Donovan’s World

‘White fellow’s hole in the ground’.

Remember the old joke?

Question: ‘What do you get when you cross an elephant with a kangaroo? Answer: ‘Holes all over Australia’.

You could be forgiven for thinking that that’s what’s happened at Coober Pedy for the desert surrounding this arid outpost in outback South Australia is a lunar landscape of craters. But they weren’t made by fantastic monsters, they are vertical shafts or large, open trenches formed by miners searching the land for opals, Australia’s national gemstones. You see, the infuriating thing about opal mining is that unlike gold or silver where you follow a lead until it’s worked out, there are no wide seams. So you try and try again, leaving holes wherever you go!

Coober Pedy would not exist were it not for opals. It’s apparent that not even the local aboriginal tribes had a name for the place for it was only after the opal field was discovered in 1911 by a fourteen year old boy, Will Hutchinson, that they called it Coober Pedy - ‘white fellow’s hole-in-the-ground’. It is an inhospitable place where little grows naturally and where, without human modification, all that would move upon the land would be snakes, lizards, the odd slinking dingo or soot-black emu, and ubiquitous carrion birds - nature’s undertakers.

Here where summer temperatures often greatly exceed 45 degrees Celsius and winter nights can be bitterly cold, men work underground because they must: but they live underground because they choose to. Sometime early in the history of Coober Pedy, long before the invention of air-conditioners, somebody discovered that, underground, the average year-round temperature is about 23 degrees and that if you carve man-made caves into the low hills and fill them with furniture, home appliances, carpets, books and paintings you can have a home fit for a king.

So, over the years, as happens with all frontier or industrial towns (especially those which turn also into tourist attractions) comfort and civilization have been added to make life not only tolerable but positively luxurious and Coober Pedy now boasts (both terrestrial and subterranean) several hotels and motels, some excellent restaurants many of which specialize in local cuisine such as emu and kangaroo steak; art galleries, opal shops and displays, supermarkets, banks, an underground bookshop and variety shops.

When I visited Coober Pedy on a photographic trip with an old friend we had approached from the north, from Ayers Rock, along the 3000km Stuart Highway that connects Darwin with Adelaide. Passing through the conical heaps of mining tailings that border the highway, we arrived in a golden twilight, and booked into the town’s famous underground motel. Not liking the idea of early interment I was pleased to find that they offered above-ground rooms but I was grateful that they were air-conditioned. The proprietor proudly showed us his diplays of opals and I marvelled at their range of colours and their sparkling lustre. He explained that they are formed of solidified silica gel whose spherical particles, when perfectly aligned within the stone, will refract the brilliant spectral colours that make opal so unique and distinctive.

Next day we took an hour’s flight over the town and its surrounds in a light aircraft. From above it’s almost surreal, the opal workings and their ‘heaps’ not unlike the casts of burrowing insects. The surface seemed deserted apart from the odd ‘blower’ blasting loose spoil from drilled shafts but I knew that there were people working below the surface as I’d been told that opals work a spell, leading miners on, always in the expectation of a big find under the next rock. To the north of the town I could see The Breakaways, a series of beautiful ochreous hills which we later visited by Jeep and photographed: some of the scenes from ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’ were shot among their broad scrub-filled valleys, crumbling ridges and coronet crested hills.

Later we visited our pilot’s opal claim where he and his brother, having so far had a bad day, thrust two copper rods into my hands and invited me to walk back and forth to see if I had any gifts as a diviner. Alas, nothing happened, but nevertheless, as if I were a visiting magician, they asked me where they should drill and I pointed to a spot somewhere in the stone strewn middle distance. The brothers painstakingly lowered their rig, shifted it to the new place, stabilized the platform, threw the drill motor into gear and sent the one metre diameter cylindrical bit screaming into the earth. We left them drilling, oblivious to everything except their hole - great expectations.

Wherever they come from miners are almost a race in themselves - but one apart from ordinary people; Australian, Irish, Chinese, Californian, Scots, whatever, they equally share the perils and, unequally, the rewards of riches they may or may not win from the earth. Because their lives, especially in the early days, were so hazardous they often craved spiritual support and so it’s not uncommon to find churches of various denominations in mining towns - many of them richly endowed. Coober Pedy is no exception: it has four underground churches one of the most impressive of which is the Serb Orthodox Church of the Holy Prophet Elijas. By chance the augurs which drilled the roof of the nave out of the rock left it appropriately vaulted, and the subtle illumination of the altar screen contrasts superbly with the brilliant colours of the stained ‘glass’ window - the only source of natural light.

