The Kimberley

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A unique feature of the Australian mainland is that a hefty chunk of the country apparently does not really exist. Only a tiny fraction of the population lives in The Real Australia, the remainder happy to inhabit an imaginary wonderland which lies in a narrow strip between The Real Australia and the sea. It's only a matter of time before some kid has an Emperor’s New Clothes type revelation and the rest of us come to regret forking out quite so much on real-estate in Never-Never land, as the whole edifice evaporates and we tumble into the ocean. Come to think of it, current global events may well indicate that it’s a point we’ve already reached.

The Real Australians won’t mourn the loss of these fictitious lands for long, I suspect, inhabited as they are by a bunch of politicians and poofters. One or two should perhaps be a little more concerned, though, as there seems to be no real consensus on quite where the Real Australia begins and ends. It’s variously referred to as the Bush or Outback, rural or regional Australia or simply the Red Centre, even though parts of it aren’t particularly red or central. You’ll know when you’re in the Real Australia, but the exact point where it begins and ends will sadly elude you, as it seems to fade in and out from place to place.

Almost everyone in Oz is very proud of the Real Australia, even if most go there only once in a blue moon and many not at all. There’s a romantic notion regarding its unsophisticated charm, a hark-back to no-nonsense straight-talking days. Even the most metro-sexual of city-slickers secretly dream of attending the Birdsville Races, the Beer-Can Regatta or the Camel Cup, or of dressing up as Ned Kelly and riding around on horseback and, well, shooting people. Imaginary people, one would hope. Certainly not good honest Real Australians, at any rate.

Real Australia has a certain grounded integrity. It’s a bit like Old Labour; you might like it an awful lot, you might not like it much at all, but at least you know where you stand. With the rest of Oz, as with New Labour, you’re never really quite so sure what’s what.

Whenever the subject of The Real Australia comes up you can always detect a certain undercurrent of tension over which is the Realest Australian spot of all. Some go fro the Alice, some for Bourke or Broken Hill, others for Longreach, Kalgoorlie or even Humpty Doo. All fair-dinkum, True Blue, dinky-di, Dingo-Eating-Baby hotspots, no doubt about it. But among all others there’s one spot that trumps them all. Even the most hardened stalwart will go misty-eyed and weak at the knees at the very mention of the name: The Kimberley.

“Ah, well;” they’ll say,”Now that’s the Real Australia.”

It has to be said that for our part we’d been travelling through the Real Australia pretty much ever since we left Cairns and were getting fairly accustomed to the whole affair by now. Today, however, we were upping the ante: we were about to enter the real Real Australia, and I had to say, that had us both Really Excited.

The Kimberley is a rugged wilderness never fully penetrated by civilisation due to climactic extremes. Throughout Australia’s Top End there are but two seasons, the Wet and the Dry, but in the Kimberley the Dry is very dry and the Wet is absolutely sodden. Highway 1, Australia’s continental ring-road, while quite happy to transect the vast and empty Nullarbor Plain in the south or plough straight through the middle of the Northern Territory, bisecting it neatly, gives the Kimberley an altogether much wider berth, circumventing it almost completely. Thus if you want to see the real real Real Australia you’ve once again got to leave the bitumen and launch yourself headlong onto the almost legendary Gibb River Road.

Unlike Highway 1, the Gibb still has the balls to pass right through the centre of the Kimberley. It was built well back when as a route to take cattle to market and connect the cattle-stations to the outside world. The cattle still roll down this road on their final journey from time to time, but handily it also serves as an excellent track to take you to all the best hotspots on the tourist trail.

The price the Gibb pays for its more direct approach is that it becomes completely impassable for a good six months of the year, when it basically gets turned into a vast muddy quagmire, or in a bad year is entirely washed away. You never know what you’re going to get with the Gibb. From year to year, month to month, or sometimes even day to day conditions completely change and the road is transformed. It can go from a breeze to a bloody nightmare in the blink of an eye, and a bit like the weather in Blighty, the condition of the road becomes the fallback topic of conversation round these parts. This debate can appear never-ending, as there seems to be no real consensus over just what constitutes a good road.

Sometime early in the Dry, after the worst of the damage has been done, the road will be graded. A grader is not, as you might be imagining, a man in a suit with a hardhat, a clipboard, and a rating system. Instead it is a large yellow contraption looking like the overgrown bastard son of a snowplough and a JCB. The graders job is to flatten out the road surface. Unlike the snowplough, the blade lies between the front and rear wheels, so that at the first sign of snow it would leave the road at the next bend. Fortunately both snow and bends are something of a rarity in these parts, and the graders can happily rumble on their merry way scraping a couple of inches of topsoil to the side of the road and leaving behind a perfectly smooth surface.

