The Crow Eaters Page 18
Just before the sun sets, we pass the enormous refinery at Moomba. Steel pipes twist through the structures, lights flash and funnels of fire spout from the stacks. It looks like a small city and it reflects the other side of this basin, the ‘boom’ that has contrasted the droughts, displacements and deaths in this inhospitable corner of the state.
As expected, water is a big issue here. When the creek is full, they draw all their water from the Cooper and filter it before it is used for drinking, showers, the hotel and everything else. ‘In January 2018 the Cooper went dry,’ Jo says as we roll through the desert, and I find it hardly surprising. ‘It was the first time in many, many years we’d run out of water, though there hasn’t been good rain here for seven years,’ she adds. This might seem like an inconvenience for someone else to overcome, though when the closest settlement is nearly 500 kilometres away and there’s no council infrastructure, they had to work out a solution themselves or face the prospect of abandoning the desert for good. ‘The fear of running out of water is something I’d never experienced,’ Jo says.
The town got together to work out a solution, as they realised that no-one else was going to solve their problem. ‘Water is a political thing: between neighbours, families, towns,’ she says of the restrictions and rules they tried to implement.
‘He’s using more, she’s using more … what happened at Innamincka happens everywhere – arguments. So the town decided to buy a water truck so we could bring water in from the Elizabeth bore 14 kilometres away. We have to future proof as much as we can. But we don’t know how long it’ll last,’ Jo says.
‘When things go wrong you’ve got to fix them – you can’t dwell on what you don’t have. If you don’t fix them, you might have no power, no water, no food,’ says Jo as if to echo my thoughts on the harshness visible out the window.
The road turns a salmon colour and the air is so still the plume of dust kicked up by a road train in the distance hangs in the air like a bush fire.
Macfarlane and McConnell write of the Dream story here that Ngura-tulu-tulu-ru was a Mura-Mura creation being of the Yauraworka people who came across a group of strangers. They laughed at his crooked legs and arms and so he stole their magic grindstone. A battle ensued and the Mura-Mura used the stone as a shield, propelling his attackers into a great pit in the ground, which he called Yidniminka.
The first permanent European settlement at Innamincka began in 1873 when Innamincka Station was established on a fork between the Cooper and Strzelecki creeks. HM Tolcher writes in her book Innamincka, ‘Within three decades the thousands of Yauraworka and Yantruwantra people who had lived on the banks of the Cooper were reduced to a handful of camps, existing unhappily on the fringes of the station homesteads.’
In 1882 a police camp was established to curb the sale of sly grog and to deal with the horse and cattle thieves in the desert. The police also supervised the ‘remaining Aborigines in the area’ as the outback identity of Innamincka changed. ‘Prisoners were chained to a post in the open air, there being no accommodation provided for them, other than a brush wurley to keep off the worst of the sun.’
A general store opened in 1884 and the first hotel followed not long after in 1885. It was a basic affair, with some rooms having calico ceilings and cement floors, and others being gravel and open air. Bue Fan, a Chinese market gardener arrived and a blacksmith, Friedrich Robrahn, set up his smithy. Life progressed slowly at Innamincka after it was proclaimed a town in 1892. So slowly, in fact, that the police documents from 1891 report the following crimes over a three-year span: one attempted suicide, two larcenies, one case of threatening language, two cases of drunkenness, one breach of the Crown Lands Act, one case of abusive language and one attempted arson.
One of the interesting complications of the isolated life at Innamincka in the late 19th century was the impracticality of voting. In 1891 the population was a relatively healthy 60 people, and although the motion for Innamincka to be declared a polling station failed, arrangements were made to enable postal voting from 1892 so as to connect them with the rest of the state. Despite this concession, as recently as 1933 it was still an incredibly arduous process, Tolcher writing that ‘an Afghan camel rider took the ballot box from Innamincka to Farina in two and three-quarter days, although the camel dropped dead on arrival’.
