The Crow Eaters Page 16
While many palaeontologists would package up the fossils and study them in their labs, Ian says that they study these in situ and keep everything together on the hills to better understand the relationship between all the fossil beds here. ‘In 17 years we’ve never found overlapping beds – each pit and each ecosystem is unique,’ Ian says as he squats down to show us the imprints of a Dickinsonia, a ribbed and circular organism the size of an apricot. The ribbons we saw in the shearing shed are now better contextualised – it is the ripples of the sand set in a cast and frozen on the hills.
‘This helps us understand evolution,’ Ian says. ‘Reg Sprigg found the link between single-celled organisms and Cambrian life just north of here; all in South Australia. That’s pretty cool.’
On another rock puzzle stretching 10 metres across he shows us Aspidellas, which would have once been enormous fronds stuck to the seabed. Their imprint looks like a plug stuck in the earth. Further along he shows us evidence of Funisia, ‘The first sexually reproducing fossil on record,’ Ian says of the tubes that look like masses of corn on the cob to me. Ian says of the variety of fossils imprinted on the rocks, that it’s ‘Like leaving a Frisbee on the grass.’ The Dickinsonia and others would have been immobilised on the seabed where they absorbed the microbial matter of the first things that moved, leaving a patch below them, just like a Frisbee does if we leave it on the lawn overnight.
One fossil, the size of a grain of rice, gets Ian particularly excited. The Helminthoidichnites is a small organism with a through-gut, it is a burrowing scavenger and the most complex life form from the Ediacaran period. ‘Our best guess is that we evolved from this guy,’ Ian says of the tiny flecks on the rock.
Over the years they’ve slowly brought up slabs of rock from the creek bed at the bottom of the hill to piece these stories together. Ian hands out silly putty to everyone so we can get in close and take our own moulds of the fossils to better appreciate the ridges, plugs and swirls on the skin of the rocks. While the outdoor setting in northern South Australia is what makes this so special, this isolated patch gets visits from researchers all over the world, including Sir David Attenborough, who has twice visited this site.
I noticed two shipping containers on the approach up the hill with their gear inside and security equipment to monitor the site, and a new 4WD below the hill. Ian tells us that a large part of their funding for the Nilpena Ediacara site comes from NASA. Their Alternative Earths team is interested in the extinction of early animals and the relationship between falling oxygen levels and sea water. This will give them a better understanding of what life on Mars may look like, as it is much more likely to resemble the Dickinsonia or the recently named Obamis, after former President Barack Obama, than it is a little green man in a spaceship.
Ian says that they now use drones to accurately map areas and they’re also investigating the use of laser scanners to reproduce fossil casts in the future. It’s not all futuristic, though, and I watch the other researchers on their hands and knees in the fossil beds with brushes and bottles of water, laboriously scrubbing new slabs of sandstone to discover more Ediacaran examples.
Ian has work to do, so he says goodbye and continues decoding this ancient puzzle on the side of the hill. Ross gets us back in the bus and we bounce back down to Parachilna, past the glimmer of Lake Torrens in the distance and to the highway once again.
On the surface of things, I first dismissed this area as a warren of grey nomads, red-cheeked farmers and scrubby desert. Stepping back through the history, from the copper mines of 150 years ago, to the Aboriginal etchings thousands of years old, and now to the swirls and imprints which have been on the rocks and in the hills here for 555 million years, it reveals the immensity of what is buried in the innocuous-looking dirt once you step back through the layers of its past.
CHAPTER 10
THE LONELY NORTH
I’ve been thinking about isolation a lot on my drives through South Australia – I’ll spend ten hours in the car driving the distance of many small countries without coming up for air or without talking to anyone, lost in thought and staring along the white line to the horizon. It helps me to maintain balance and to have some sort of equilibrium outside of work, kids, family, emails and the chaos of everyday life.
Just as walking at night once allowed Charles Dickens to process his life, his writing and all his problems as he tramped through the foggy London darkness in the 1860s, it is the same for me now, staring into the vacant expanses of South Australia’s roads while the kilometres tick over helps me make sense of the world a little more. I need it to put everything in a filing cabinet of sorts, and sitting behind the wheel helps me do it.
