It's hard to identify the physical location in my body, harder yet to pin down the sensation itself. But there it was driving me to chip away at the building-sized pile of rubble with a broken prospector's adze.
Karen must have felt it too. She's hunched over a gravel outcropping, green hat pulled down against the white-hot mid-day sun, batting away the hundreds of bottle flies swarming around and digging away with a hand-sized stone.
Coober Pedy does this to you.
It's about the most God-forsaken wasteland imaginable. A treeless town of 3000, the largest in central Australia between the coast 500 km south and Alice Springs 1200 km north. Built with bare hands out of rubble and without a water well on the driest, rockiest plain in the Outback. Hundreds of thousands of piles of mine tailings encircle the town and the subsurface is a Swiss cheese of shafts and tunnels where every year they lose the odd tourist or late-night drunk.
The town site is filled with abandoned cars and apocalyptic film props and the people here are all a bit nuts. Mind you, except for a few hundred Aborigines, nobody seems actually to be from Coober Pedy. Half the population lives underground in houses and mines and we even pitched our tent in an underground campsite. Few would want to visit, let alone live here but everyone is digging
I look down through the chalky dust blowing in my face, my hands are caked with moisture sucking grime and then I see it. A little spit and I see a multi-coloured glint in the sunlight. I dig around and come up with two bits of a fossilized seashell the opal veneer visible where the adze cracked it. I can feel the pull now.
I hear a shout from Karen that she has found some opal chips. Sure it's all worthless 'potch' as the locals call it, not the rare 6% of opal that is precious. Still I see her go back to the digging in a swarm of flies and can see that she's got the opal fever too.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Wilpena Pound
is a vast 80 square kilometre natural amphitheatre ringed by the mountains of the Flinders Range of South Australia. It was used by early settlers to hold thousands of sheep and cattle [hence 'Pound'] but after a few droughts and severe land degradation from grazing it was abandoned.
This is dramatic country, a few hundred kilometres from somewhere and a couple thousand from nowhere. Despite the heat in the frying pan of the Pound the clouds rolled in and by the time we summitted St. Marys Peak, the highest mountain, it was decidedly Scottish on the top.
Twenty-three kilometres under the boots and a few dozen wallaby encounters later the sky was cloudless again and it being a rare night with ice at our campsite, we sat by a large stone slab under a graceful eucalyptus with its smooth white skin, drank cold gin and tonics and, as you might expect, listened to the Hair musical soundtrack while watching the waxing moon cut a swathe up through the Milky Way.
This is dramatic country, a few hundred kilometres from somewhere and a couple thousand from nowhere. Despite the heat in the frying pan of the Pound the clouds rolled in and by the time we summitted St. Marys Peak, the highest mountain, it was decidedly Scottish on the top.
Twenty-three kilometres under the boots and a few dozen wallaby encounters later the sky was cloudless again and it being a rare night with ice at our campsite, we sat by a large stone slab under a graceful eucalyptus with its smooth white skin, drank cold gin and tonics and, as you might expect, listened to the Hair musical soundtrack while watching the waxing moon cut a swathe up through the Milky Way.
From driving to sustainable agriculture in 10 minutes
A random right turn off a corrugated gravel road onto a white sand road in the Grampians of Victoria took us unexpectedly to the delightful oasis of Mount Zero Olives in the middle of the bush.
Contrary to all expectation, in the farm shop we got a frosty reception from the proprietor. Short, choppy answers to our questions and a sharp half-already-answered-for-you-in-the-negative question about whether we wanted to taste any olives followed by an intake of breath when we said yes.
Ten minutes later after we'd munched some olives and she'd established that we weren't Americans nor supporters of GM crops and Monsanto and after I started to talk about the problem of Roundup resistant Canola in Canada, Saskatchewan farmers, gene flow, the evils of terminator seed technology, sustainable agriculture and the growth versus no-growth paradigms in the economics of sustainability, Jane as we now knew her, had backpedalled to the point of graciously inviting us for a coffee in her delightful cafe converted from an old one-room school house
A WWOOFER [organic farm volunteer] from near Padua, Italy made delightful espresso [in the bush it's important to have both a photovoltaic powered espresso maker and an authentic Italian to operate it] and we talked about solar power, sustainable architecture, Mount Zero's olive production, Mount Zero's cooperative venture with the Aborigines to produce pink salt from a nearby lake, her interest in distilling eucalyptus oil and soap making and her activism against GM seed companies and for local, sustainable agriculture.