Before we left Coober Pedy we were invited, by our pilot/miner and his wife to see the new home they were excavating south of the town. It’s in a ‘sub-division’, but where you’d expect to find streets formed and bordered by green lawns and shade trees there’s apparently nothing until you notice windows and doors let into the sides of low hills above which sprout television aerials, air ventilation pipes and radio masts.

Our hosts’ ‘dugout’, a series of rectangular burrowings, will eventually be a sumptuous subterranean ‘mansion’ of 460 square metres equipped with every modern convenience cool in the searing summer and warm under cloudless chilly desert nights.

I asked the pilot’s wife whether anybody had ever drilled a hole into somebody else’s house from the other side of a hill.

‘Oh - it happens quite often,’ she said, ‘but when it does they just apologise, back off, and fill in the hole!’

I wonder whether the opal miners are equally tolerant if somebody drills into their claim?

Clearly everything that’s worth anything is underground in Coober Pedy.

© DON DONOVAN

Thursday 24 March

Blue patches, but too much pudding in the sky. It would only get worse. No chance of a helicopter that day so we drove 59 km south-west to Cooinda to an area called Yellow Waters where the Jim Jim River links with others to fill a basin of billabongs with reckless names - Jim Jim, Leichardt, Red Lily, Bucket and Alligator - which form one huge expanse of wetlands, birth-canal of the north-flowing South Alligator River. Yellow Waters is renowned for its wild life: crocodiles, fish, snakes, lizards, waders, geese, ducks, storks, eagles, hawks and passerines; we were anxious to get photographing. Robin talked to the manager of the Gagadju Lodge and he was able to arrange for us to be taken out by the head guide on one of the flat-bottomed aluminium scows that normally carries about thirty visitors.

We couldn’t have it both ways. In the wet season Yellow Waters’s wild life is scattered to its distant margins. On the other hand the waterfalls are in full flow. Our guide explained that it is not until The Dry, when the flood plain has shrunk to its very basic river courses or the strings of evaporating billabongs that mark their dried up channels, that the wildlife comes in concentration, the need for access to water over-riding their fear of predators. On our day we saw a lushly floral waterscape rather than a fauna-filled landscape.

He was using the scow, driven by twin 40 hp Honda outboard motors, to cut channels through choking waterlilies so that those few tourists who came to Yellow Waters in The Wet could explore the inundated forest. In company with us, but at a distance, a tourist boat bore a coach-load - Germans mostly, but also some aborigine children who waved for our cameras and gave huge, white-toothed smiles. It was handy to have in it the picture, to give depth and scale to an otherwise verdant infinity.

We would drive the scow into a bed of lilies, pushing aside the green soup plates and pretty mauve, yellow and white flowers, then reverse engines so that the entangling filaments were thrown off the propellor blades. We drove deeper and deeper, pushing and backing, probing ways through the paperbarks, occasionally observing a bird’s nest or some special tree, using common and scientific names. We photographed: a pretty Jacana, a little lotus bird with a scarlet cap and spatula-toed feet that let him walk on lily pads as if they were flagstones; cormorants and darters - wings drying half opened like cloaked schoolmasters perched warily on dead tree limbs jutting from the mirrored surface; and a Jabiru, Australia’s only stork, lifting into measured flight on huge black and white wings trailed by dripping crimson legs.

I asked our guide if lotuses (which grew in patches all over Yellow Waters) had a narcotic property and immediately he quoted bits of Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos Eaters’: ‘“Courage”, he said and pointed toward the land… A land in which it seemed always afternoon…’ but said that, to his knowledge, there was nothing in the lotus that would make a person dream. I wish we could have spent more time with him but he dropped us off, after a couple of enchanting hours, at the Cooinda jetty, declining our offer to buy him a drink but inviting us to drink our wine later in his office whose walls were decorated with Hindu paintings. From there we took our leave. A man of great depth…

But still we hadn’t seen a crocodile.

© DON DONOVAN From diary notes: ‘Kakadu and Beyond’

I made a little note that afternoon:-

‘This is a different experience from the trip Robin and I did around the Red Centre two-and-a-half-years ago. That was a desert journey; hot dry days, cold dry nights. Here, the tropical humidity saps all energy and stresses the body’s systems, especially the heat-exchanger. The flora of Kakadu are luscious, strong-growing, fecund, sensuous.