While there were high hopes for Innamincka, the distances and the ferocity of the weather, both droughts and floods, meant that it slowly went bust. The Adelaide Chronicle somewhat short-sightedly declared in 1904 that this ‘town has all the appearance of coming prosperity’. Though it wasn’t to be. From 1920 to 1952 it had an average population of only six. Buildings washed away or burned down, most of the famous 200 metre long pile of bottles from the pub disappeared in the wash and while in 1972 the town received something of a rebirth with the discovery of natural gas in the basin, Innamincka has clung to life in its current form for nearly 150 years. In the late 1920s the Australian Inland Mission and an RFDS base was established at Innamincka, along with the Elizabeth Symon Nursing Home in 1928. One of the nurses there, Elizabeth Burchill, wrote a memoir of her time in Innamincka and, despite all the hardships, she keenly recalled the positives:
‘We discovered an entirely new world, rich and varied in service and adventure. Actual loneliness was rare.’ Elizabeth wrote of the dignified Afghans who would take a ‘spell’ at Innamincka and of the wandering professors, travellers, writers and nomads who would bring them news of the outside world. She was constantly surprised by the courtesy, kindness and chivalry she encountered. And, ‘In a small lifetime of days and months’ she began to understand the strange country that Innamincka existed on.
As the inky colours on the horizon disappear and the first stars show in the blackening sky above, we pull into the hotel. It’s lined with utes and caravans and I can see the relief on Jo’s face as she steps out and breathes in the warm desert air. There’s a nice atmosphere at the pub; it’s the sense of release, whether it’s from the completion of 1100 kilometres of driving, the end of a long day on the cattle station or the relief at having pitched a tent by the creek successfully before darkness fell, the dusty faces, sweaty brows and aching legs here seem well earned.
After a beer at the pub and a meal at the Outamincka, I crash. I feel uneasy on my first night. I’m ex- hausted and I fall asleep in seconds once I flop down on the bed, though my dreams are punctuated with sand and thirst and the hallucinatory wandering of emaciated explorers on the verge of death. Behind it all is a soundtrack of crows outside my window: craaaaw, craaaaw, craaaaaw, before the sun rises across the creek. I walk down to its edges in the first light of the day. The Cooper is disarmingly beautiful. Despite the heat that arrives immediately, the flies, the dust, the hopelessness of the Burke and Wills story here, once I slip down onto the banks just after 6 am I understand why so many before me have called it an oasis. The trunks of the coolibah trees and river red gums stretch out from the earth like buried giants, the water is green and still with only the occasional ripple from a fish below. Above, on the edges of this cord of green, it is alive with birds: pelicans float on the surface, swallows and honeyeaters flitter around the smaller saplings and crows and mag-pies skulk on the overhanging limbs.
I can’t quite get my head around how both Burke and Wills died so close to the idyllic spot I’m sitting at, so I enlist Kym and Jo to take me to the sites which have drawn people here as much as the Cooper has over the past 150 years.
There was ‘an excess of bravery’, as Sarah Murgatroyd writes in The Dig Tree, of the whole endeavour. Burke and his party were aiming to be the first to cross the Australian continent from south to north in 1860. It was Australia’s most expensive expedition at the time, with 26 camels, 23 horses, 19 men, six wagons and 20 tonnes of supplies (including 270 litres of rum) leaving Melbourne to enormous fanfare on 20 August.
As the distance, the challenges and their lack of real forward planning became more and more apparent, the party
split; great swathes of supplies were dumped and others were left at designated drop points. William Wills, the quiet and inexperienced surveyor of the party, was promoted to second-in-command, after weeks of second-guessing and infighting among the men. Burke and only three of his most trusted men decided to venture north from the Cooper for a 1500 kilometre dash to the north coast so the whole expedition wouldn’t be an enormous failure and embarrassment. They were naive and inexperienced and, after two months of hard marching, the men got to within 20 kilometres of the northern coast of Australia, close enough to taste the salt water sucking through the mangrove swamps. Bogged and unable to venture further, they turned around and retreated back to the Cooper with strict rations and a punishing schedule through the heat of the desert to reach their depot, still 1100 kilometres away. Malnutrition and starvation set in as they stumbled south. Gray, one of their party members, died 150 kilometres short of the creek.