Along the way, while I’m driving, it’s not unusual to see a solitary traveller on a bike, pedalling along the edge of the road with panniers full of supplies as they disappear into the desert or sometimes, like on the way to Coober Pedy once, a man barefoot walking alone along the centre line of the Stuart Highway hundreds of kilometres from anywhere else.
My latest long drive is to William Creek. It is supposedly Australia’s smallest town, with a population of ten (though a permanent population of one, I’m told), so I imagine that Trevor Wright – the eccentric publican and chief pilot of Wright’s Air onsite must know a little bit about coping with isolation in his desert pit stop 160 kilometres east of Coober Pedy and 200 kilometres west of Marree along the soupy dirt road of the Oodnadatta Track.
After the 850 kilometre drive from Adelaide to Coober Pedy I turn right in town and descend onto the red, flat country where the Moon Plains stretch to the north. The pebbles on the road are hard and perfectly round – they look like little fragments from meteorites and there’s every chance they are the scalded remnants of an ancient meteor shower. I can see for 100 kilometres to the south and the dust plumes of approaching trucks are visible for 20 minutes before they arrive and force me off onto the soft shoulder to avoid a cracked windscreen.
I pull in to rest my eyes at a stand of gnarled trees – there is a slick of water here with grass, ducks and the sound of frogs even in this remote and lonely spot. I continue driving and see the shells of old cars on the side of the road and I’m reminded of how unforgiving this area can be. I pass an old Holden on the left and remember the story told to me by local Coober Pedy guide Wayne Borrett, of three young Indigenous men who died from exposure after losing their way to Anna Creek Station in the 1970s. Wayne regularly drives on the road from Coober Pedy to William Creek as a tour guide and he often pulls grey nomads and their caravans out of the mud. Recently he found a man walking along the track near his broken-down Toyota Prado, ‘And he didn’t even know how to change a tyre!’ Wayne told me incredulously. This stretch is notorious for breakdowns and bad endings, none more so than the 1998 death of Gabriele Grossmueller, the Austrian backpacker whose campervan broke down with a twisted axle near Halligan Bay on Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre. She and her partner, Karl Goeschka, had sufficient water and supplies, though after they hadn’t been discovered for two days they decided to walk back to William Creek – more than 40 kilometres away and in the middle of summer. The conditions were so hot that their shoes would melt on the boiling sand. Karl eventually turned back to the vehicle while Gabriele continued on alone. Gabriele’s body was later discovered in the desert; she had died from heat exhaustion and exposure.
I continue driving, content to rely on my jerry can of diesel, my off-road puncture kit and 20 litres of emergency water. Trevor is expecting me at William Creek and people know what time I left Coober Pedy in the other direction. Ahead is the shimmer of Lake Cadibarrawirracanna – a 60 square kilometre salt lake hiding behind the soft sand dunes. I turn onto the Oodnadatta Track towards Anna Creek Station, the largest cattle station in the world at 24 000 square kilometres, and the straight stretch to William Creek. I wind down the windows despite the heat, just for some noise in the car. The tinnitus whine of the silence becomes too much out here. A sand goanna scuttles across the road
and the landscape changes to flaky, yellow clay as the five squat buildings of William Creek appear.
The place is deserted. I wander around and hear the radio in the workers’ quarters. Trevor is covered in white paint – he has a mop of snowy hair and Harry Potter– esque glasses on his nose. He’s painting the rooms white to liven them up. ‘Let’s get a coffee,’ he says and takes me across to the bar.
It’s well past 40°C now, though Trevor thinks nothing of walking around in the sun with a scalding hot cup of coffee – I wonder if it’s the same theory I encountered in India – where the sweat induced from drinking hot beverages eventually cools the body when there is a slight breeze, though I think Trevor just wanted a coffee, to be honest.
Trevor has been at William Creek for 30 years, though he thinks that he’s only got a few more years left in him of coping with the struggle and the isolation.
