​We visited Stonehenge - 26 September 2017

The colour is Kharki! The dirt, grass and trees are all shades of kharki. Soft and subtle. The gidgee trees forming clouds of silvery green-grey along side pale curly Mitchell grass.

And always the trucks! What happened to rail!? Wide road eh!?

No we're not in the UK but still right here in Oz. We're in The Barcoo - look it up!! We spent an hour or so on a much too quick visit - a deliciously icy cold drink in the pub talking to the publican, then a visit to the community/information centre - the people there were a mine of information.

The Stonehenge bar.

What drew us to Stonehenge? the OTH (Over The Horizon) radar system which was installed in the 1950s as part of an early warning radar system. There are three installations - here, Laverton and The Alice. This sophisticated system was evidently invented by Australian physicists! Did we know this?! The totally off-limits base 10 or more Km out of town is now controlled by the UK and the US - I ask you!! I am constantly gob smacked at how much I/we simply have no idea about and what we seem to have let slip from our grasp.

Eau de Nil. Gorgeous colour of the Mitchell Grass downs.

You've got to like big skies and distance horizons to appreciate this country, part of the Lake Eyre Basin

Love this. A car looming on the horizon looking disproportionately and ironically big in this vast setting

Aaaaanyway ..... there we were in the heart of Barcoo country, a Shire bigger than Tasmania but with a population of less than 500 residents.
Temperatures soared to over 40 today - not my kind of weather! The publican told us that the aircon is now on and won't be turned off until Easter and it's not even summer yet! Their temperatures are in the mid to high 40s in summer - note to self 'Do NOT Visit Here in the Summer'! Step aside Marble Bar, I think you've got a challenger.

The wind has been hot and bone dry (stop - where did that phrase come from? as a biologist/physiologist I have to tell you that bones are not dry but ...) and in the words of a local, enough to blow your freckles off. Love it. Hate the heat, but I have found a place I want to come back to.

This poor little female kestrel looked so heat-stressed. A few other birds fluttered in after she took off when I got out of the car with water. But she came back. Birds - you wonder how they survive in temperatures like today but not far down the road we saw gorgeous little orange chats and then flocks of crimson chats. They are so tiny but perfect.

On the way here from Longreach, we saw lots of wild willy willies picking up 'tumble weed' and hurling it into the air. Hop out of the car and the heat - and beautiful silence - rush in and engulf you. This is dry country! When we pulled over for lunch at one of those 'picnic' stops, we found a nankeen kestrel sheltering in the shade beak open trying to cool itself. It took off as I took a bowl of water over to it, but it had returned by the time we took off. Summer has come early! 41 degrees today as we pulled into Windorah - in aircon relative comfort close to sunset. I reckon the car was working a bit too hard though.

I captured part of the solar farm as we mozied on by. Plenty of solar energy out here!

And just another sunset to finish the day. Believe me it got more brilliant as the earth swallowed it up. Such are outback sunsets.

​Mountain ranges to Channel Country 24-27 September 2017

A view over the great expanse of the Thomson flood plains from Swanvale Jump Up.

From driving through wrap-around ranges and iron ridges in the east Kimberley to driving long dry stretches in the Lake Eyre Basin and Channel country. The contrasts on our homeward journey have been quite spectacular.
For days we have driven through Mitchell grass downs, the vista changing every 30-40km with Jump Ups popping up on the horizon every now and then. These are remnants of a very old landscape and have survived because they are capped with very hard rock rich in iron and aluminium. Add water and high temperatures and voila! Solid caps. Terrific vantage points to look out over vast plains and near Stonehenge the Swanvale Fault, centre of earthquake activity in the area.

We're in desert country and here's an Eremophila! As we drive along I was reading about the various species one of which is the Eremophila polyclada - Flowering Lignum so named because it looks like Lignum. And voila there it was! I was shocked. We screeched to a halt and I jump out - in the 41 degree heat. What some people will do for a flower.

Lovely isn't it!? I think that's an ant who met his end wandering through the labyrinth of tiny hairs in the throat of the flower. I am on a hunt for more species. It's hard when they're not in flower but I reckon I've seen a few with green fruit along the way.

This beauty which provides much needed shade, is an Acacia cambagei, Gidgee. Very hard wood but a bit smelly it seems.

