We were on the road by 6:15.

Fourteen kilometers of dirt road was followed by a quiet breakfast at Mini Palm Gorge and a pair of hikes: Mini Palm Gorge and Echidna Chasm. These walks, maybe a total of eight kilometers, wandered into a couple of the narrow canyons that knife into the west side of the range. These chasms follow major structural joints – vertical planes of weakness – in the bedrock.

As we headed out on the first hike, I felt strangely disoriented; how did I suddenly come to be walking along this hot sandy track in Western Australia? It was a particularly fast evolution this time; maybe being tired in advance contributed to this.

Well, I was here, healthy and awake, so I walked to see what the Bungle Bungle was really like. The hike into Mini Palm Gorge gently ascended into a blind canyon full of Livionsia palm trees; a species endemic to this area. It wasn’t clear which palms were dwarfs; there was enough evidence of flash floods that I wondered if the smaller ones weren’t just younger. Although it was 8 am, it was already hot and I was sweating. We turned a corner into the gorge per se; deep shadows and a breeze greeted us. The hike immediately seemed more tolerable. The trail climbed over and under large boulders of conglomerate, eventually ending above a grove of the maybe mini palms, in a blind canyon. It was totally quiet, except for the sound of birds and my heartbeat. The vertical walls of the gorge glowed red a the top. I thought, this is a good start.

Echidna Chasm proved this to be the case. This canyon, while an easy walk, pinched down until it was little more than hip wide, albeit 600 feet high. We passed under several large chockstones; boulders that had been trapped in their fall by the narrowing chasm. I hoped they were stable, at least for the rest of our hike. Like Mini Palm, the trail ended in a blind canyon; in this case defined by a waterfall chute fifty feet above the trail’s end. This would not be a good place to be in the wet. The chasm widened out a bit here, and many of our fellow hikers gathered here for a rest in the relatively cool shade. Most of the people were encountered were pensioners who were exploring the remoter parts of AustraliaThey were inevitably fun to talk to; for some reason most of them thought we were Canadian. . However, I was particularly struck by one family on holiday from Perth. They had three young boys, under ten at the oldest. Not only had they got them this far and up Echidna Chasm, but the eldest son was clearly mentally challenged. The father carried him the whole way, while patiently answering the middle son’s questions about spiders.

A quick stroll down the trail, and time for lunch. Geez, it was hotter. Riding in the truck with the AC on full seemed a good idea, so we went to the visitors centre for, in order: cold drinks, an excellent guide to Bungle Bungle geology, and reservations for a helicopter ride on Sunday. After sunset (talking to more pensioners, seeing the family again) it was time for dinner and sleep.

Aus 15: The New Places

My last entry talked about the work of Australia Fifteen: the part that the grant covers. What about the fun? On Fifteen, a week of new places exploration happens first. I’m being joined for this leg by my frequent travel buddy Paul. He’s in the throes of getting a job in Perth (if I weren’t happy for him, strangulation would be in order). Last summer’s pleasure excursion, with both Paul and Louis, was in the central deserts of Australia: Uluru, Kata Tjuta, Kings Canyon, and Alice Springs. This year, we’ll be further north, in the subtropics. After a lot of investigation, we’ve settled on a bipartite itinerary: splitting our time between the Kimberley Region of Western Australia and Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. My initial urge was to just visit the Kimberley. Lots of desert and rocks – my kind of place. Then I realized that more than half of our waking time would be driving in order to glimpse the area’s highlights. This is normal in Outback Australia, but since this year’s field season will have a lot of driving, we’ve decided to focus on one spot: the Bungle Bungles Range, more recently named Purnululu National Park. The Bungle Bungles are my desert fix. It is one of those places that is strikingly and uniquely scenic, hard to get to, and largely unheard of outside of Australia. A rough analogy would be Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in the US. I’ve wanted to go there since first hearing its name in 1985. It features lots of exposed sedimentary rock, which has weathered into a variety of gorges and “beehive” structures. It just looks like a fun place to hike, poke around, and photography.

Getting the Bungle Bungles will be the usual multi-tube adventure. After flying from San Francisco to Sydney, we take a domestic jet to Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory. After a couple hours to feel jet lag, we fly on a puddle jumper to Kununurra, in the East Kimberley. With a night of recovery, we rent a 4WD vehicle and make the five hour drive to the Bungle Bungles, and start camping.

