Continuing the racy account of journalist Peter Blake's safari at Nourlangie, run by the Great White Hunter , Allan Stewart .
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| Peter Blake big game fishing somewhere in the Americas . |
Buffalo hunting apart, the enchantment of Nourlangie has stayed with me for life -- a serene and beautiful place of birds descending like great white flowers to decorate the flooded forest, lagoons strewn with giant lily pads, and harbouring deep dark, pools where the barramundi waited and at the camp itself, a shy invasion of wild life, wallabies, dingoes, and even buffalo drifting in from the bush at dusk, padding around the huts where, lying on your bunk you are enfolded in the vast silence of the outback night barely broken by the squeak, and rustle of tiny animals hunting and being hunted, and the soft padding of something bigger.
I must say it was a magical experience, up there with cracking a Caulfield-Melbourne Cup double for serious cash, which I do a few years later when Tobin Bronze and Red Handed salute.
Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was charged with poaching in l978 after a well covered fishing safari to the Dreaming Lagoon , then part of the Woolwonga Wildlife Sanctuary.
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| Yunupingu , safari suited PM. |
The odd charge was brought against him by Roy James Wright, of Darwin , who was serving nine months in Fannie Bay Gaol for taking fish with a gill net. Wright , described as one of the Northern Territory's most colourful fishermen, was convicted in 1974 for fishing in the same area as the PM had thrown a line.
Wright claimed he had been invited to fish by an Aboriginal born in the sanctuary. Fraser had fished the lagoon at the invitation of the Northern Land Council chairman, Galarrwuy Yunupingu.
Darwin magistrate, Tom Pauling , later the Administrator of the Northern Territory, dismissed the poaching charge.
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FISHING SNAP : Fraser with camera , next to him Press Secretary, David Barnett , and another staff member , journalist Brian Johns , formerly of the Sydney Morning Herald , later the ABC head honcho . Man with cigarette is a southern journalist and the other person a ranger . The superb ABC TV Country Road series about the National Party, by Heather Ewart , showed that Fraser still enjoyed fishing. (Safari. Nourlangie. Blake.) |
