The Crow Eaters Page 15

  I dash for the front porch and peek through the windows at the old hearth and the bedrooms of the Wilkins family. Hubert used to ride his horse from here into school at Mount Bryan township every day, just like Dave Willson did on the same hills in another era.

  Initially, because of Wilkins’ love of cameras, he became a war correspondent covering the fight between the Turks and the Bulgarians in 1912. From 1913 to 1916 he was part of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition. He then developed a plan to improve international weather forecasting by establishing weather stations at both poles. He was later the official photographer of the Australian Imperial Force in 1918. Wilkins’ search for adventure didn’t stop there either; he entered the England to Australia air race in 1919, only for his plane to make a crash landing in Crete. When he returned to Australia, he signed up to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition of 1921–22. In 1928 he charted the arctic from Alaska to Norway from the air, and he would visit the Antarctic another four times before becoming an advisor to the US during the Second World War on cold-weather combat. Wilkins died in Massachusetts in 1958, far from his childhood home just past Goyder’s Line in a remote valley of South Australia.

  My route continues further north, to another cottage, though this one is in the shadows of the Flinders Ranges’ most iconic image: Wilpena Pound.

  I drive through the little towns on the eastern side of the Ranges, past Jamestown’s big trees, colonial pubs and a gigantic monster truck sitting on the lawn of a tiny house near the creek. Jamestown was given international publicity recently by entrepreneur, mini-sub builder and space exploration enthusiast Elon Musk, who constructed the world’s largest lithium-ion battery here to ease the state’s power inconsistencies.

  The road cuts further north, past hamlets with little more than an old church and a pub advertising cold beer. Past the town of Carrieton, I notice a dead dingo strung up on a post, indicating how far they can range even this far south of the dog fence. In the last licks of light I drive through Hawker, the first town that looks like the outback. The dirt is red, the streets are dusty and it seems a little wilder. Beyond the town, the smudges of the Flinders Ranges are immense as their shadows lengthen across the plains at the end of the day. Emus and kangaroos dart across the roads with increasing regularity – springing from bushes and embankments through the violet-coloured dusk and slowing my journey down as I crawl along so as to not hit a migrating bunch.

  I stay in a bush cabin on a former sheep property at Rawnsley Park Station for the night. The air is cold and there is the slightest icing sugar dusting of frost on the ground as I continue driving towards the Wilpena Homestead early the next morning.

  Beyond the mining history of the northern region and its important role in shaping 19th century South Australia, I am interested in understanding another point of view here and going back in time further still. Archaeological research in the northern Flinders Ranges discovered evidence at a rock shelter site called Warratyi, confirming that Aboriginal settlement here in arid Australia stretches back 49 000 years, much longer than previously thought.

  I am meeting senior Adnyamathanha cultural advisor for the Department for Environment and Water (DEW), Arthur Coulthard, at the aptly named Ikara-Flinders Ranges headquarters. Ikara means ‘meeting place’ in the Adnyamathanha language. Arthur acts as an intermediary between the Adnyamathanha people of the region and the DEW to ensure there is consultation on all important issues within the National Parks here in the north of the state.

  Arthur lives at Balcanoona in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park, though while he’s on patrol he’ll stay in a bush cabin at the Ikara-Flinders National Park or, often as not, just unroll his swag on a flat patch of the ranges near the Ediacara fossils as the sun begins to set.

  ‘I was born one rainy night under a river red gum in the northern Flinders.’ Arthur tells me of his life-long affinity with the earth as we walk along the reclaimed farmland around the former station. ‘Mum and Dad got stuck in the car at Italowie Gorge during a storm,’ he says to demystify his story a little. ‘I’ve got a real connection to country.’

  The cliché of those who work outside having a nice ‘office’ is a common one, though it is one that has defined many of Arthur’s work choices over the last 20 years. ‘I love what I do, getting out there and getting dirty,’ he says of why he has stayed in the same northern Flinders stretch his whole life.

