Copyright © Tanya Piejus, 2001

7 July 2001

G'day from Darwin

So, I've finally been dragged away from Alice Springs. I would have said 'dragged kicking and screaming from Alice Springs' but I was still drunk when I woke up on Thursday morning with a voice telling me it was time to go and get on the bus. I achieved a personal first on Wednesday evening by being so out of it that I have no memory of what happened the last couple of hours I was out with the Toddy's crew. I have vague recollections of eating a meat pie but that was it until my alarm went off. I've been assured that I didn't do or say anything too embarrassing.

Monday night was spent at the Dust Bowl with eight other Toddy's hangers-on for a spot of dinner and ten-pin. For a bit of excitement it was glow-in-the-dark bowling with luminous balls and only the pins lit up. This obviously helped my accuracy as I won the second game and beat my personal best by three points. On Tuesday night I got to achieve another personal first by running the bar at Toddy's for the night. This basically means keeping the eskies full of Carlton Draught, trying to remember who gets the staff rate and attempting to balance the till. I know I didn't because I overcharged a couple of backpackers during happy hour, but apparently no-one ever gets the figures to work out anyway.

The last three days getting from Alice to Darwin have been a bit of a blur due to post-leaving hangover and a stomach bug. I could have done without the insistent stomach pains and feeling like my brain was loose in my skull, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy the 1721.4-km journey.It's weird being back with a boisterous crowd of strangers after the familiarity of the Alice scene as I haven't felt like a traveller for ages. The early mornings, hours of pounding tarmac and stops to take in the scenery soon reminded me what I came here for though.

The first day we saw the Devil's Marbles which are kind of like a mini version of Kata-Tjuta (the Olgas) with their rocky red domes scattered across the landscape. The night was spent at Banka Banka, a working cattle station where great beasts of road trains roar past on the highway all night. Yesterday we got to experience the bliss of wallowing in the Mataranka thermal pool which is a natural upwelling of 34-degree water in the middle of the palm forest. The afternoon was spent at Edith Falls, a beautiful stretch of alernating cascades and waterholes, ideal for a refreshing dip. Today's excitement was Katherine Gorge. I was feeling too washed-out to join the others in canoes so took a two-hour boat cruise instead through the towering sandstone chasm in Nitmiluk National Park.

And so to Darwin which is hot and feels distinctly tropical. Even 600km north of Alice the air felt stickier and the temperature didn't plummet to near freezing as soon as the sun dropped like it does in the desert country. The vegetation has changed too. The spinifex is gone and there's proper green grass and lush foliage. It's hard to believe I'm in the same country at the moment.

I'll be off to Arnhem Land on Monday and have no idea what sort of facilities I'll have there. If you don't hear from me in the next four weeks, DON'T PANIC! I'm still out there somewhere...

20 July 2001

G'day from Nhulunbuy

Despite the horror stories in the British newspapers lately, I haven't fallen prey to lunatics, fires or crocodiles lately. However, the mozzies, marchflies, sandflies and green ants have been doing their best to make my life a misery since I've been in Arnhem Land. It's been worth it, though, as this is a breathtaking part of the country.

I am one of eight volunteers and my co-workers and our Team Leader are all Aussies and vary in age from 16 to 50 so we're a pretty mixed bag but it seems to be working well. We left Darwin a day earlier than I expected and it took two days to drive all the way out on the lumpy dirt roads to Nhulunbuy (also known as Gove). Few tourists make it out here as it is tough four-wheel driving country and limited permits are required to enter the aboriginal-owned land. Nhulunbuy itself is an odd kind of place. It's the only major town for hundreds of kilometres and is dominated by the activities of the Nabalco mining company. The local aborigines are hemmed into a pocket of land on the tip of the Gove Peninsula.

Our first week here we were working in the Yirrkala aboriginal community with the local landcare group. I had my first ever dose of culture shock after spending the day clearing up rubbish around the houses. I was aware of the deprived state of many aboriginal communities but seeing it for real still gave me a jolt. It's hard to believe that Australia is a First World country when you see people living in Third World conditions. I couldn't help thinking of Africa as I walked around the streets, although Yirrkala is relatively problem-free as communities go. Our Team Leader put things in perspective for me and after the initial shock had worn off I really got to like Yirrkala. The people were extremely friendly and welcoming and genuinely grateful for what we were doing to help them. As it turned out we did very little actual work as we'd been taken there more for the cultural experience than for hard graft. We spent most of the week pottering along various magnificent beaches with the local people looking for oysters to cook on a fire, watching damper loaves rise in the hot coals, digging up and eating turtle eggs, catching and cooking fish and swimming in the warm, bluey-green ocean. We did shed a bit of sweat massacring a few pestilent coffee bush trees on Tuesday. Our final day there we were extended the rare privilege of being invited out to a community that no mere tourist would ever be allowed to visit. It is in a sublimely beautiful spot in a sheltered bay of clear turquoise ocean, surrounded by white sand dunes, lush greenery, palm trees and points of soft grey rock. A solitary sea eagle was floating around on the breezes, a dolphin played out in the bay and even a sprouting coconut began its tentative journey to the open ocean. It was the stuff of dreams. We were there to work, though, and after putting my jaw back in place, it was off to moving building materials, clearing scrub and preparing a camping area for the people coming to the funeral of a community elder - before stripping off and jumping back into the sea!