We happily left with a bag of Jane's bio-dynamic oranges, a jar of olives, some falafel mix, a bag of organic red lentils and an offer to stay and volunteer on the farm as WWOOFERS. In turn, Jane waved us goodbye with an Earthscan reading list in hand for Agri-Culture, Prosperity Without Growth and Factor Five and my promise to send her [which I later did] the link to the website of our our Kiwi friends Shay and Jo who are building a zero energy house in Auckland.
Great coffee and conversation and to think I could have driven straight on.
Contrary to all expectation, in the farm shop we got a frosty reception from the proprietor. Short, choppy answers to our questions and a sharp half-already-answered-for-you-in-the-negative question about whether we wanted to taste any olives followed by an intake of breath when we said yes.
Ten minutes later after we'd munched some olives and she'd established that we weren't Americans nor supporters of GM crops and Monsanto and after I started to talk about the problem of Roundup resistant Canola in Canada, Saskatchewan farmers, gene flow, the evils of terminator seed technology, sustainable agriculture and the growth versus no-growth paradigms in the economics of sustainability, Jane as we now knew her, had backpedalled to the point of graciously inviting us for a coffee in her delightful cafe converted from an old one-room school house
A WWOOFER [organic farm volunteer] from near Padua, Italy made delightful espresso [in the bush it's important to have both a photovoltaic powered espresso maker and an authentic Italian to operate it] and we talked about solar power, sustainable architecture, Mount Zero's olive production, Mount Zero's cooperative venture with the Aborigines to produce pink salt from a nearby lake, her interest in distilling eucalyptus oil and soap making and her activism against GM seed companies and for local, sustainable agriculture.
We happily left with a bag of Jane's bio-dynamic oranges, a jar of olives, some falafel mix, a bag of organic red lentils and an offer to stay and volunteer on the farm as WWOOFERS. In turn, Jane waved us goodbye with an Earthscan reading list in hand for Agri-Culture, Prosperity Without Growth and Factor Five and my promise to send her [which I later did] the link to the website of our our Kiwi friends Shay and Jo who are building a zero energy house in Auckland.
Great coffee and conversation and to think I could have driven straight on.
The waning sun above the mountains
lit up the red earth of the dusty, pot-holed track we drove up in our 'not-to-be-taken-off-sealed-roads' rental car. Eucalyptus trees with their characteristic peeling bark draped over the red strip ahead of us. As our bush campsite in Victoria's Grampians National Park loomed on our right, without warning it was all action up ahead.
Out of the bush and across the track raced a 5-foot emu, head pulsing forward and back, eyes wide as it fled into the gum trees. Then another right behind, feathers ruffling and three-toed feet kicking up the red dust in frantic wait-for-me strides. Not to be outdone by his flightless mates, further down the road a kangaroo hopped out of the trees, across the track and back into the bush near the entrance to our campsite.
It seemed that after nearly two weeks in Oz, we'd finally found 'The Bush'.
The comedic value of animals with bodies so ridiculous to northern eyes induced cathartic belly laughs in our car. Only the night before we camped in a loud urban caravan park in Warrnambool at the end of the Great Ocean Road after a long escape two days before from the sprawling suburbs of western Melbourne.
And now here we were, finally. Two people, four wheels and a tent on the inward looking edge of this vast continent. Poised for the first step on the very margin of the place I'd come looking for.
Out of the bush and across the track raced a 5-foot emu, head pulsing forward and back, eyes wide as it fled into the gum trees. Then another right behind, feathers ruffling and three-toed feet kicking up the red dust in frantic wait-for-me strides. Not to be outdone by his flightless mates, further down the road a kangaroo hopped out of the trees, across the track and back into the bush near the entrance to our campsite.
It seemed that after nearly two weeks in Oz, we'd finally found 'The Bush'.
The comedic value of animals with bodies so ridiculous to northern eyes induced cathartic belly laughs in our car. Only the night before we camped in a loud urban caravan park in Warrnambool at the end of the Great Ocean Road after a long escape two days before from the sprawling suburbs of western Melbourne.
And now here we were, finally. Two people, four wheels and a tent on the inward looking edge of this vast continent. Poised for the first step on the very margin of the place I'd come looking for.
When I was 14 years of age
I pinned a massive National Geographic Society physical land form map of Australia above my bed in Calgary, tracing obscure Outback tracks and roads with my finger and wondering what the vast salt bed of Lake Eyre looked like. I subsequently read quite a bit about the country and coming from southern Alberta, endowed as it is with big landscapes of prairie and mountains, I focussed on the landforms - the Outback and the coastlines - and I built up both a powerful mental profile of Australia and a desire to visit it more than any other place in the world.
