Epic Encounter
It is hoped that Baz Luhrmann's latest blockbuster, Australia, set mainly in the Top End, will help draw international travellers to the area. So what will New Yorker SHANE MITCHELL make of a visit to this most remote of destinations?
Even the crows sound different out here. Sitting in front of the Warmun Roadhouse in Warmun, Western Australia, I note how their strangled clacking has a higher timbre and a more staccato rhythm than that of their cousins back in my hemisphere.
The stretch of northern Australia known as the Top End covers more than 400,000 square kilometres. It encompasses some of the world's least populated but most climatically diverse regions – saltwater estuaries, arid savannahs, hidden thermal springs and im-passable peaks. Film director Baz Luhrmann, who was raised in rural NSW, spent more than a month in the Top End shooting Australia, an epic set in and around wartime Darwin (see box page 118) and on the cattle ranches of the outback, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kid-man. Luhrmann used the landscape to reveal an Australia most people have never seen. "This is an untouched frontier with a rare abundance of nothingness," Luhrmann says. "You have your Wild West. We have the Wild North."
Luhrmann chose to rough it on the range during film-ing. "I decided that instead of travelling to the location and back every day, why don't I just camp there?" he says. "I didn't leave for the whole five weeks. This is what I had come looking for, to be forced by the power and scale of the landscape to be still, to be in the moment. There was a unique magic in this place on the edge of the world."
The crows eventually settle as dusk fades. I finish a cup of bitter black tea and watch the people hovering by the road-house's petrol pumps: blonde German girls in a battered Wicked rental camper, two Aboriginal drovers in Akubra hats, truckies clutching hyper-caffeinated soft drinks. This road-house, like many of its kind along the Top End's barren highways, is a gathering point where travellers can stop for souvenir stubby holders, basic bed-and-shower facili-ties, and carb-heavy fried dinners. I'm waiting for Nora Saliba, the Sydney casting director who managed the 50 or so indigenous extras on Luhrmann's film and who continues to be welcomed into their communi-ties, where some of the world's most ancient narrative tradi-tions still flourish. Aboriginal mythology has been sustained by an unbroken line of storytellers, generation after genera-tion, since the Stone Age. Saliba has agreed to a trek around the Top End, which makes entry to this closed world possible for me.
Teeth clamped on her cigarette, Saliba pulls up in her four-wheel-drive. "Get in, Shane-o," she yells over the rum-ble of a passing road-train. Tonight we are meeting the singer and celebrated artist Peggy Patrick, an Aboriginal elder. Patrick also instructs young girls in joonba, or ceremo-nial performances. Saliba spins out of the lot and drives to a nearby cluster of concrete ranch dwellings and trailers belonging to the Gidja people, who are the East Kimberley region's traditional owners. She stops at a lot where several women are surrounded by children chasing a soccer ball. As some of the women rake a clearing under a paperbark tree, Patrick, tall and wiry with a gaunt face, asks me in pidgin English to sit next to her on the bare ground, close to a fire that's staving off mosquitoes and the evening chill.
In the Aboriginal Dreamtime origin myths, totemic an-cestors travelled the nascent landscape, scattering a trail of musical notes that are also geological markers. Trees, rocks, creeks, patches of desert, whole mountain ranges, and di-minutive dust storms are part of "songlines" that serve as both a map and a moral compass. Every creature is con-nected to a specific aspect of this sacred geography by a Dreaming story and "skin name", or bloodline. In a cul-ture that has sustained a spoken-word tradition for millen-nia, passing these tales down through the generations intact is critical.I watch as Patrick's granddaughters paint white dots around one another's eyes. Patrick's friend Phyllis Thomas keeps time with carved rhythm sticks, and the girls commence their joonba, but they step awkwardly. Patrick employs a universal form of emotional blackmail: walking away in disgust, declaring that she will quit teach-ing. "Useless, these kids." It works. Coaxing Patrick back to sing, the girls sway and step properly. Finally excused, they run off into the dark.
Then Patrick and Thomas start singing the Barramundi Dreaming. It tells the Ngarranggarni, or Dreamtime story, of an ancestor barramundi fish that swims through a nearby moun-tain range while being chased by clanswomen with woven spinifex-grass nets. Squeezing through the nets and a fissure in the rock, the fish scrapes off its sparkling scales. (The world's largest pink diamond mine is in Barramundi Gap, right up the highway from Warmun.) When the music stops, I ask how long she has been singing these same notes. "Since I was a kid," she says. At this point, it's late and the women are ready to retire. As I rise, Patrick points emphatically at me and says, "Tonight, you dream." I'm too exhausted to take her seriously as I head back to the roadhouse.
