My wife, Judi , flies in to Kununurra to join me for a week’s travel to Broome. In Canberra the night before she left it was two degrees below zero. She arrives wearing polar knickers.
Other ladies arrive, too, until our party numbers 17 souls, including: two ex-magistrates; two current aldermen; a gynaecologist ; a dental nurse; a retired mining engineer; an executive information technology placement consultant ; a veterinarian nurse ; someone’s daughter and her boyfriend; a retired interior designer ; a demolition contractor ; a Canadian undertaker ; an American real estate manipulator and your finger- licking Bulldust Diarist.
This hand-picked group of retards will either do well together or re-create the wreck of the Batavia. Someone’s daughter and her boyfriend will fly out to Darwin in the morning, so attrition is striking early. Tonight the local Speedway does a good impression of a future NATO air raid on Damascus.
Petrolheads from all over the place have poured into town, exhausts rumbling, beer cans tumbling. The Speedway lights flash around the horizon and the thumps, bangs and screams of fireworks echo through the town, speaking of great destruction and bloodshed.
But we ignore all that as we are in the Coles Supermarket, provisioning for our trip to the Bungle Bungles. Those who are reading this series of travelogues may already be using the term “Bunglers” to describe me and my fellow travellers, but I assure you the Bungle Bungles is the name of a pile of rocks in the desert.
On our way to the Bungle Bungles turnoff we pass through Turkey Creek, another of the glum little refuelling outposts along the never-ending highway. You have to leave your driving licence or credit card at the cash register before they’ll switch on the fuel pumps. People have been filling up and running away without paying. Fuel in both forms is expensive: diesel is $2.00 per litre; a steak sandwich $9.50, which brings me to chicken.
What a debt we owe to the humble chicken. How many of them have died and will die to keep us sandwiched, roasted, saladed and breakfasted? Yet we make jokes about them, call them cowardly, burn, boil and roast them. If we ever need another religion based on an example of sacrifice, my vote is for the chicken. I hope a talented poet will write a “Chicken Odyssey” some day.
The prehistoric quality of the road out to the bunch of Bungles is legendary, but in fact proves to be the easy part. Once we reach Broome we plan to leave the surfaced highway and return northeast to Kununurra along the Gibb River Road, as infamous a track as ever forded the River Styx.“The life expectancy of your car (being a non-Toyota) will be about 40 minutes,” gleefully sneers one local. Another advises: “Lookin’ at that country is as exciting as watching yer verandah warp.”
Meanwhile, they’re right about the track to the Bungles. It takes 2.5 hours to travel 52km. You turn off a perfectly good sealed highway onto a dirt track which soon becomes a Big Dipper with added potholes, rocks, corrugations and multiple river crossings. To get to the National Park you must pass through private property and only a few weeks ago, before the State Government stopped him, the landowner was levying a $20 “transit fee” on every car which went through.
If you want to see what the Bungles look like, find them on the internet. I can’t describe them as well as a photo can. They’re spectacularly old; they say 300 million years, although why it isn’t a more specific 305 million or 417 million isn’t clear. They are domes of black-and-red striped rock, formed by millennia of floodwaters and before that the tides of the fabled inland sea covering Central Australia.
Look, it’s easier if you simply come over to my place and check out my photos. Why the legendary”‘slide evening” has fallen out of fashion I don’t know.
We walk for kilometres around these colourful knobs. The walks seem much longer than Chairman Mao’s. All of us now have legs more muscular than Superman’s. Time moves incredibly slowly here, and in summer the superheated air and sunlight are heavy enough to cause their own erosion. It’s mid-winter now yet the days are around 33 degrees. The rains have receded, leaving a few small pools crowded with doomed fish. The silence is deep. You feel privileged to be here.
We find a kind of weird “crop circle” in the grass which may be the landing place of an alien spacecraft. It’s dominated by the black-and-pink cliffs of the Bungles. We decide to camp on it, confident we can out-weird any alien who comes along.
We circle the wagons around a campfire and cook our modest eye fillet steaks. Wine appears from hiding places and by morning there is a large pile of empty cans and bottles. The volume of alcohol consumed each night proves just how hard and tough life is out here.
We wake to an anguished cry of “Dingoes stole my Helga’s!” Dingoes have not carried away any child or drunken compatriot but a loaf of bread is missing and bags of Muesli lie in the dirt, ripped open / disembowelled / missing / molested. The word goes out: be alert, not alarmed. The second night passes without incident (what goes on in your tent stays in your tent).
[Astute Little Darwin readers will notice that Burleigh's rendition of the swashbuckling dingo is obviously influenced by the tapes he plays in his car about scurvy seadogs roaming the bounding main. Heavy consumption of his ship's daily ration of Mad Dog Morgan's Blood could explain the incorrect spelling of muesli ]
(Burleigh, Kentucky,Dingo.)
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