  Arthur did his early schooling at Nepabunna and then the Leigh Creek Area School before he became one of the three Adnyamathanha people working for Parks. ‘In the Flinders people forget about Arkaroola and the Gammon Ranges,’ he says. ‘They think that Wilpena Pound is all there is.’ On patrol today he’s going to show me a little of the office he’s so pleased to work in.

  It looks like a Hans Heysen painting up here: red earth, rock falls, gullies and stark gum trees on the rugged edges of the plains. He starts the truck and we bounce along the dirt tracks of the north, with me on gate-opening duty as we drive.

  ‘Wilpena is a Dreaming story,’ Arthur says, narrating our journey with another layer of meaning as he tells me of Yurla Ngukandha. ‘Two large serpents came from Mount Termination, or Culcapuna. There was an old man living at Mount Termination and he heard there was a ceremony at Ikara and he said he would do the ceremony. He lit a fire – that’s where the Leigh Creek coalfield is now – it’s still burning – and there were two large serpents on the Heysen Range. They ate all the people at the ceremony and eventually curled up and died, forming the Pound.’

  We see lots of kangaroos in the fields as we drive – euros, western greys, red and grey kangaroos – all grazing across the grass below the peaks. I ask Arthur what other animals they have here and he says that despite the isolation, pests are a problem, ‘We have lots of cats and some foxes. There’s a baiting program here now, and further north there’s lots of feral donkeys.’

  Another unusual pest here, Arthur tells me, are the cacti originally planted for medicinal purposes at Angorichina Village, which are now unwanted in the Park.

  Wilpena Pound looms behind us as we turn off to Bunyeroo Gorge along Bunyeroo Road. The track winds through dry creek beds, meandering past big river red gums with the grey, misty gorges of the Heysen Range in the distance. All this land used to be part of pastoral country here, though since it was taken over by National Parks, Arthur thinks there’s room for optimism. ‘There’s echidnas bouncing back, yellow-footed rock wallabies as well. All of this used to be part of the station here. So we’re regenerating it.’

  The hills are crossed with tracks, where animals traverse the slopes towards water. We roll down into Bunyeroo Gorge, passing scarred trees where the Adnyamathanha people have taken bark for their shelters, shields and, in wetter places, canoes. This is also the Yan Yanna stop where pastoralists would rest on their way to the mining town of Blinman in the north. This trail embodies much of Arthur’s work – he is the bridge between the National Parks perspective and the Indigenous one.

  ‘My role is seen as a step forward. Adnyamathanha get to make real decisions on their terms, with a little of “non” Adnyamathanha mixed in. I’m the liaison in between everyone. If DEW are doing a program, I’ll go and talk to the Adnyamathanha people and see what they want and what they think, making sure that everyone knows what’s going on,’ he says.

  We drive along past the rocky peaks, still concealed by the fog. It looks like a lost city – with walls of rock hundreds of metres high rising from the red dirt.

  Further into the gorge we pass the isolated Acra-man camping ground and the jagged, imposing peaks of the ABC Range above it. ‘It should be the Alphabet range,’ says Arthur, referring to the 26 peaks that roll through here from Wilpena to Aroona.

  We drive towards Oraparinna where they’re con-ducting a ‘bounce back’ program, introducing native plants and species and further eradicating ferals. On the Brachina Gorge trail Arthur tells me he manages three cultural sites here –
Arkaroo Rock, Sacred Canyon and Perawurtina.

  Next we pass the Trezona limestone foundation – it’s 630 million years old and looks like a sea of half-sunken buildings slowly sinking into the earth on the plains. ‘Layer upon layer, this country here used to be under the seabed,’ Arthur says, echoing the questions in my head.

  Both parks in the north have Traditional Use Zones, which means that from 3 pm until 5 am the next day, the Adnyamathanha people are permitted to hunt kangaroos and emus and to collect emu eggs within the park. ‘They use rifles,’ Arthur says of the hunting, so that’s why management of the TUZs is so important, to ensure all parties are happy and safe. ‘I think we can all learn from open communication. People can get mixed up, confused and angry, because they don’t talk. Com-munication needs to stay strong. We’ve achieved a hell of a lot during the co-management,’ he says.