‘Succumbing to the tide of inertia was unthinkable,’ writes Murgatroyd and, despite their hopeless situation, Burke pushed them on, unable to see how close to death they were. ‘In an amazing display of denial the trio continued on, clutching just a small bundle of supplies each.’ Burke had become obsessed with finishing his journey as he had imagined it from the beginning, at the cost of all else.
One staple that had been supplementing their meagre diets was the paste of the ground seeds of the nardoo plant. ‘Each morning they toiled for several hours in the blistering sun, collecting enough seeds to pound into flour.’
The explorers had repeatedly spurned the help of the local Indigenous people on the Cooper and as such they didn’t know how to prepare the nardoo correctly. They ground it into flour without rinsing it with water and, rather than cooking it, they ate it raw, like a gruel dough, which exacerbated their discomfort and prevented their already malnourished bodies from absorbing vitamin B. Nardoo contains an excess of thiaminase. It has to be carefully rinsed before further preparation, which includes pounding and baking to remove the toxic elements. Bruce Pascoe writes in Dark Emu, his book about the complex and comprehensive agriculture and land management practices of the Indigenous Australians before settlement, of Burke’s and Wills’ bitter ending, ‘Perhaps an explanation of the required techniques may have been forthcoming to Burke’s doomed party if he had refrained from firing his pistol at the people who were trying to keep him alive.’
Such was Wills’ poise and discipline despite this, he held it together until the end. His final words before he died on a sandy bank in a thicket of trees on the edge of the Cooper, ‘I think to live about four or five days. My spirits are excellent. My religious beliefs are not in the least bit changed and I have not the least fear of their being so. My spirits are excellent.’
Later that day, King and Burke gave Wills some nardoo, wood for a fire and water before they left him alone in the desert to die.
It wasn’t long though until Burke had used his last reserves of energy. Filthy, exhausted and aching from his body eating itself from the inside, King laid Burke down beside a coolibah tree next to the Yidniminckanie Waterhole. He shot a crow for their final supper together. Burke managed to eat a little of it, though he died the next morning, still grasping his pistol, leaving King all alone on the outskirts of what is now Innamincka.
In this fertile basin, which had supported numerous Indigenous tribes for thousands of years, these blinkered and stubborn men would meet their ends. As Pascoe writes, this abundance of food could be observed in the era of Burke and Wills also, ‘Near Cooper’s Creek one settler saw women collecting seeds and roots on the flats, “as thick as grazing sheep”.’ He writes that King, the sole survivor of the last push of Burke and Wills’ retreat, later found nardoo stores he estimated at 4 tonnes in an Aboriginal house and that desert in Australia, for all its connotations, ‘is a term Europeans use to describe areas where they can’t grow wheat and sheep’.
Twenty kilometres downstream from the pub, across the sandy floodplain of the Cooper, we drive to the final resting spot of William Wills, the first to die during their last stand. The approach to Wills’ resting spot, marked by a stone cairn, is dry and desolate. Aside from the introduction of farming, much of this country – the big gums, the channels of the creek and the flora and fauna which subsist here – would be the same as it was around 29 June 1861, when Wills died on the bank just above the Cooper. The quietness is the largest presence all along the edge of the creek, pulsing across the sand and the scrubby trees. I scramble down the edge and see that the creek has dried and come to a piddling end only 50 metres from this spot. Bubbles surface from the last pond, evidence that there are still fish in there, slowly suffocating as the water runs out. The sense of helplessness is thick in the air. Kym and Jo have been here before, though not for a few years, and none of us speak as we soak in the final moments of the Burke and Wills legend.