Lotuses have a mute, threatening intelligence (like the sun-staring girasole of Italy), the paper-barks seem strangely vulnerable and dainty; and fist-sized mauve-petaled water lilies flower boldly beside their tiny white and cream cousins - naiads consorting with nymphs. Dragonflies pepper the sky like world war one bi-planes, they come at the car in head-on attacks but very rarely hit the windscreen; their relatives, the damsel-flies are tiny strips of blue and red neon on mica wings.

Coarse, broad-leaved grasses give shelter to snakes and long, stiletto lizards who dart suddenly with their heads up, seeking height for vigilance. Other grasses, lining the tracks, are taller than a man and give a deceiving impression of intimacy to the forest that lies behind them. At Jabiru nothing can be seen from the ground that gives direction. No hills; only the sun which rises over forbidden Arnhem Land and swings north to light up the flooded streams of the Alligator rivers.’

At dinner in the Escarpment Restaurant of the Crocodile Hotel I sweet-talked waitress Annabelle into sweet-talking the chef to depart from the set menu and do for me barramundi grilled in olive oil, and steamed potatoes. She did, he did; it was simple and delicious.

As we returned to our room lightning flashed in the southern sky but too far away for its thunder to carry. Instead the night crickets rattled while small lizards hung stencilled on the hotel wall. The air smelled of a subtle perfume.

© DON DONOVAN

From diary notes: ‘Kakadu and Beyond’

Saturday 27 March

There was a marked change in the weather. We sniffed it as we walked outside our room; a different feeling. The sky had changed, too and instead of there being clear blue above but cloud over the escarpment we now had strings of high cloud overhead, soft feathers against the blue.

We drove out to Jabiru airfield and found Des-of-the-huge-hands sitting in his air conditioned, forest-green cuboid shed; he agreed to take us up.

We lifted off in the Jet-Ranger, having waited four days for a break in the weather, and headed south-east towards the escarpment that’s virtually the western boundary of Arnhem Land. From just a few metres above the ground Kakadu National Park was revealed as an open-forested plain stretching limitlessly west, a sameness of trees and shrubs on a vastly flooded grassland base. Nothing could more emphasize that this was the wet season than the straight, red-clay tracks we occasionally flew across that ran into water, to reappear again later, tracks impassable even to four-wheel drive vehicles, their usefulness proscribed by the slightest descent below flood level. Short of foot-trekking (which would be madness) the only way to the waterfalls was by helicopter.

To the east the escarpment rose, at first unimpressively. Its geological importance lies not in its height but in the difference it marks between the Kakadu flood lands and the hard rock crust of Arnhem Land. As we approached the cliffs they became more impressive but again this was not because of their height - no more than 100 - 200 metres - but their length, they stretched to north and south, a forbidding red-rock wall. We flew at no more than 500 metres and hugged the cliffs for a considerable distance until, after passing low over a detached outcrop which came up to meet us, its crazy stones labyrinthine as a brain, we were confronted by Twin Falls, where the escarpment runs east-west. This was the lesser of the waterfalls but grand all the same, its modest plateau stream bifurcated at the lip into sudden turmoil. Des held the Jet Ranger steady as we waited for cloud shadow to pass and then photographed the falls, fully lit by the late morning sun.

Jim Jim Falls are to the east where the escarpment has turned north-south. A much more splendid display than Twin Falls, the waters drop into a self-carved gorge the northerly face of which, this day, was in deep shadow. We were probably a little too early - maybe thirty minutes - but the falls themselves were in full sunlight and as we made our first pass the spray clouds billowing from the base of the fall threw a brilliant rainbow. Then, having passed the rim, above Arnhem Land and looking back towards Kakadu, we could see that the stream that makes the falls seems nothing much at all; Jim Jim Creek - its name both above and below the falls - weaves as a thousand other water courses across the plateau, placid, narrow but not apparently deep, until, like Twin Falls, it hits the edge and turns into a fury.

Des lowered us down the face of the falls until we were almost at the gorge floor, slowly gyrating and moving gradually across the deep and surprisingly still sandy-beached pool at its base. Looking up from there I marvelled (as even a child of the technological age can) at the ease with which we had been above, around and below the falls in a few minutes, seeing it as only a large bird could.