This is a dried out native well. Obviously no longer protected

Place names which have intrigued me for ages - Quilpie, Cooper Creek, Thargomindah were places happily discovered with solemn promises to return. It's an area of massive rivers at flood but drought affected most of the year. Stonehenge gets about 300mm pa and that falls over a few weeks. When their river, the Thomson, floods it reaches 22km wide and is over 6m deep in places. This river joins the might Cooper as it meanders and braids its way towards Lake Eyre. Yet they reckon that only 1% of the massive water front of the Thomson reaches Lake Eyre; they lose ~3metres of water to evaporation. And as we passed over these now quiet rivers, the words of Banjo Paterson echoed in my head and 'visions come to me of Clancy gone a-droving down the Cooper' .......
it's a region of earth quakes, rain, flood and drought - and white ghost gums which leap out stark white infrequently enough to surprise you. Did I say I love a sunburnt country! Indeed I do.

The mighty Cooper Creek. When did you ever see a creek this side - and it is not at flood at the moment. Look carefully and you can see a few dots in the water. People swimming. I am guessing from the house boat but there were also some people camped along the bank.

The Cooper from the other side of the bridge. I so want to be there when it floods.

No idea what this is. Pretty delicate flower but deadly prickles and a prickle coated 'fruit'. We saw them on the edge of newly sealed roads obviously come in with the road material. A weed I am guessing?

Anyone have any idea what this is. The 'fruit' looks vaguely familiar but I can't find it listed. Any clues? I found it at Windorah

This is the tree. A very young one I think.

​Heading back to Kununurra- 19 September 2017

This is the Carr Boyd range and just over the range us Lake Argyle. You'd never guess but that's what my clever phone told me!

Heading back to Kununurra from Halls Creek in the wake of TCI ( 'the caravan incident'), we traveled though and passed many significant ranges Muellet, Duran, Bungle Bungle, Carr Boyd and O'Donnell. And humongously wide rivers albeit dry beds at the moment. The river beds are flat, wide, rocky and sandy punctuated with river gums and paperbarks. Some of the larger ones are flanked by large stone groins. One can only imagine the amount of water that gushes along their lengths. Flowering kapok everywhere added splashes of brilliant yellow between the trees as the vegetation changed from desert, through mountainous rock and spinifex to the relative lushness of the east Kimberley.

When we cam through Kununurra back in July, this crossing, the Ivanhoe Crossing over or rather through which the mighty Ord River flows, was closed. This time water levels had dropped but it was still a bit water-wing territory. Great fun!

I had my water wings on but I'm still in the car - really!!!

This is the lovely Silver Box which only grows in the wild in the very northern parts of Oz. It is quite beautiful close up and at a distance in a woodland the entire tree layer appears silver. Stunning!

When we hit the turn off to Kununurra (the hwy goes north to Wyndham), we completed the Great Northern Highway, the longest hwy in WA (it was built to bring cattle to the south - more of that later). As a matter of interest albeit probably only to us! we've actually completed a number of hwys in this trip - Route 1, the Gibb River Road, Stuart, Barkly, Tablelands and Savannah Way which stretches from Broome to Cannes. But back to the story ....

We're on the Victoria Hwy (Route 1) but here is is also the Auvergne Stock Route. A rose by any other name eh!?

A couple of days and the van was fixed, thankfully and we headed east towards the Stuart hwy. About 150 km after crossing the NT border we stopped to help a young German couple who had a flat - they didn't have the right lock key to get the wheel off. After 40 mins or more on our sat phone to RAC in the searing heat, the phone battery went flat. Reluctantly we left them there as they decided to flag a car and return to Kununurra - there were plenty passing. We're now waiting to get the phone bill. Gulp!!

I think this is Razorback in the Pinkerton Range north of the Judbarra NP (Gregory NP).

As we approached the Victoria River valley we were driving the Coolibah Stock Route (Victoria Hwy)

Still on the Coolibah Stock Route, the cliffs cut over millennia by the Victoria River, loom deep auburn along side the road. Spectacular!