Eventually we’ll fly back to Darwin, rent another vehicle, and head east to Kakadu National Park. Kakadu was Paul’s idea. It’s not arid, so it was off my radar screens. Like the Bungle Bungles, Kakadu is another gem largely unknown outside of Aus. It’s a huge expanse combining river plains that drain north to the Gulf of Carpentaria (lots of birds and crocodiles) and a southern sandstone escarpment that’s cut into dramatic canyons. It looks beautiful and lush – even in the dry season, when we’ll be there. In addition to these natural charms, Kakadu has been home to Aboriginal groups for at least 40,000 years. The park has several significant rock art sites. These are stylistically more elaborate and complex than the petroglyphs I’ve see in WA and the NT. As I wrote last summer, I’ve gradually become more attuned to Aboriginal Australia; the art, the places, and the people. Kakadu is an opportunity to further this osmotic process. When I read the park literature, I sense that visiting Kakadu is not going to a park; it’s visiting part of cultural homeland. The Aboriginal culture persistent has persisted enough that I sense it through the overprint of colonization. Or so it feels from pictures and words. We will see what ground truth is like.

Australia Fifteen: Preamble

A year proceeds quickly. My last entry was a series of reflections on Australia Fourteen. Suddenly it’s time for my fifteenth trip to what Bill Bryson calls “A Sunburned Land”. The upcoming trip follows a similar arc to last year. First, a week of poking around in new areas, i.e., vacation. “New areas” on this trip means the Kimberley Region of Western Australia, particularly the Bungle Bungles, and Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. Assuming I survive crocodile assaults in the Kakadu, this holiday will be followed by a few weeks of field research in the Pilbara.

Recap and Plans

In case you did not read my blog last year, check out this entry for explanation of how I’ve come to be a recidivist geologist/visitor in Australia. The short version is that I’m currently on a grant through my work with Oberlin College to study meteorite impact deposits. These strata are really old; the four layers we’ve recognized so far accumulated on the sea floor around 2.5 billion years or go, plus or minus 70 million years. The rocks we look at have been uplifted and very well preserved; they comprise the rocks of the Hamersley Basin. They outcrop in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia: the Outback with lots of iron mines. We’ve done a lot of work demonstrating that these layers formed after very large extraterrestrial impacts, and sorting out their environmental effects – massive tsunami and underwater landslides. On a personal level, in the twenty-five years I’ve been going down under, I’ve become extremely fond of the continent and its rocks, plants, animals and people. I always look forward to return and further exploration. I also relish the time away from the normal for reflection and restoration.

Australia Fifteen has two major scientific goals. The first is to finish up the main work of the grant project, which is to make detailed lateral measurements of the best exposed and preserved impact layer in the Hamersley Basin: the Bee Gorge Spherule Layer. I have a couple final sites to visit, including the mine property we were thwarted from reaching last year. We call the impact layers “spherule layers” because their most distinctive component is lots and lots of BB-sized spherical particles. These spherules formed from the cloud of vaporized rock blown out of the impact crater. They subsequently settled to the surface, forming a fairly unique sedimentary layer.

The second goal is more exploratory. The 2009 field season ended dramatically with discovery of a new Hamersley Basin spherule layer. We named this the Paraburdoo Spherule Layer, which I’ll call the PSL to save you all from trying to pronounce Par-a-bur-doo in your heads. By the way, Paraburdoo is one of the local mining towns, and its name comes from a presumably local Aboriginal dialect; “paraburdoo” means “meat feathers”. I can only hope this refers to emus or bustards, and not corellas or galahs, the local, nasty cockatoos. I’d describe them as gaudy crows, but that would be insulting crows. As I wrote last year, I literally stumbled upon the PSL, a 2 centimeter thick layer of impact debris, at my personal nadir point for Australia Fourteen. I was tired, cranky, sore and possibly flatulent (Louis – my field assistant - had cooked the night before). I climbed a rubbly hill, looked down, and there was the PSL.