The serious hard yakka began yesterday. We've now forsaken our lovely campsite out in the bush for the air-conditioned, three-meals-a-day convenience of the Nabalco miners' hostel in town. Under the guidance of Dhimurru Land Management, we spent yesterday building silt traps in a gully to prevent soil erosion and clearing the four-wheel drive track to Cape Arnhem of mangled sheets of rubber that were supposed to help vehicles over the soft sand. Bouncing about in the Land Cruiser was straining my back and I did it in well and truly yesterday afternoon. Consequently I'm having a day off today and getting stuck in to the Tiger Balm to relieve a strained muscle.

It's a hard life!

28 July 2001

G'day from Nhulunbuy, part 2

Cape Arnhem is where flip-flops go to die. That's the conclusion I've come to since we've been doing the beach clean-up this week. Apparently, the water in the Gulf of Carpentaria moves slowly clockwise and at this time of year all the rubbish in the ocean gets dumped on the 40km stretch of coast that we're working on. Apart from the huge quantity of cast-off fishing nets, the next biggest constituent of marine debris is indeed flip-flops, or what the Aussies amusingly call 'thongs'. The idea of losing a pair of thongs at the beach has a far lower snigger factor here than it does for us toilet-humoured Brits. Apart from the beach shoes in various states of disintegration, I've found a huge variety of odd things while I've been scouring the strand line such as three pieces from a chess set, walking stick handles, a toy horse, fluorescent tubes, a hypodermic needle, a soap dish and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle to name but a few.

As well as collecting the rubbish, we're also categorising and counting it. The thongs have their very own entry on the data sheet and last year's volunteers picked up over 2000 of them, predominantly left-footed. This year we seem to be picking up more right-footed ones. Having conducted my own ad hoc experiments into the surfing properties of thongs, I haven't reached any conclusions as to why that is yet but I'm working on it... We've also done more road repairs and after my back muscle had successfully healed with a day's rest I was back to hauling rock and dragging huge bits of rubber about with the rest of the crew last weekend.

Yesterday we went on a tour of the Nabalco bauxite mine. I went expecting to hear the usual corporate drivel and to come away thinking they were evil, money-grabbing monsters but actually Nabalco are unusually sensitive to the cultural and environmental concerns of this area. They have good relations with the two aboriginal land-owning clans and have had a sensible habitat rehabilitation scheme in place from the start, so I was quite impressed by their efforts. They've done a lot more for the area than their original contract obliges them to do.

Since being in town we've all turned into serious gluttons on the three-times-a-day total scoff-fest provided in the Nabalco canteen. It's shameless, but the way I look at it is that I'm going back to being a Two-Minute Noodle-eating backpacker soon so I might as well take advantage of the sticky toffee pudding and custard while it's still there.

4 August 2001

G'day again from Darwin

I've just arrived back in the metropolis after a dusty, bumpy 15-hour journey, over two days, from Nhulunbuy. This week's been more of the same in terms of work but I switched from picking up the assorted flotsam on Cape Arnhem to counting it and recording details for future research. Everything with a product name, country of origin, description or barcode went onto my recording sheet. The stuff predominantly comes from Indonesia. They obviously have a thing for perfumed talc, engine oil and bottled water over there because I noted endless empty bottles of all three. We've also added a rook, bishop and two pawns to the Cape Arnhem chess set and clocked up a grand total of over 1700 thongs. One of the Nabalco miners has a theory about where they all come from. Apparently, many of the Yolngu people fly out to their communities from Gove airport and are required to wear shoes on the plane. Most aboriginal people up here don't normally wear shoes so they buy themselves a natty pair of flip-flops for the journey then jetison them when they get to their destination. The other theory I've heard is that Indonesian fisherman wear them on their boats so that they don't slide around on the decks and in fact manufacture their own little shoes out of sheets of rubber. We've found more than one piece of bright blue foam with foot shapes cut out of it which seems to support this theory. My experiments into left- and right-footed thong travel have alas failed to provide conclusive results as to why we found more of one than the other so that will remain forever a mystery. Apparently, there's a sculpture in Brisbane made out of washed-up thongs. Flip-flops recycled as art? That's almost worthy of Tate Modern. I've done a spot of my own recycling and now have a one-eyed, fish-shaped barramundi lure with a little propellor on the end as a souvenir of my work on Cape Arnhem. It makes a lovely key-ring accessory.

Another excitement for this week was finding a young flatback turtle on the beach being harangued by a sea eagle. We rescued the exhausted little fellow from certain death, named him Soup and sent him by plane to a wildlife hospital in Darwin. As a protected species, he should get first-class care there and, if he recovers from whatever reptilian illness caused him to be stranded on the beach in the first place, he'll be released back into the ocean a new turtle.