  ‘Black fellas and white fellas need to be talking,’ Arthur continues with a smile, telling it exactly how he sees it as we drive up to a lookout which gives us a view across the Flinders. ‘Black fellas don’t always understand white fellas’ processes and protocols, and white fellas don’t always understand our connection to country. That’s where I come in,’ he explains.

  We head to Sacred Canyon within the park next, marked with a small sign off the main road. It is an area recently acquired by DEW from an adjacent farming property because it had been subject to vandalism by unmonitored visitors damaging the site. The boundaries of the National Park were also extended to incorporate this important site.

  After 20 minutes meandering through the native pines and across the hard-packed earth, we reach the trailhead and walk along the dry creek bed past the river red gums. Arthur shuffles over to the sheer edge of the gorge and shows me an engraving on the wall – it is of two perfect circles etched in the rock – indicating that it would have once been a gathering spot or campsite for the Adnyamathanha. Further into the canyon he shows me emu footprints on the rock as if they are climbing up to the lip of the canyon; and goanna prints too, though there is also graffiti on this sacred site – of random scratches and people’s initials, highlighting why ‘early protection is important’, as Arthur says. We clamber all the way into the back of the canyon and find a neat little cave, blackened from fires in the long-ago past, and perfect for shelter. We walk back along the trail, slowly, as Arthur stops to chat to the hikers we meet along the way to explain the significance of where we are. If I was here on my own, this is the sort of place I would have driven straight past, and without Arthur’s guidance I certainly wouldn’t have noticed the symbols and markers of the Indigenous past here.

  We head back to the main attraction, as Wilpena Pound is now in full sun. Arthur takes me to the base before I hike alone up the inside cauldron.

  This all used to be part of the Hill family’s station, which covered around 1000 square kilometres and included the Pound, the homestead where Arthur’s office now is and the surrounding countryside. I hike to the lip of the Pound at Wangara Lookout and I can see down across the blanket of green, red and orange foliage. It’s hard to imagine that up until 1985 this was still farming property – including the land inside the Pound. It looks like a Venezuelan tepui from here – one of the mysterious tabletop mountains in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World – it is an enormous bowl ringed by protective peaks and now sheltering emus, eagles and yellow-footed rock wallabies inside. I also notice habitation boxes on many of the trees on the way up to the top, where they’re also trying to reintroduce possums.

  The Adnyamathanha footprint here is ancient and Arthur works to preserve its place and importance. I head through the gorge and across to the western side of the mountain range to understand a Flinders story that stretches back millions of years and gives clues as to where all of us came from.

  Reg Sprigg (1919–94) is one of the most notable South Australians because of his fascination with what lies beneath the surface of the land and what he found there. Sprigg was a geologist who studied under Sir Douglas Mawson in Adelaide. He was once placed in charge of the South Australian Department of Mines Uranium Project during the Cold War (and monitored for years by ASIO for suspected communist leanings) and later he formed the Geosurveys of Australia Ltd company where he directed the endeavour with Santos to discover natural gas in the Cooper Basin. Sprigg also purchased the former sheep station Arkaroola with his second wife in 1968, which has gone on to become a renowned wilderness sanctuary.

  In 1946, Sprigg discovered some innocuous looking swirls in an old mine site in the northern Flinders Ranges. He had uncovered the first evidence of the oldest animal ecosystem on earth, dating back more than 555 million years.

  Sprigg’s discovery was just the beginning, though, as in the 1980s, when pastoralists Ross and Jane Fargher moved to Nilpena Station they also discovered evidence of these soft-bodied organisms, which would have once lived on the bottom of a warm shallow sea, imprinted on the stones of their 100-year-old shearing shed.

  Ross and Jane also run the Parachilna pub to the south, which I had previously passed through on my way to Marree. I spend the night now in an old railway worker’s overflow room behind the pub and meet Ross early the next morning. He arrives at the pub driving an all-terrain bus, which wouldn’t look out of place punching through the Amazon jungle. Ross has big hands, worn boots and a squint. He is taking me and a group of locals and tourists to Mount Michael, which sits on the bottom end of the Ediacara Hills, part of the 5000 hectare conservation park.