My first attempt to travel there was scuppered in 1992, the early 90s recession kicked a plan to go to Oz on a one year working holiday visa into the long, dry life-choking grass of the doldrums of prolonged unemployment. I didn't have the $1200 bond the Australia government required for a visa to be processed let alone the cash for a flight. What I did have was a massive student loan and no job and no prospect of a job.
So Oz would have to wait 13 years until I was in London and working at Earthscan where I managed a week-long editorial and promotional work trip to attend the huge IUFRO World Forestry Congress being convened in Brisbane with a three day holiday excursion to Noosa and Fraser Island tagged on the end. This trip was more of a sweetener - I was there and gone before jet lag subsided - than the satisfying long drink from the well demanded by two decades of travelling the dusty tracks of this vast sun-scoured desert land in my imagination.
It was thus, you might imagine, a bit of a jab in the solar plexus to finally arrive in Melbourne on 2 April for a trip of real duration and unlimited prospects and to not really like the country all that much.
The problem, as it turned out, wasn't Australia but rather a misalignment of the fantasy of youth and the reality of modern Australia. That is to say the idea of an almost unimaginably vast, thinly populated country of rugged geography and unforgiving landscapes, inhabited by odd, unique characters, much like my own country, crashing headlong into another reality. A reality which is that for the 80-85% of the population of this country that lives in five large coastal cities and a number of smaller cities and towns, much of everyday life in Oz is a circumscribed existence in a sprawling belt of interchangeable suburbs. These are flanked by big-box stores and shopping centres and choked by the freeways of busy, stressed people carting home mountains of stuff they don't need to an overpriced, cookie-cutter house they can hardly afford in a neighbourhood that isn't as good as the one they really want to live in but is better than where their friends live. And then every night they turn on the television and have this same world reified in a shower of mass media.
So, in other words, it seemed that I'd waited 25 years and travelled to the other side of the world to arrive back in the city - or more to the point, what that city represents in Anglo-American Western society - where I pinned up my National Geographic map of Australia in 1985.
Over the past month, much has changed though and this initial disappointing view of Oz has been being eclipsed by a vivid, engaged experience that has matched, and indeed has begun to exceed, the imagination of a 14 year old. And all it took to kick this off were four wheels, two emus and a kangaroo.
My first attempt to travel there was scuppered in 1992, the early 90s recession kicked a plan to go to Oz on a one year working holiday visa into the long, dry life-choking grass of the doldrums of prolonged unemployment. I didn't have the $1200 bond the Australia government required for a visa to be processed let alone the cash for a flight. What I did have was a massive student loan and no job and no prospect of a job.
So Oz would have to wait 13 years until I was in London and working at Earthscan where I managed a week-long editorial and promotional work trip to attend the huge IUFRO World Forestry Congress being convened in Brisbane with a three day holiday excursion to Noosa and Fraser Island tagged on the end. This trip was more of a sweetener - I was there and gone before jet lag subsided - than the satisfying long drink from the well demanded by two decades of travelling the dusty tracks of this vast sun-scoured desert land in my imagination.
It was thus, you might imagine, a bit of a jab in the solar plexus to finally arrive in Melbourne on 2 April for a trip of real duration and unlimited prospects and to not really like the country all that much.
The problem, as it turned out, wasn't Australia but rather a misalignment of the fantasy of youth and the reality of modern Australia. That is to say the idea of an almost unimaginably vast, thinly populated country of rugged geography and unforgiving landscapes, inhabited by odd, unique characters, much like my own country, crashing headlong into another reality. A reality which is that for the 80-85% of the population of this country that lives in five large coastal cities and a number of smaller cities and towns, much of everyday life in Oz is a circumscribed existence in a sprawling belt of interchangeable suburbs. These are flanked by big-box stores and shopping centres and choked by the freeways of busy, stressed people carting home mountains of stuff they don't need to an overpriced, cookie-cutter house they can hardly afford in a neighbourhood that isn't as good as the one they really want to live in but is better than where their friends live. And then every night they turn on the television and have this same world reified in a shower of mass media.
So, in other words, it seemed that I'd waited 25 years and travelled to the other side of the world to arrive back in the city - or more to the point, what that city represents in Anglo-American Western society - where I pinned up my National Geographic map of Australia in 1985.
Over the past month, much has changed though and this initial disappointing view of Oz has been being eclipsed by a vivid, engaged experience that has matched, and indeed has begun to exceed, the imagination of a 14 year old. And all it took to kick this off were four wheels, two emus and a kangaroo.
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