The next morning, we pick up an elder named Shirley Drill for the bumpy drive into Purnululu National Park. This UNESCO World Heri-tage site encompasses the Bungle Bungle Range, 20 million-year-old striped rock formations that resemble giant beehives. It's also the country of Drill's Dreaming story, and she can grant us permission to enter restricted Aboriginal areas. Along with two of her granddaughters, Drill climbs into Saliba's car. Phyllis Thomas and her sister Nora decide to ride along. We jolt over dry creek beds, then splash through wet ones and beyond the point where tour bus-es are allowed, we pull off the main road into a valley over-grown with eucalyptus. The older women, who've been complaining about the rough trip, settle on the porch of an abandoned house. Drill waves her work-roughened hands at the surrounding hills, saying, "My great-great-great-grandmother is bur-ied up there." She then wanders over to a ghost gum to gather bark. Saliba speaks to me quietly: "Do you see the change in them? They can be them-selves here. It's like coming home."
The children start sneezing. Drill decides there must be bees nearby, be-cause these girls belong to the Sugarbag Dreaming, which means they are hy-persensitive to the presence of wild honey. A foraging expedition begins, but since I'm allergic to bee stings, the Thomas sisters take me instead to Echidna Gorge, one of several narrow canyons that cut through the Bungle Bungle Range. As we progress deeper into a fracture between the massifs, cool air swirls along the shielding stone walls, and Phyllis points out black streaks where water gushes down-ward during the wet sea-son. In the gloom, I lean against the tower-ing, immovable rock. Sud-denly I'm spooked by striped yellow bees, which swarm around my white linen shirt. They ignore the Thomases.
Turning back, we race against the twilight, a swoop of scarlet dividing the descending indigo sky and shadowed escarpment. Phyllis Thomas reveals she is an ochre painter. Rover Thomas, Phyllis's uncle, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Aborigi-nal art, once strictly ceremonial, has skyrocketed in value during recent de-cades. These days, the finest works are abstract interpretations of Dreaming landscapes that often resemble Pointil-list satellite maps. It takes a rare talent to be able to conceptualise a perspec-tive from above without having been airborne, but these are artists attuned to their environment.
North of Warmun, in the mining town of Kununurra, Saliba and I head for the Waringarri Aborigi-nal Arts studio. "These painters are spiritually based," she explains. "They can't just paint anything. They can only tell a story related to themselves." In the studio, a white-haired woman named Mignonette Jamin is seated in front of a primed canvas. She usually interprets sites significant to her Dreaming around Majalindy Valley. Another artist, Daisy Bitting, looks solemnly at a water-dam-aged painting that needs retouching.
Beyond Kununurra lie the East Kimberley plains, fenced in by sprawl-ing cattle stations. We traverse a parched salt flat fronting the Cockburn Range, hook onto Gibb River Road, then cross a ford at the Pentecost River. A cluster of boabs and a new stone wall indicate the entrance to Home Valley Station. Held in trust for the Balanggarra and Ngarinyin peoples by the Indigenous Land Corporation, which fosters sus-tainable partnerships for native title landholders, this 250,000-hectare parcel is managed by a stockman named Nick Bradley. He grew up at Carlton Hill Station, where Luhrmann shot key lo-cation scenes for Australia. Bradley shows me around the campgrounds and livestock paddocks, discussing the station's Aboriginal education mission. "I'm not out here to play cattle king," he says. "We have a training program for the locals that gives them skills and pays them to learn on the job. Some have never had that."
Nick's brother, Richard, unexpect-edly flings open the car door and jumps into the backseat. When Richard hears I'm eager to get back on a horse, we saddle up for a ride in the scrub. A thrill-seeking jackaroo who wears custom-made riding boots, Richard can cling to a bucking horse. Since my cowboy boots keep slip-ping out of the steel stirrups and I have no desire to eat eucalyptus, I keep my mount at a safe trot. When we finally dust off the trail, I meet Nick and Richard's mother, Susan Bradley. (Luhrmann says locals call her "Queen of the Kimberley". He consulted her about outback life at Carlton Hill.) She directs a campaign to protect the isolated north-west Kimberley, a wild region lacking much modern infrastructure, from industrial development. Not only is the Top End rich in miner-als, it has untapped reserves of uranium ore and natural gas, some of them temptingly sited on Aboriginal land trusts. "This is a powerful country of great extremes," she says. "Some things should not be for sale. I have lived in the Kimberley for 40 years and hate to think my grandchildren or great-grandchildren will not be able to camp out under the stars in unpolluted river gorges."