  The bus takes us north along the highway, past the old railway and the ruins of the fettlers’ cottages – each worker would look after 5 miles (8 kilometres) of track each side of their cottage on the old Ghan trail, all the way up to Alice Springs. Not long after, the bus rattles over a cattle grid. There’s no fence, though this is the marker of the beginning of the Farghers’ Nilpena property, a 200 000 acre (81 000 hectare) plot for cattle. Ross says that they can run 1500 cattle when the conditions are right, though it’s a particularly dry season at the moment, so they’re down to only 300–400. ‘We only get 6 to 7 inches [150–80 millimetres] of rain [per annum] at the best of times here’, Ross says. This is saltbush and blue bush country, though one thing I do notice on the hills are the big, stocky sheep running across the trails. ‘They’re Dorper sheep, from South Africa. They shed their wool and are pretty strong, so they can often fight off dogs and dingoes, which we still get here,’ he says. These sheep aren’t his, they’re his neighbours’ and they must have wandered here from the boundary, 40 kilometres down the road.

  On the right of the bus is Mount Deception; named by Edward John Eyre in 1840 during his expeditions to open up the pastoral country of the north, when the enormous salt lakes that stretch across the land from here impeded him and his discoveries.

  Nilpena Station’s stone buildings date back to the 1870s. They give way to beautiful views across the plains and to the Flinders Ranges in the distance. ‘We’ve had Rabbit Proof Fence, Tracks and Home and Away all filmed here. And Australia’s Next Top Model,’ Ross says of the property. He parks the bus and takes us across to the shearing shed where their connection to the Ediacara biota began. We walk through the cool, dark shed; it smells of wool and liniment. The floor is cold and Ross points out the ripples on the stone. ‘A friend doing geology at Adelaide Uni came here and saw the floor. I told her that I’d seen the same ripples on the hills. We went up to have a look and we found the fossils.’

  These weren’t just any fossils. On Nilpena’s hills they’ve found evidence of the oldest complex fossils on earth, which predate dinosaurs by millions of years.

  Ross gets us back in the robo-bus and we drive across the farm to the active dig site. He takes us through dry creek beds with 3 metre high walls and across paddocks with ribbons of dry ochre earth still shaped by the floods that come through here. We scrape past Acacia tetragonophylla or ‘dead finish’ bushes which will outlast all but the most apocalyptic droughts. The bus rises to the top of Mount M
ichael, it is a modest hill, though Ross says that from here it is straight and flat for 2000 kilometres, until the Stirling Range in Western Australia.

  The Ediacara dig site is laid out on the side of a rocky slope. Here we meet our guide, 18-year-old Ian Hughes, a marine biology student from the University of California in San Diego, who has been coming here since he was two years old. Ian’s mother is Dr Mary Droser, a researcher who has been examining the fossils here, with the Farghers’ help, for 17 years. The Flinders winter, when Mary can visit from the US, means that Ian has had every one of his birthdays here since (including his 18th recently, where the locals shouted him more than a few rounds at the Parachilna pub).

  Ian has long blond hair and looks like a surfer, though his passion for this hill that his mother has been bringing him to since before he could walk, is evident. He walks with us across their various dig sites, all looking like big stone jigsaw puzzles that they’ve used to solve ‘Darwin’s dilemma’ to explain where complex life within the evolutionary chain originated. ‘The first multicellular complex fossils were discovered here,’ Ian says. There are similar deposits in Namibia and Newfoundland, though the Nilpena examples are unique, and it is regarded as one of the best fossil sites on earth, where they’ve uncovered organisms resembling soft coral, flatworms, jellyfish and algae.

  We tramp down the hill and I’m worried I’m going to step on some delicate evidence, though Ian says that most of the fossils here are pretty hardy. He also explains the link with these organisms, and his area of study. ‘This would have once been a shallow sea. There would have been lots of microbial matter here – like pond scum. A storm would come and wash dirt and sediment over the organisms, then another would come and it would form these layers, like storm stories.’ Ian shows us the layers in an excavation they’ve cut into the hill to demonstrate the metres of rock pressed together, revealing a narrative of evolution going back 555 million years.