Back over Jabiru we dawdled above the Crocodile Hotel and took pictures. Only from the air, of course, does the crocodile shape become real - and really quite inspired. I still couldn’t work out, though, whether the architect’s motives were born of kitsch, humour or näivety. Probably tongue-in-cheek.

© DON DONOVAN

From diary notes: ‘Kakadu and Beyond’

DON DONOVAN

Beware! Danger lurks in any unfamiliar environment. A seemingly harmless excursion very nearly turned into a matter of survival when I decided to walk alone to photograph some aboriginal rock drawings in Kakadu National Park in Australia’s Northern Territory. This is an extract from my diary…

‘Friday 26th: I drove from Jabiru to Nanguluwar on the northern side of Nourlangie to visit the Angbangbang rock art gallery. As usual, the car park designated for the tourist attraction was in full sun and at an indecent distance from the rock; 1.7 km to be precise. This was all very well for the sake of ecology, conservation or whatever other reason apart from bloody-mindedness that might be put forward but it takes no account of the elderly, the infirm or even your average tour-bus tourist. Australian National Parks are, I’m sure, deliberately designed for back-packers - tramping types in tight shorts and ankle boots - in fact anybody who resembles the park staff themselves.

As I left the car, having drunk a large amount of water but unwilling to load myself up with any more impedimenta than necessary beyond cameras and tripod, I was amazed at the force of the heat; the hottest yet experienced and exacerbated by airlessness. A short distance along the path I met a forlorn party trailed by a drooping, fat woman who looked extremely distressed. She was staggering, her pinkly blotched flesh slimy with perspiration, hair hanging lank and wet below a felt hat that sat, sweat-stained on the back of her head. She looked at me with the desperate-to-be-beatified eyes of a martyr, ecstatic in suffering, and I smiled encouragingly, whispering: ‘You’re almost there.’

Having seen her, I felt fit and able to undertake any challenge. The walk was easy for the first twenty minutes until the path broke up, ill-defined on harsh, boulder-littered ground among trees. I started to ascend around and over rocks which had fallen from the bluffs, and very soon I was pouring sweat, my pulse thumping fast in my head.

The rock gallery was along a cliff face typically protected by an overhang. There was even less air here and I found breathing an effort as I started to photograph the paintings. They were beautiful and included friezes of ‘x-ray’ fishes and turtles done, apparently quite recently, by ‘Barramundi Charlie’ and ‘Old Nym’ two of the last great rock artists of the region. There was a remarkable illustration of a sailing vessel, evidence of the impact of European and Indonesian intrusions between 1880 and 1950; a leaping figure known as Nabulwinjbulwinj (who kills and eats women) and a weird thing like a stick of celery with legs called ‘Algaiho’ - the ‘Fire Woman’, one of the first people to create the world, who planted shrubs in the woodlands and used their smouldering flowers to carry fire. ‘Algaiho’, it was said, hunted opossums with the help of her pack of dingos and she is still feared by the people of Arnhem Land - where her spirit yet lives - because she kills and burns people. So much primitive fear.

Nabulwinjbulwinj

I think Algaiho was at work on me. I was conscious, and only just, of so much sweat pouring off me that my clothing was soaked and when picking up lenses and film from my camera bag which lay on the ground I was having to stand to one side to avoid a constant stream of droplets falling on to the equipment. As I finished the last photograph my vision began to blur, I felt faint and apprehensive. I was alone, losing body fluids fast, and beginning to stumble. As quickly as I could, hoping that I hadn’t left anything behind, I packed up and scrambled, tottering, away from the brooding cliff. I remember taking huge gulps of breath and trying to gather saliva in my mouth. All of a sudden a round trip of just over three kilometres seemed like a day’s march…

I made it, of course, but it taught me lessons: carry water, don’t go alone, don’t overburden yourself. I sat in the oven-like car and drank warm water as I bathed my forehead in the slowly cooling air from the air-conditioning grille. Then after a long time of reflection, frowning and blinking to clear my vision I drove, slowly and carefully back to The Crocodile Hotel at Jabiru to shower and change my clothes.

Perhaps it was worth it to get the photographs but what a fool I’d been; and thank God it hadn’t been a five kilometre walk!’

© DON DONOVAN

From diary notes: ‘Kakadu and Beyond’