At last, I see a willy-willy. It blows across our path on Gibb River Road when Saliba and I start the trek eastward toward Darwin. Shirley Drill, who belongs to the Willy Willy Dream-ing, ∫mentioned it during our visit days ago in Purnululu. Perhaps it's her part-ing gift. These harmless twists of wind puff up randomly; as the dust storm dances ahead of the car, I watch leaves whirl upward in a column before they drop onto the spinifex plain.
It takes a day to drive to the Mary River floodplain, three hours beyond Darwin, on the doorstep of Kakadu National Park. We gratefully unpack at Bamurru Plains, an eco-conscious bush camp that occupies a stretch of Swim Creek Station. The earth-toned lodge has a collection of modern Aboriginal art, a communal dining table, and an open bar of coveted Australian vintag-es. That night, I eat kangaroo shep-herd's pie by kerosene lamp and collapse onto a soft platform bed.
At dawn, Bamurru Plains manager John O'Shea takes me out on the river in a Tornado airboat. A former Australian army commando, he wears a .357 Magnum strapped to his belt as defence against crocodile attacks. We drift through clumps of blooming pink sacred lotus. O'Shea steers toward the opposite shoreline, and nudges the flat-bottomed boat between acacias grow-ing in a backwater clogged with algae. Our only croc sighting is a coy pair of ridged eyes.
After two thankfully uneventful nights on the Mary River, Saliba and I finally leave the Top End. By the road, halfway to Darwin, we pass a small na-ture marker. The sign depicts a frilled-neck lizard, its spiny orange ruff ex-tended in full display. A jolt of recognition leaves me unnerved. This creature inhabits savannah woodlands across northern Australia, and for Ab-origines it's a powerful totemic rain-maker, bringing both emotional storms and cleansing. I've seen this lizard only once before – after the Warmun joonba, glittering gemlike in the absolute dark-ness of a dream that Peggy Patrick pre-dicted for me. When I confess this to Saliba, she doesn't even blink. "Mate, they let you in for a second," she says. "They're in your heart, and you are in theirs."
Guide to the Top End
WHEN TO GO
During the wet season, from November to March, temperatures can reach 38 degrees. April to October is the cooler dry season.
HOW TO GET THERE
Qantas and Virgin Blue fly from all major Australian cities to Darwin. Airnorth flies from Darwin to Kununurra. Europcar (03 9330 6160; europcar.com.au) rents four-wheel-drive vehicles.
TOUR OPERATOR
Wundargoodie
Aboriginal Safaris
Rock-art tours and extended camping expeditions with Gidja guides in north Kimberley. 08 9161 1145; wundargoodie.com.au; from $500 per person per day, group discounts apply.
WHERE TO STAY
Bamurru Plains
Swim Creek Station, Northern Territory; 02 9571 6399; bamurruplains.com; from $898 per person per night, twin-share.
Bungle Bungle
Wilderness Lodge
Tent cabins, en-suite baths, and an open- air dining room. Closed during the wet season. Bellburn Creek, Purnululu National Park, Western Australia; 1800 335 003 (Australia), 03 9277 8444 (New Zealand); kimberleywilderness.com.au; from $210 per person per night, twin-share.
Home Valley Station
Gibb River Road, East Kimberley, Western Australia; 08 9161 4322; homevalley.com.au; doubles from $155.
Kimberley Grande
20 Victoria Highway, Kununurra, Western Australia; 08 9166 5600; thekimberleygrande.com.au; doubles from $220.
ART GALLERIES
Jirrawun Arts
Modern gallery representing top artists, including Peggy Patrick and Phyllis Thomas. Wedge Drive, Wyndham, Western Australia; 08 9161 1500; jirrawunarts.com
Waringarri Aboriginal Arts Studio with work by Mignonette Jamin and Daisy Bitting. 16 Speargrass Road, Kununurra, Western Australia; 08 9168 2212; waringarriarts.com.au
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