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Sprawled
across northwest Australia, the Kimberley is the Outback's
outback. Tony Perrottet follows the songlines of Aboriginal history
across one of the last great wildernesses and discovers giant
crocodiles, caves full of rock art, and a camp so remote—and
luxurious—that only a yacht or a private plane can get you there.
The plan for my rendezvous with an Aboriginal guide in the Kimberley
was presented to me as a model of Swiss efficiency. All I had to do was
fly from New York to the remotest corner of the Outback, drive 250
miles into the desert, and locate a crocodile-filled ravine, where at
precisely 11 a.m. on a Monday morning I would meet up with a character
named Dillon Andrews. "Mate, you won't need to wear a carnation," my
Aussie contact said dryly, when I asked how this guy Dillon would
recognize me. "It's not exactly Grand Central out there."
By the time I was actually in
Australia, waking up before dawn in
the tropical port of Broome and easing my rented four-wheel drive along
a dark bush highway, I felt like I was in the opening sequence of a
Bond movie. What if I somehow missed Dillon? I wondered, shining a
flashlight on my topographical map. It's not like I would just bump
into him out here. Sprawling across the northwest coast of Australia,
the Kimberley is roughly two-thirds the size of Texas, with fewer
inhabitants than a Dallas suburb. It's one of the world's last great
wilderness areas, a land of bloodred mountain ranges and million-acre
cattle ranches where workers commute by light aircraft and mustering is
done by helicopter. Cell phones are useless in this empty
expanse—there's no reception. Soon, as the white-barked eucalyptus
trees known as ghost gums flashed by like tortured spirits, I had the
peculiar sensation that I was sinking into a prehistoric void, never to
be heard from again.
A couple of hours later, I was
speeding along a cattle track called
the Gibb River Road—the only route through the Kimberley's heart—and
the prehistoric void was just where I wanted to be. The rust-red soil
was matched by a lurid blue sky. Plains full of giant termite mounds
were glowing golden in the morning sunlight, while a tornado of dust,
known as a willy-willy, danced on the sidelines. The sense of endless
space was already exhilarating—whole Montanas could be swallowed out
here. It was as if nothing had changed in this elemental landscape
since the Aussie stockmen blazed the route in the 1890s and the
Kimberley became notorious as the colonial Wild West.
The stories of that violent era had
fascinated me ever since I was a
kid growing up in suburban Sydney. Back in the 1890s, when most
Australian states had become quiet outposts of the British Empire, a
bloody frontier war erupted in the Kimberley between pioneer white
settlers and the Bunuba Aborigines, who had lived there for at least
forty thousand years. The most famous "outlaw" was an Aboriginal gunman
named Jandamarra, who is revered today as a sort of black Che Guevara.
This mysterious, romantic figure led a campaign of guerrilla resistance
against cattle ranchers, appearing from the bush like a phantom and
then disappearing without a trace, while newspaper readers in faraway
cities thrilled to his exploits. In the Victorian age, Jandamarra was
regarded as a murderous renegade, but these days he is celebrated as an
Aboriginal hero who struggled to save his homeland from invasion. The
remote Kimberley sites where he hid and fought have been identified,
and there are plans for TV dramas and feature films. To me, following
Jandamarra's story seemed a logical introduction to the Kimberley—and
who better to recount the story than his own Bunuba people?
At last, I turned off at a dust-caked
sign to the appointed meeting
place, Windjana Gorge—a jagged wall of limestone rutted with chasms and
crowned with natural spires rising sheer from the plains. Sure enough,
there was no sign of Dillon, or anyone else for that matter. It was
just me and the kookaburras, flashing their turquoise wings.