‘Why are you here?’ I ask.
‘It’s halfway to Adelaide and Alice Springs, it’s the closest point to Lake Eyre, the old Ghan and to Anna Creek.’ It’s an answer I’m sure he’s rehearsed.
It’s funny, despite the loneliness of where William Creek is and the challenges associated with living here, Trevor seems to have an unending list of things to do to occupy his time. He’s built up one of the most iconic outback pubs in Australia and in his hangar he now has 18 planes for scenic flights around remote South Australia.
Trevor’s all alone out here, with only his own timetable to adhere to, though he can’t sit still. We jump in his ute while he takes rubbish to the ‘dump’ he created outside of town. ‘There’s no Bunnings and no Google here,’ he says. ‘Gotta be quirky to make it work,’ he adds. It helps that he can run a pub, fly a plane, fix diesel generators and work out an irrigation system for all the trees he’s planted, among many other things required to survive and thrive in a place like this.
Despite his never-ending list of tasks, even Trevor needs ‘me’ time. ‘One of the things that keeps you sane is that in one or two hours you can be somewhere completely different,’ he says of the freedom flying gives him. ‘It’s a hobby that went out of control.’
In order to understand some of that freedom, one of Trevor’s pilots, Nick, takes me up in one of their Cessnas. Kati Thanda appears as soon as we take off.
It is mesmerising. The lake is dry and the white salt sparkles below, stretching out 140 kilometres to the north. We dip over Belt Bay – at 15 metres below sea level it is one of the lowest points in Australia. The plane climbs up again and Nick points towards Madigan Gulf, where Sir Donald Campbell broke the land speed record in 1964. The clouds around us look like ink stains on the surface of the dry lake as we pass the now infamous Halligan Bay where Gabriele Grossmueller broke down.
Nick pushes the plane up further to cool the cabin, which must be pushing 50°C, and we fly across to the strange sight of the Marree Man. Below us is the earth ‘painting’ of a nearly 4 kilometre long Indigenous man with a hunting stick on the desert floor. It appeared in the desert here mysteriously in 1998 and while I don’t get a straight answer from Trevor, I suspect he had a hand (along with the publican of the Marree pub) in restoring this outback geoglyph recently with tractors and graders to bring curious tourists to the area.
Nick eventually takes us back down to William Creek and past the beautiful ‘painted hills’, which are a series of fluorescent ochre-coloured hills on the edges of Anna Creek Station.
Back at the bar and under the air conditioner, I look out at the sparseness of the red plains shimmering outside and the strange sight of a solitary cockatoo drinking from puddles where the trees are being watered. I hear a plane coming in to land and pop my head out of the pub to take a look. The small plane lands on Trevor’s paved airstrip (a fact he is very proud of ), and out comes a sweating Scottish doctor, a pilot and a nurse. It is the Royal Flying Doctor Service and they are out in remote South Australia doing their check-ups and regular rounds on the people who live in some of the most isolated communities in Australia. The doctor gives me his card and says I should call them when I come through Port Augusta on my way home. I want to know more – about the RFDS and about the people they visit. If I stay any longer at William Creek, Trevor is going to have me either painting rooms or learning to fly, so I say my goodbyes and begin the drive south once again.
In 1911, Reverend John Flynn arrived by horse and camel at the remote station of Beltana and realised that neither the workers, visiting travellers nor anyone else in the Australian outback had proper and reliable access to medical care. Heat stroke, snake bites, heart attacks, pregnancy complications, farm accidents and things as simple as stomach bugs would all remain either untreated or dealt with onsite as best as they could. The closest hospital was in Port Augusta 240 kilometres south, and there was one case where a worker at Nonning Station rode 150 kilometres on his pushbike just for a bottle of medicine. This set the Reverend on a path to conceive of a way he could provide medical care for those in remote Australia. After receiving a letter from a young airman, Lieutenant Clifford Peel, who suggested the use of planes to take medicine to the outback, Flynn had the blueprint for how he wanted to revolutionise health care in remote Australia. Unfortunately, Peel was shot down and killed while on patrol in France in 1918, though this spurred Flynn on further and he campaigned for an aerial medical service to be established. In 1928, it became a reality.