This was particularly exciting because it was new. It’s the fourth spherule layer we’ve found in the Hamersley Basin. Based on looking at similar rocks in South Africa, I knew very roughly where it should be in the Hamersley rock sequence, but it was dead awesome to find it. However, since the PSL revealed itself almost at the end of last year’s field season, it remains a single point on a map. This is very unsatisfactory; we have no sense of the PSL’s distribution, or how its internal characteristics change from place to place. So I have put together a list of about a dozen exploratory sites that might have PSL outcrops. This will mean driving to the far reaches of the Hamersley Basin; seeing new areas and places I have not been for upwards of seventeen years. I expect this to be frustrating; the PSL interval is generally poorly exposed, the layer is damn thin, and it outcrops amidst nasty rubbly limestone. As some compensation for this, we’ll also spend a couple of days looking at drill core that might contain the PSL in the Geological Survey of Western Australia Core Library in Perth. Looking a core has its own challenges; rocks can look completely different when they are extracted from the ground than they do “normally” in a weathered outcrop.

Louis will again be my assistant and companion on this part of the journey. He’s an Oberlin student, a double major in geology and jazz trumpet. His help was outstanding last year. Not only is he bright and observant, but he can cook and put up with how inner-directed I get in the field. He’s one of the best student assistants we’ve had. I’m looking forward to more time with him. He’s going walkabout prior to meeting me in Perth, spending a couple weeks in New Zealand. I’m trusting that he’ll appear in Perth on the right day.

Field Food Failure

Field work can create many kinds of failure. Most crucial to the research, in the case of my work on spherule layers, has been an inability to find outcrops of the target strata. This is usually a matter of poor exposure. It’s hard to find a thin layer of tiny round particles in a rubbly hillside, especially when one is not sure where it’s supposed to be. There are sometimes other extenuating circumstances, such as the troop of angry baboons I encountered once in South Africa, but these are rarer. My personal research shortcoming is failing to take copious notes or photographs. It all seems so obvious when I’m looking at the rocks.

Other field failures are the common malfunctions of travel: missed connections, lost luggage, or faulty reservations. I’d add three Outback Australia-specific hazards to this list. First, flat tyres. Our trucks have had a range of brand new to badly worn tyres, sometimes both on the same vehicle. Regardless of condition, I have gotten two or three flats on every trip. This is mostly inconvenient; we always carry two spares, and tyre repair is easy at the mining towns. Crawling under a 1.5 ton vehicle on a dusty road to place a tiny jack on the axle is a bit dicey. This is what field assistants are for. Second, getting stuck. I’ve only gotten the truck bogged – in mud – once. That was enough. Escape was a 40 hour project. Finally, road kill. Kangaroos often graze by road verges at dawn and dusk. When they are startled by the truck there’s an even chance they’ll jump in front of the vehicle rather than into the bush. Our expeditions have hit an average of one animal per trip. It’s hard to avoid an animal leaping in front of your truck when it’s going 80 kph. I’m glad that cattle, the other main road kill opportunity, tend to graze during the day. It’s easy to slow down when approaching them.

While I know this inventory of recurrent failures very well, Australia Fourteen served up my first food failure. When Bruce and I first worked together in 1982, he quickly discovered that I liked to cook. This was good: he can’t. I’ve been in charge of the kitchen on every subsequent research trip. This has suited us both very well. Bruce likes my meals, and I enjoy both the cooking as well as control over this domestic part of field work.

On Australia One, I developed a series of field recipes, which I’ve refined over subsequent years. Chernobyl Potatoes is one of these. Another is pan-baked, baking soda-raised bread. I’ve always tried to include a meal or two that features cornbread, dessert bread, or a savory wheat bread.

Louis and I purchased a set of pots in Perth. This has been protocol for many field seasons; to buy cheap, basic equipment which we can use and wear out, to be abandoned in the appropriate refuse or recycling bin at the trip’s end. The set we found was thin metal, but seemed sufficient for two weeks. The non-stick coating on the frying pan was a plus.

I bought staples for bread in Newman. Eventually, a night occurred when I was cooking, and had enough time to make a batter – cornbread this time. To compensate for the hot gas flame, I have always added extra oil to the mix. I heated the pan, and made a small test cake. It stuck a little bit, but came out satisfactorily. I put more butter in the pan, and poured in enough batter to form a layer about half an inch thick throughout the pan: standard procedure. I watched the cooking mass closely. I knew from previous dinners that I needed to constantly move the pan over the flame so that the bread cooked evenly and did not burn. Presently the bread seemed ready to flip. It held together at the edges, and tested to be cooked three-quarters through. I pried up one edge using a knife, and slid my spatula under the bread. It stopped. Crap. In spite of all the oil and butter, it was burned firmly onto the pan. I pried it loose. It broke into many pieces, and was burning rather than cooking. The damn frying pan was just too thin.