They’re so good at their job that, should you be the next vehicle along the road, you’d be hard-pushed to know you weren’t travelling down one enormous billiard table if you shut your eyes. Should you switch your vision to the rear-view, though, you’ll notice that you’re doing your own little bit to keep the graders rolling by liberally distributing the road over the surrounding landscape in a huge plume of dust. Every car that passes does its own little bit to transform the road from flat-as-a-pancake pleasure to rough-as-guts hellhole. A passing roadtrain can throw up the kind of cloud the space-shuttle would be proud of, while a quick rain-shower will produce a complete mud bath in no time flat, and before long the grader has hit the road all over again.

It’s generally agreed that it’s a complete lottery what state the road will be in when you arrive. What clouds the issue even more is the Princess and the Pea Syndrome. Half the population appear to believe that at the slightest vibration their 4x4 will spontaneously combust, while a contrasting portion seem convinced they own the vehicular equivalent of the cockroach, which should be able to survive a nuclear explosion virtually unscathed. Every night you’ll be regaled at campsite with varying tales of the road ahead being a living nightmare or smooth as a baby's bum! Experience tells me I’ve more in common with the nuclear nutters than the princesses, though I’m not so sure the car will agree in the long run.

Suffice it to say that every day’s an adventure on the Gibb. In between testing the limits of man and machine there’ll be plenty of chances to stretch a leg or three, and hike off into this startling utopia.
The abundance of annual rainfall has over the aeons carved out an amazing landscape of mountain ranges and gorges complete with spectacular waterfalls and idyllic swimming holes, which come in very handy in the searing heat. Days are spent rattling yourself to bits travelling from oasis to oasis, hiking to the nearest pool, and then plunging into ridiculously serene refreshment, before drying off and doing the same thing all over again. There’s a hyperabundance of these idyllic getaways, and regrettably, as with beaches in Bali or temples in Thailand, eventually you get a bit gorged out, unable to take in the sheer splendour of it all. This is a real tragedy, as any one of them would be worth the trip alone.

Camping at one such location turned out to be unexpectedly entertaining. Silent Grove campsite was packed to the rafters due to its proximity to the beautiful Bell Gorge. A certain amount of consternation was therefore caused when a large snake slid out of the undergrowth just before dusk and began slithering from site to site.

Snakes in the campsite are not entirely unexpected around here. This is the Real Australia, after all, which is bloody choc-full of snakes. The trouble was, nobody staying in the camp was actually from the Real Australia, and certainly not accustomed to being in quite such close proximity to a bloody big serpent. Everyone knows that Australia has a good handful of the most venomous snakes in the world. What they don’t know, is what those snakes actually look like. The snakes do nobody any favours here, by all looking almost exactly the bloody same, whether harmless or not. To accurately identify most snakes you need not only a PhD in herpetology, but also to have got close enough to ensure that one of the two of you is now dead.

Back in the campsite the Princess and the Pea Syndrome once again came to the fore, some barely batting an eyelid while others screamed in terror and ran around like headless chickens, not entirely the wisest move as nearly dead chickens are exactly the sort of thing a big snake might fancy for tea.
Needless to say by nightfall a posse had formed and a council of war was called to decide What Should Be Done. Many seemed to be beginning to question just why they had come to the Real Australia at all when they could have been at home sipping a nice latte and worrying only about what to watch on the telly tonight.

Debbie was being admirably nonchalant about the whole affair, so I decided to stick up for reptilian rights and suggest we simply left it alone, us being guests in its home and all.

Others weren’t so sure.

“Looks like a bloody King Brown to me. If that’s a King Brown, you mark my words; one of us’ll be dead by morning!”

These words did little to settle the princesses’ pulse rates.

Realising that it was plain that nobody, myself included, really had a clue what they were talking about, I decided to calm their nerves somewhat.

“Looks like an Olive Python to me. They’re more or less completely harmless, aren’t they? I mean, it’s a bit large for a King Brown, isn’t it?”

“Jeez, you could be right, mate! Bloody massive King Brown, that is! Biggest one I’ve ever seen!”

“Kill it!”

“Run ‘im over!”

“Cut ‘is head off with a spade!”

Not exactly the reaction I’d been hoping for.

Thus began my bizarre life as a double agent. The posse had spoken and the poor snake’s days were numbered. While all dispersed to gather their weapons of choice, I formulated my own plan of action to foil their deadly scheme. The only hope was to enthusiastically join the posse and then ever-so subtly sabotage their every move.

I was considerably aided in my quest by the fact that the posse, on their return, all seemed to be in possession of identical head-torches. These looked likely to have been made by a bunch of thirteen year-old Taiwanese school-girls getting very close to their midnight tea-break, and as a result they were having trouble lighting up their own shoelaces, let alone something the size of our slithering quarry.

I, on the other hand, was armed with a giant rechargeable number about the size of an early 1980s police speed gun. It had undoubtedly been designed by a particularly diligent German engineer keen on the idea of spotting snakes on the surface of the Moon. Indeed my principle fear was that the snake may spontaneously kark it out of sheer terror when he realised some mad Scotsman had turned up packing a bazooka. Maybe next time I will, as its amazing how quickly a well placed Rocket-Propelled Grenade will disperse a crowd in my experience, or, indeed, a person, if they happen to get in the way.