We also got permission to spend two nights camping out on the Cape and laid out our swags in a beautiful seaside spot known as The Penthouse. This is another fine example of dry Aussie humour as it has no facilities other than a hammock so we were digging latrines in the sand dunes, cooking on a campfire and taking baths in the ocean. Being located in our work area meant that we were able to finish clearing up the beaches by 11 a.m. on our last day and got to go for a drive right up to the tip of the Cape. This is sacred aboriginal land but one of the Dhimurru rangers, whose country it is, let us through the usually-locked gate and up to the end of the track. This consists of a coral beach and a weird shelf of rock through which the green sea squirts with each wave, sounding like the aggrieved snorting of a leviathan. Cape Arnhem is impossibly scenic and I was cursing the fact that the battery was flat on my digital camera with the charger left behind in Alice. I managed to coax a few pictures out of it but you'll all have to come to my slide show next year to really get a feel for the awesome natural beauty of the Cape.

One thing has been really bugging me since I got to Australia - the Aussies' appalling grasp of written English. Apologies to the locals receiving this but the standards of literacy in your public signage leave a hell of a lot to be desired. Take this example I saw on a hand-dryer this morning:

'Excellent safe face drying is achieved by the same action as water was applied by regular wiping with warm hands during drying cycle.'

I'm not even going to start on the bad spelling and apostrophe abuse that goes on here. OK, I'll shut up now.

Uni friend, Jackie, arrives tomorrow and I'm back on the backpacker trail and will have to stop saying 'Bloody tourists!' all the time.

13 August 2001

G'day yet again from Darwin

My dollop of self-satisfaction for the week came from seeing a 'traveller's tale' I wrote about my pursuit of the Big Things published in a backpacker's magazine called 'The Word'. Not only did they print it for reading by backpackers across Australia but they are also sending me $100 which will keep me in clean socks for a while. So I am officially published at last and at some point I'll put it on my website for those interested in reading it.

It's been a fun-filled week Down Under since Jackie arrived looking decidedly chipper, despite a 24-hour journey from England. Last Monday was Picnic Day. Yes, the Territorians get a day off to scoff. Even though I loathe the idea of animals being used in the name of sport, I couldn't resist the opportunity to see the Aussies in their most natural environment - at the race track. It was Darwin Cup day on Monday too and Jackie is my excuse for moral lassitude as she's nuts about horses. I also put my first ever bet on a race with $5 on Lust No More at 4-1; it came in fifth. I picked another horse in the next race and it too came fifth. I thought I was on to a winner in the big race when I backed the horse with my lucky number which was named after a movie character and was ridden by a fluorescent yellow-clad, race-winning jockey. It came fifth.

On Tuesday we took a tour out to Litchfield National Park which locals rate as being better than Kakadu. We certainly enjoyed the awesome gorges, waterfalls with deep brown plunge pools and rockholes that you can swim in, and the lush monsoon forest. We also saw huge cathedral-like termite mounds and their tiny little occupants, and magnetic termite mounds that are aligned north-south to avoid the midday sun.

Kakadu itself is the big sell in Darwin and we went on a three-day trip to see it. It started with a boat ride on the wetlands where we saw freshwater and saltwater crocodiles basking on the banks or lurking in the water making like submerged logs. There was also a profusion of bird life including magpie geese, bee-eaters, jabiru storks, brolgas, sea eagles, brahminy kites and various herons and egrets. We spent day 2 around Twin Falls where I took my life in my hands and climbed down a crack in the rock known as The Chimney to reach the head of the falls. There we swam in swirling rock pools and toasted in the sun on the hot rock. After that we all swam up the gorge to the base of the falls and gazed up the rock face to where we'd been in the morning, peering down.

Our last day in Kakadu was spent seeing Jim Jim Falls which are dry at the moment and plunging into freezing water at the base. We then went to the Ubirr rock art site and saw the paintings which are very different in style from those I've seen before. Our guide was very knowledgeable about Aboriginal culture and Jackie particularly enjoyed the learning experience. We finished up with a fine view across the northern end of the park of lush floodplains and the rocky escarpment behind which is Arnhem Land. Our guide stopped at the Big Boxing Crocodile in Humpty Doo on the way home, especially for me. Not having had a shower for three days, we returned to Darwin sweaty, filthy and reeking. I pity the people who have our room after us as the smell from our boots was threatening to set the fire alarm off.

We've checked out the toothsome reptiles at Crocodylus Park where we also saw some stroppy leopards arriving from Perth and today went to the excellent Wildlife Park. We've twice been to the night markets at Mindil Beach where I had a foot massage and dined on wallaby shank and possum satay at the Roadkill Cafe ('You kill it, we grill it!'), watched two of Darwin's famous firy sunsets, fed catfish and metre-long milkfish on the Esplanade and seen the Australian Navy preparing for war games in Darwin Harbour.

We're off to Cairns tomorrow at some ridiculously-early hour and I'm saying a temporary good-bye to my bike which I've decided to leave in Darwin until I return in December.

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