I tossed this first failure away. I modified the batter, making it drier. The same thing happened; a burned crust, a raw interior. I got increasingly annoyed. Eventually, it was clear that my efforts were futile. I gave up and made rice. I burned the partially cooked bread in the camp fire, and we disposed of the rest the next day in a rubbish bin. I’ve made dinners in the past that were a bit too spicy, but never have I had to abandon a meal plan. I should have bought a better frying pan.

The frying pan became increasingly difficult to use. Vigorous cleaning progressively removed the non-stick coating. Our meals became slightly greasier to compensate. I became annoyed at the pan for being so useless and at myself for buying such a cheap piece of equipment.

I decided to achieve retribution at our final swag out. After the final field dinner, I took the frying pan away from camp, and tried to crush it with large rocks, dropped from chest height. This was unsatisfying; the rocks were too small, and the ground was soft and absorbed too much of the impact. So I got my rock hammer and punched the pan full of holes. I felt much better.

We recycled the cook set in Newman.

Reflections III: Seeing with the Natives

The picture: Petroglyphs at N'Ghala Gorge. See previous post for more info.


A fresh and unexpected result of Australia Fourteen is my greater sense of Aboriginal culture. I’ve of course been aware of Aboriginals and their history since my first visit in 1985. I even went to a show of Aboriginal art at the state gallery that year. On previous trips I made little effort to explore or learn about Aboriginal culture. I kept looking at art, which resonated in some inchoate way, but I did not reflect on it deeply. I didn’t interact with many Aboriginals. This is a mixture of where I spent most of my time: in remote areas looking at rocks, and my innate natural reticence.

Nonetheless, preFourteen I’d built an impression of Aboriginals, their culture, and their experience. Three strong memories epitomize this. First, in 1987 I went to the Fremantle Markets, probably to buy cheap produce for the field season. There was an Aboriginal sitting at the entrance playing a didgeridoo. He was busking rather successfully. I stopped and watched. At some point we made eye contact. From the glimmer in his eyes, I intuited that I was seeing another human whose life experience and world view were radically unlike than mine. It was a feeling of utter dissimilarity. This profound difference was far greater than I’d ever felt in other places: Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Costa Rica. The moment was disturbing. It challenged my comprehension of the breadth of humanness.

This experience fit into my evolving appreciation of the Australian land. The outback feels quite different from anywhere else I’ve been. The great age of the deeply weathered red rocks, the acacias of all sizes, the hopping animals, and the frequently harsh conditions create a unique environment. It’s matchlessly beautiful. This man was from a different and separate landscape, which had influenced his distinctive and rich culture. This is what showed in his eyes. I’ve sensed a similar heritage and power of place in the Aboriginal paintings and artwork.

My second experience is uglier. I was visiting friends in Karratha in 1990. At some point we drove through the old town of Roebourne on the Pilbara coast. Roebourne had a wide, arched main street, probably for drainage during cyclones. I though, geez, this town is filthy: the main street gutters seemed to be full of trash. As we got closer, I saw that some of this apparent debris was moving. It was literally piles of drunk and sleeping Aboriginals. This reminded me of seeing inebriated Native Americans in Arizona. Yet there was a sense of conformation here that was different. If I’m right that these were Aboriginals recovering after a drunk, it was like their bodies melded with the ground. They seemed to belong, to fit into the landscape; not or accidentally fallen down. My emotional memory of this scene is this sense of belonging. As with the busker, I felt that these people were of this land in a way that was across a very wide gap from me.

Finally, Newman 2003. In the early 21st century, Aboriginal settlements were established near most of the Pilbara mining towns. I don’t know the politics of this. I am pretty sure that the Aboriginals were the descendants of the pre-white inhabitants of the local areas. I suspect the new settlements are part of the ongoing race reconciliation process through which Australia is going. Many of the mining areas were originally Aboriginal places, taken away by Europeans. Now they’ve been somewhat returned.