The first pilot, Arthur Affleck, took off from Clon-curry in Queensland on 17 May 1928, flying a singleengine, timber and fabric biplane called Victory. Along for the ride was the first flying doctor, Dr Kenyon St Vincent Welch. Affleck and Welch had no navigational aids and there was no radio on board; they navigated using a compass and spotting landmarks such as fences, rivers and dirt roads along their route.
The first medical flights were made during daylight hours because of the limitations the planes and the pilots faced, though night flights were attempted in cases of extreme emergencies.
Eventually, fuel dumps were established at stations around remote Australia to help when the doctors were flying long distances. In 1928, the Aerial Medical Service (which changed its name to the Flying Doctor Service in 1942 and the Royal Flying Doctor Service in 1955) flew 50 flights to 26 destinations around Australia and treated 225 patients.
From those humble beginnings, the RFDS now has 88 541 patients in rural and regional Australia, as well as 69 aircraft and 24 air bases around the country. It also transports an average of 16 patients a day with cardiovascular disease – as hospitalisation from coronary heart disease is 1.6 times more likely in regional Australia and one of their biggest challenges.
With 25 per cent of South Australia’s population of 1.8 million living outside Adelaide and surrounds and the entire state having an area of more than a million square kilometres, the state relies heavily on the services of the RFDS, not only for emergencies, but also for the sort of basic health care many of us, who can book a local doctor’s appointment down the road without a hassle, might take for granted.
I want to understand what role the RFDS plays in the lives of regular and remote South Australians, so I travel to the Port Augusta base – which services an incredible 840 000 square kilometre area – to do a ‘station run’ on the properties around the Birdsville Track in the far north-east of the state.
I arrive at the airport out of town in the early morning as the crew readies the plane for our day of house calls. With me is pilot Dave Phillips, Dr Betsy Williams and nurse Caitlyn Keller.
The plane is a modern Pilatus PC-12 with what looks like a hospital room inside it with a bed, monitors, a defibrillator and drawers full of different medications and paraphernalia for whatever situations they might encounter. Dave takes off and the plane lifts up over the morning fog to reveal the flat, grey water of Spencer Gulf below. The Flinders Ranges are still the colour of blue bruises in the early morning and we follow the trail of the mountain shelf next to us, continuing northwards. We are dropping off supplies and refuell
ing at Marree for our first stop, as they have a breastscreening clinic operating in the town at the moment. The plane arcs over the top of a dry riverbed – it looks like a white snake’s tail above the crinkles of the ranges. The curved serpent reminds me of the Dreaming story Arthur Coulthard told me of Yurlu Ngukandanha. The Wadlata Outback Centre in Port Augusta states that there are two lenses with which to understand the outback here – the Aboriginal Dreaming and the European scientific: ‘Both explanations greatly enrich our appreciation of the special place that is the outback’.
The landscape looks empty and bald, though I still notice the thin branches of creeks and tributaries spreading out like the veins on an arm, pumping life into the most remote pockets up here.
We see the dust plumes of a truck on the edge of south Kati Thanda while Dave tells me a little of his story before we touch down. He has been a pilot for six years and he used to work in tropical north Queensland.
‘It’s just as beautiful here,’ he says as I catch a glimpse of the white expanse of the lake out the left side window, ‘it’s just a different colour!’
We land in Marree and it’s already hot. Red-faced and sweating, Lyall Oldfield from the caravan park is here to meet us – he’s also the fuel man in Marree. We have to manoeuvre the plane over closer to the tanker to get our 350 litre top-up, as Lyall’s truck blew a tyre on the tarmac the other day when the temperature reached 52°C.
The RFDS is also in the process of doing meningococcal vaccinations in Marree. Caitlyn tells me it’s because ‘Marree is generally a low disease place because it’s so isolated’, and a local resident has agreed to pay to vaccinate the entire school.