We headed on through Timber Creek and Judbarra National Park along Victoria Hwy and what I have since discovered a couple of stock routes. Que? One of the brilliant things the iPhone does is give you the location of your pix - which you probably already know. I was puzzled that a couple of mine had stock routes as the location so I looked it up. I was floored! The country is criss-crossed with a dense network of stock routes. https://www.dnrm.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/99624/stock-routes-map.pdf check it out for Qld. All quite formal and gazetted. I knew about the long paddock as travelling stock routes but this blew my mind! State by state, they are all carefully regulated and monitored, permits for this and that. And of course it is the truckies who want roads like the Tanami track sealed to make their transporting of cattle easier (and cheaper). Well I never! So I started delving as you do and came across the story of the Canning Stock Route. I'll leave you to read more about that along with me http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/canning-stock-route. Who said travelling was an education? This city girl is learning heaps.

This little pet stood guard at No 7 Bore on the Stuart Hwy. We were heading south for the Barkly and Qld border - 3 States in a few days! Way too fast!

​Mimbi Caves: stories in stone from an ancient past - 15 Septmber 2017

The rocks are jagged and stained black by millenia of cyanobacteria activity.

Underneat the blackened surface the rock is various colours. The patterns in the cliffs made by cave ins and erosion like this conjured up all manner of creatures from other worlds. 

before we entered the caves which had been carved out lover thousands of  years by water, we had to rub a peddle under our arms and throw it into the water to let the rainbow serpent we were OK.

A 160 or so km from Tunnel Creek, 90 km east of Fitzroy Crossing, we visited another spectacular and significant geological site - Mimbi caves. This cave system is also part of the ancient Devonian reef system and shows ancient fossilised reefs.

There were quite a lot of rock painting which we could access but there were many more deeper in the cave system which was off limits to us,

We walked in with the aid of torches

Unlike many caves the stalactite and stalagmites were not lit with coloured lights. They came alive when we shone our torches on them,

We saw it through the eyes of the people who have lived in this area for thousands of years. The Gooniyandi people are the traditional owners on the region. Now cattle graziers, they were once enslaved. A dark history. Harrison Skinner, traditional owner and our guide, took us exploring through a small part of this magical system of caves carved out by flowing water over the millennia.
These caves are on his land and we were treated to the traditional stories of the origins of the caves and surrounding land.

this is the remnants of a group of European archaeologists who left a scar on the site and took priceless artifacts - fortunately they were recovered! This is a chess board and set they made out of limestone cement.

They modified this cave and lived in it for I think 6 months

The tour ended with damper and billy tea around a camp fire and were entertained by Harrison 'Indie' Skinner.

This is Indie our guide.  Delightful sense of fun and humour.  

On the way back to visit Geikie Gorge, the wheels fells off our plans!! Sadly we never got to Geikie Gorge.

​Wounded in action - 16 September 2017

Another sunset! This time we're parked on the side of the road between Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek waiting for a tow truck. Broken bl ..... caravan axel! Wouldn't you know it. That's the way of 'the way' eh!? The old girl - the van - has travelled over 20,000km this trip; not bad.

we were close to going over the edge - scary thought!

My faith in the basic goodness of people was reinforced - again. We had so many offers of help as we were crouched on the side of the highway 100km back to Fitzroy Crossing one way and 200km to Halls Creek the other. Three carloads of people helped get the van to the side of the road and cut the wheel free - it looked like a big sad broken leg sticky out the side of the van. A couple took Lindsay back into Fitzroy Crossing and another couple drove him back to our rig some 4 hours later where I was 'standing' guard over our precious rig (a little on edge 'our there' alone!).

Lindsay was operating the lifty thingo.

The tow truck arrived a couple of hours later. Angelo the driver, was a sweetie and very patient. I forget that to the world we look like oldies! People are so kind and caring. It's lovely. Thanks to RAC (and the extra cover we took out), towing was taken care of and we have a motel room. We're perfectly together albeit with unexpected time to kill until!
A few days later we were back on the road to Kununarra, Hall's Creek didn't have the expertise.

Looks a bit down in the heel one side!

You know the saying - what goes round etc?  well as fate would have it once we were on the road and heading back east. That very same day we stopped to help a young German couple who had a flat but no way of getting the wheel nit unlocked - neither did we  They spent over half hour on our sat phone to RAC - all standing around in the stinking heat. Unfortunately in the end we ran out of battery so they opted to wait for a passing car going back to Kununurra - we were 150 Km out. They wont forget their trip to the top end!