We flew into town, and set about the usual assembling of gear for the field season. I was in the town centre shopping area. Newman was originally a one company mining town. Most of the workers were white. The population was a mixture of families and single males. Being the shopping centre felt like entering an excised chunk of Australian suburb: lots of consumer goods, clean people. The new Aboriginal settlement across the highway had changed this. Clusters of Aboriginals wandered the centre. A group of men waited for the liquor store to open, chattering in the local language: rapid, guttural, clearly expressive. I called home; it was hard to hear my parents in America because of another loud Aboriginal conversation going on behind me. There was trash in the streets and on the sidewalk. This seemed to correlate with the density of Aboriginals. I watched white shoppers walk by. Their faces showed distaste, resignation, and even fear.

I was watching a cultural clash in action, certainly. It showed the reverse of what I’d seen before; the unconformation of the Aboriginals to norms of white Australia. At the time, no one seemed happy with this. To be fair, Newman was already changing; the one company town had become a base for a diversity of businesses as the iron ore business expanded. I should note to; the situation did seem more resolved this year.

I didn’t make much effort to understand or integrate these experiences or the many others that took place over the years. The events were transient. Aboriginal culture seemed so far away from my experience. It was not my primary interest about Australia. My eyes and heart were for the rocks and the land. I was content with a cryptic sense of Aboriginals and Aboriginal cultures.

Australia Fourteen was different. Tnorala, which I’ve written about, was the crux. At the crater, my sense of the land aligned with the Dreamtime origin of the place. I could finally sense a bit of what I’d seen in the busker’s eyes back in Fremantle. Uluru and Kata Tjuta had similar although less overt affects. Relaxing and feeling these places was more difficult.

As I wrote this, I realized that Aboriginal art has moved me since I first saw it. This is a gut resonance about place. I didn’t intellectually attempt to figure out the paintings and other works that I saw, but some part of me understood. During Australia Fourteen, Paul was on a quest to buy art in Alice Springs. At some point on this traverse I found a decently sized introduction to Aboriginal art. I read it in the Pilbara. It gave me a basic appreciation for the diversity and breadth of Aboriginal culture and modern art. I don’t pretend to get Aboriginal art, but I do appreciate it more richly. It comes back to place. Fifty centuries have rooted the native culture on this continent. My fifty weeks here have given me appreciation of the land. This is where I can truly meet and understand the people of the place.

Reflections II: Wetness

The pictures are: 1) Fortescue Pool, Karijini NP, 2) Splash Pool, Karijini NP, and 3) Weeli Wolli Creek


This field season had the most water in it of any I can remember. Before the trip, I think I told Louis that surface water would be rare. During Australia Fourteen, we saw a stream or a pool every day, in both the Red Centre and the Pilbara. Two days of rain in the latter is unprecedented. Perhaps it was predictable. The Pilbara does have a few more millimeters of rainfall in June than it does in July or August, when I’ve usually worked there. In any event, the centimeters of rain we experienced made for drama, ranging from our epic Bee Gorge-Tom Price dirt road commute to finding the missing layer just as rain began. The potential of crisis – becoming trapped off road by mud, for example – added to the adventure.

Water was also abundant on and in the ground. Pools and streams in Karijini were fuller and higher. Better swimming. Better light reflections off the cliffs. Groundwater made a special appearance during Fourteen. The swag out at Palm Springs was unique: an actual pool created fed by groundwater. It was lush, verdant, and unexpected. Moreover, the former presence of groundwater at the “undisclosed location” is probably what attracted Aboriginals to the area. Their time there resulted in the petroglyphs we discovered. This was also true at Uluru and at N’Dhala Gorge in the Northern Territory.

Postscript - looking over previous entries, I see I did not write about N'Dhala Gorge. This was a stop in the NT, on our last day. A recommendation by the truck rental company. N'Dhala is east of Alice along the MacDonnells. Another wet gorge: rock holes close to year long. It's known for petroglyphs. Like many such sites in the NT, it remains active and sacred in Aboriginal culture.

My impressions. An hour plus east of Alice, a nice bit of 4WD at the end. Much to explore, little time. Good track, petroglyphs hard to find for a couple reasons. First, I think many are still in use as it were. Second, I was tired. Third, high fly density. Not epic levels, but enough that I kept inhaling them. Distracting. What was interesting with respect to the subject of this post was an observation of Paul's, and maybe the signage. The visible petroglyphs were concentrated on the flat rock surfaces around the waterholes. It was easy to imagine Aboriginals having the time and energy, via abundant water and probably food (via water), to create carvings in N'Dhala. More likely than a random rock among the dunes. Another bit of information about place.