Across the other side of Innamincka we drive the 28 kilometres back to where Burke ended up. We turn left across a hot, rocky field, though if you continue on straight, 63 kilometres away and just across the Queensland border is the Dig Tree. It’s not as desolate here; the trunks of the river red gums stretch out across the sandy soil to the water; it is a beautiful part of the creek with pelicans and corellas on the other bank. Despite the arid beauty, Burke’s resting place is down a gentle embank-ment and in a tangle of old trees out of sight of the water. Not far from this spot is a Queensland bean tree or Bauhinia gilva, thick with moodlu seeds for eating. I find this puzzling, that in his last moments he chose to ignore such a beautiful view, though maybe after all those months of toil and the realisation of his ultimate failure, he didn’t care. A crow perches on the branches above as I silently walk around Burke’s cairn – it’s fitting, considering it was his last meal, however the same sense of waste at their pathetic end is hard to ignore. Jo and Kym’s dog Millie bounds into the water, disrupting the quiet, though there’s the same absence that exists here as with Wills’ final resting place, and the explanations for Burke’s stubbornness and the hopelessness of their end, remain.
As many people know, however, this wasn’t the end of their story on the Cooper. John King, who was only 22, had already fought in India for the British Army and was enlisted into the expedition as a camel handler, despite having no previous experience, was still alive. After discovering his leader dead, ‘rotting in the sun’ and unburied as he had requested, King trekked back to Wills’ body at the Tilka Waterhole to find that he was now truly alone. Here King made the one decision that would save him. He followed the ‘footprints in the sand’ of the Yandruwandha people, who had also discovered Wills, and he found their camp on the Cooper. King was welcomed, given fish and a gunyah to sleep in. Despite the indications by some in the tribe for King to head south, he stayed. He befriended some of them, including the woman Carrawaw who felt pity for the solitary explorer. King continued to follow the tribe along the banks of the creek for weeks. On 15 September William Brahe and Alfred Howitt and their rescue crew had camped at Cullymurra, an important ceremony site for the local tribes, not far from Innamincka. When they noticed groups of the Yandruwandha watching them, a man in what remained of a cabbage tree hat and covered in grime said, to their surprise, ‘I am King, sir.’ He was the last of the expedition. From that day forward John King celebrated his birthday on 15 September, after the day of his rescue on the Cooper.
Later that afternoon, I sit down at the bar with Geoff. He drives the hotel tour boat on the Cooper and does all the maintenance for the hotel to ensure they can survive out here, ‘I make sure there’s power, water, cold beer and food,’ Geoff says of his priorities.
‘I’ve been here for six years and three weeks,’ he adds folding his tattooed arms together, not that he was counting. Geoff says that despite the challenges that brought his partner, hotel manager Nichelle, to tears when they first arrived, Innamincka is now a place they happily call home.
‘I only intended to do a year,’ he says. ‘If you can’
t fix it, make it; if you can’t make it, jimmy it together until you can get the right part in,’ he says of the reality here.
It is a rare thing to have to be as resourceful as this, not just because of the isolation, but also because of the number of people who rely on his ingenuity. ‘Once, when the cold room shut down we had to use bags of ice and eskys for a few weeks until someone could come in and fix it.’ He says it’s not unusual for him to be up at 2 am restarting generators for the solar system, ‘Nothing’s designed to work with these temperatures. And the dust.’ Geoff says that he thinks about leaving, though he’s not really sure what could top the experience of living in the desert here.
While I’m at the bar I also meet Sean Greenwood, the resident barman and surrogate ‘Mr Fix-it’ as he learns the quirks of Innamincka from Geoff. Sean has a similar story to Geoff. They talk to me about the many staff who have lasted less than a week once they begin to understand the heat, the quiet and the distances here, though Sean has just arrived back here for his second stint and he seems content. All the staff who aren’t on shift eat together at night and there is an easiness to the way they all live here together to keep Innamincka alive.
Another interesting reality of Innamincka is that because there are no council services, they have to dispose of all their rubbish themselves. ‘We do what we can to minimise our footprint,’ Sean says, as they reuse, recycle and utilise worm farms as much as possible. There’s a small dump out of town and Sean says that it’s a place where he’ll often see roaming dingoes in the early morning.