TONIGHT WE have dinner at the Drysdale homestead. The girl tells us what’s on the menu.“Burf Boggynun and Roast Chook,” she says brightly, “and Cook has made a ‘log’ from bananas from the tree out the back mixed with almonds.” None of us has brought evening clothes and debate whether to wear our second-dirtiest or most-dirtiest clothes. Mr JW, the calmest, most polite and wisest judge of etiquette in the group.( Another small gratuity was paid to the author for this flattering testimonial). He is sometimes known as the “Ignoble Savage” and will take the lead in his filthy pink Target polo shirt.
The food and the cheerful service is very good, and the wine list features labels much better than the usual donkey’s piss you get out here. There’s no menu choice – the chicken and the Boggynun is all piled high on your plate together with potatoes, crumbed mushrooms and celery. But it’s sublime. They say Drysdale Station doesn’t make any money from cattle anymore; the tourist business keeps it in the black – so far in the black that the owners spend only three months a year here and the rest sailing the world in their yacht.
Otto, a heavily-accented European, is caretaker here during the Wet. There seems to be no flint-faced boundary riders about, no thundering stampedes, horse-breaking or big-hatted guys wearing R.M.Williams. Only Otto and the shed lady are over 24 years of age; all the rest are kids working during the tourist season.
The shed lady gruffly takes our booking for the flight: two hours for $335. Compare the time, stress, fuel, car damage and food cost of seeing the same things from ground level by car this price is a bargain. We have almost two plane loads of people. I’m pleased and delighted to be flying on Singapore Airlines until I get to the strip after dawn the following morning. It’s not Singapore Airlines, it’s Slingair Airlines, is not an Airbus 380 and has one small propeller. It’s a bit like a wheelbarrow with wings.
Johnny, the childishly young pilot/mechanic/refueller/hostess-and-tour-guide, pumps fuel into the wing tanks (just as well he’s multi-skilled, there’s no one else out here on the dirt strip). He proudly announces the plane was built by “Gippsland Aviation” near Melbourne, as if that is reassuring. He pats it as if it’s a simple but honest machine, less complicated than a lawn mower.
Our people on the earlier flight forgot/exhausted their camera batteries so I am to photograph everything that doesn’t move. Consequently Johnny gives me the co-pilot’s seat which is designed for people with half a buttock, a curved spine and no brains. The curved plexiglas windows distort the view. Johnny alarms us by pumping fuel through the motor “to cool it down”. Come again? What’s that saying about discretion and valour? Abandoning both, we taxi to one end of the camel track the pilot calls a runway and take off.
Drysdale Station covers one million acres. Apparently it supports one beast per hundred acres, but looking down on it you doubt even that. Without trying to describe the truly spectacular sights, the one thing that stands out is the number of watercourses cutting through this unforgiving country. Out here water doesn’t mean growth, or forests; it’s dry, dry, dry – yet because the soil has water in it from the recent flooding, it’ll be a great season for grazing.
We follow large rivers to the sea, and watch them change from fresh water to salt. There are gorges and spectacular waterfalls we could never have seen from the ‘roads’, even if they led there, of which there are very few. This is truly deserted country. A few attempts at settlement by conned, deluded and idealistic settlers ended in tragedy. There was a military base here in the Bonaparte Gulf to maintain the English land claim against their French rivals; all 120 people perished.
Large coastal tourist boats out of Wyndham motor up the first few kilometres of the Prince Regent River and others, especially for fishing. Johnny tells us about Ginger Meadows, a 24-year-old American model trapped by the tide on a rock ledge and who was hunted down and killed by a crocodile as she frantically swam for her boat. This tale fills our imaginations with what it would be like to be marooned down there, and what a girl named Ginger Meadows would look like...
It’s easy to see where the theory of an inland sea came from in this country’s geology, which is so clearly sedimentary. It looks and feels like the bottom of the sea, and with so much water around it’s reasonable to expect a huge body of water in the middle of the continent. I guess Lake Eyre is it. Maybe it should be re-named "Lake Disappointment."
Finally we bank over Mitchell Falls, a huge three-bowl sandstone formation with a waterfall filling each one, level by level. The view from the plane could never be matched from the ground. Below us, a helicopter loops and lands at the foot of the falls, ferrying tourists to and from the road. It seems the falls are accessible only by helicopter or by a long walk through shattered sandstone formations. What a relief we didn’t have to do it!
We fly back to Drysdale, dodging vast columns of smoke rising from burn-offs set by Aboriginal communities. Traditionally the burn-offs are designed to promote the growth of native grasses and to attract wildlife. Johnny says the communities depend on re-supply by air, so you have to question their viability. One of them is built so close to a river that it must be evacuated before the Wet each year. Not a good example of local knowledge.
Our rear-seat passengers are a couple from Melbourne. Undetected by me,they spend much of the flight hurling into airsickness bags – "souvenir bags," Johnny calls them, because you take them with you as souvenirs. Maybe riding in a plane built in Gippsland filled them with fear. A miserable way to spend two costly hours flying over some of the most extraordinary scenery they’ll ever see*