For the next twenty minutes or so, Silent Grove campsite spectacularly failed to live up to its name as I led a demented bloodthirsty pack in chase of a somewhat startled serpent, always making sure I stayed closest, between it and the mob, only to ‘lose it’ in the nearest patch of grass whenever we got really close.

“Anyone see where it went?” I’d ask, carefully shining my torch straight into one pair of eyes after another.

Unfortunately the snake appeared to have a death wish and resolutely refused to stay still long enough for the crowd to disperse.

I was eventually forced to chase it right under the table where Debbie was sitting and into a large patch of scrub directly beside our car, where it finally seemed to develop the good sense to stay.

“That’s where it lives.” I announced.”Been there all day. Probably harmless. If it comes out again I’ll be sure to give you all a shout.”

By now the crowd’s bloodthirstiness seemed to be abating, as they all realised their dinners were getting cold, and that, quite plainly, had the snake wanted to bite us, it could easily have done so by now.

One dissenting voice remained, belonging to a small middle aged lady dressed incongruously for the bush in a floral dress. She looked likely to have never before left her posh Sydney suburb, and was thus doubly embarrassed to have to own up to a small hole in the corner of her tent through which the snake was sure to enter in the night and devour her entirely.

Luckily everyone else had by now burned clean through their adrenaline reserves and were keen to end the hunt. One helpful chap piped up he’d some masking tape it the car which would render the tent sufficiently snake proof, and upon this the mob dispersed to make repairs and finish their suppers, all vowing to arm themselves with shovels on any nocturnal toilet-trips.

For once the snake played along and failed to re-emerge all night, allowing all to get something close to a good night’s shut-eye.

Awakening in the morning I poked my head through the curtains and reassured myself that all remained quiet. I have to admit that a little part of me was half-hoping to see a very happy fat snake with a tent-shaped bulge in his midriff, but instead he seemed simply to have vanished.

A few days later at Geike Gorge, the last of the trip, I was chatting to the Ranger and showed him my photo.

“Olive python?” I enquired.

“No, mate, no! That’s a bloody massive King Brown, that is! You kill him?”

“No we, uh, we all decided it would be best if we just, sort of, um, let him go.”

“Oh well, good on yer mate! You did the right thing. It’s these idiots who form hunting mobs who end up in hospital. Anyone stupid enough to get anywhere near that one deserves to get themselves bit!”

Before long we found ourselves back on the bitumen and the Gibb River Road was finally behind us.
As it turned out, though, even when back on the hard stuff, the Real Real Australia still had one last trick up its sleeve, and it came courtesy of the very cattle to which the Gibb owed its existence. Cattle still form a big part of the lifeblood around here, and are pretty much given free reign to roam over areas the size of several English counties. At some stage, though, some unlucky sod has to round them all up and give them a quick lesson on the true meaning of life.

Back in the good old days this was all done on horseback, just like in the other Wild West. More recently some young Einstein noticed motorbikes were considerably less inclined to wander off themselves whenever your back was turned, and they became the go, forming a holy trinity with quad-bikes and Mad Max style 4x4s to make the whole thing more fun.

All that’s old hat in the new millennium, though. To really put the willies up your average Generation Y cow you need to switch to total shock and awe tactics, swap your Suzuki for a Sikorski and get airborne in the truly insane pastime of Heli-mustering.

As extreme sports go, this one really is completely nuts, combining the finest elements of rodeo with the aerial lunacy of the Crusty Demons and the precision timing of the Red Bull Air Race.

I’d seen one of these nutters in action once before, and it scared the bejeezus out of me, let alone the cows. Today, though we had double trouble, rounding a rare corner to be confronted by a stampeding mass of cattle with eyes the size of dinner plates. They were being roundly pursued by two giant mechanical dragonflies engaged in an earnest competition involving both each other and the cows to see who could have the shortest future. The cows clearly won in the intelligence stakes, as they seemed much more clued up to the possibility of being enveloped in an imminent fireball than either pilot, fleeing in panic from anything that might get in the choppers’ way, of which there were many, not just trees, power lines and the ground, but also our car, which was considerably less nimble than our terrified bovine brethren.
The whole thing really does seem the most incredible case of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, and has as much in common with One Man and His Dog as South Park has to Wallace and Grommit.

Luckily, after a couple of death-defying minutes, the cows were successfully herded across the road and we high-tailed out of there back on our way, fortunately without discovering if either pilot was called Kenny.

And that just about sums up the Real Real Australia, a gritty exciting landscape full of killer snakes and psychopathic nutters.

Our last thoughts on the Kimberley... in a word, Gorge-ous!

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Photos

El Questro Gorge
Deb enjoys a rare shower!

4X4 Parking Lot
We're the muddiest!

Lookout, Cockburn Ranges
Deb enjoys the view

Comments

[Marcel]

envious
Andy, You have a great photographic and literary talent mate- I love the posts- great stuff.