Ask any Australian where he or she
dreams of traveling these days
and the answer will almost certainly be the Kimberley. It's the
Outback's outback, a mythic region where the distances are farther, the
scenery grander, and the palette more brilliant than anywhere else on
the continent. Nature works on a biblical scale here: At the height of
the dry season, the interior is a blistering desert; during "the Wet,"
monsoons pour down from the heavens, turning the cliffs into surging
waterfalls and the plains into inland oceans. Thanks to its savage
extremes, the Kimberley has kept its secrets intact. Its mountain
strongholds conceal oases of tropical palms and natural swimming holes
cooled by ferns and dripping moss, and nobody has yet counted the
number of Aboriginal rock art galleries hidden in its cliffs. Think of
it as an Aussie Eden—with the occasional man-eating croc and deadly
king brown snake thrown in, just to keep you from getting bored. Today,
there are only about 35,000 residents in the Kimberley's 162,723 square
miles, nearly half of them Aborigines—compared with a two percent
average in Australia overall—and they take a wry attitude toward their
home's wild reputation: The only sign at the tiny Kununurra airport
cheekily welcomes visitors to "the last frontier." Still, there's some
justice to the claim. It was only in 1983 that the outside world
learned about a freakish geological wonder called the Bungle Bungles
(known as Purnululu to the Aborigines): a monolithic cluster of
glowing, beehive-shaped mountains that are orange with black tiger
stripes—like a city of Ayers Rocks living in the desert. Even ten years
ago, visitors had to equip themselves with outdoor gear, as if they
were competing on Outback Survivor. Today, the Kimberley is
still virgin territory for experiments in Aussie wilderness touring.
I had signed on for two exotic trips
at opposite extremes in this
travel frontier. For the first, I wanted to delve into the Kimberley's
past as the lone guest for three days on private Aboriginal land—in
search of Jandamarra. After that, I would fly by light aircraft to the
ultimate bush camp on Australia's luxury ecolodge circuit.
It was high noon at Windjana Gorge
when a battered vehicle pulled up
in a cloud of dust and a pair of lanky legs unwound from the cab.
Dillon Andrews was decked out in a bright orange shirt, blue jeans, and
a crisp white cowboy hat, at forty-nine years old still looking every
inch the cattle stockman he's been for most of his life. Piling out
behind him were three wild-haired teenagers wearing mismatched nylon
football outfits—all Bunuba students from Dillon's "skin group," or
clan. "This mob's here to help," Dillon explained, as he set Amos,
Ryzack, and Richelle to work boiling up some tea while we pondered the
possibilities for lunch. Amos was all for rustling up some bush tucker,
running over the local menu of snake, wallaby, and goanna, a four-foot
monitor lizard. "I love python," Amos declared, after explaining how
the reptile's skin peels off when roasted on hot coals. "Carpet snake's
beautiful too. But I won't touch king brown."
I was thinking this was going to be a
lean three days when Dillon
brought out the culinary backup—pressed ham, pressed chicken, and
pressed turkey. "I went hunting and gathering in the shop back in
Fitzroy," he said.
A half-hour later, we were all hiking
a trail into Windjana Gorge,
whose placid green waters are shaded by three-hundred-foot cliffs. The
rocks by the path bristle with the fossils of seashells and
crustaceans, relics from when these mountains were part of a
prehistoric coral reef. We crossed an expanse of burning sand to where
a dozen crocodiles were lazily sunning themselves in the river, a spot
Dillon had chosen for a welcome ritual. With a theatrical flourish, he
picked up two pebbles and instructed me to place one in my left armpit.
He chanted a few words in Bunuba, then we both tossed our pebbles into
the water. "That was a message to the spirits," he said. "Just told
them, here, I'm bringing a friend, we don't mean any disturbance." I
don't know if the spirits much appreciated my musky offering; the
crocodiles were certainly unimpressed.
Dillon pointed at the cliffs above us.
Long before the Pyramids were
built, the Bunuba buried their ancestors, shrouded in bark, in the
natural catacombs of this gorge. The biggest cave, high in the
limestone wall, was one of Jandamarra's many hideouts; Dillon's elders
had even found rusted guns and cartridges up there.
"Normally, we Bunuba are forbidden to
say aloud the names of the
dead," he said. "But he was an outstanding individual, a fighter for
our people's freedom."
If Sergio Leone had been Australian,
we'd already have a string of
existential Westerns inspired by Jandamarra. As it is, his bleak,
symbolic story has only recently become well-known outside the
Kimberley. The future outlaw was around six years old in 1879, when the
first white explorers appeared like sunburned ghosts on Bunuba land,
and he grew up on the fringes of the pioneer settlements, caught
between two worlds. By his late teens, Jandamarra had been exiled by
his Aboriginal relatives for breaking sexual taboos—sleeping with a
string of young women marked for marriage with tribal elders—and then
put on trial by white ranchers for spearing cattle for food. To avoid
prison, he agreed to work as a tracker for the Outback police. But
violent conflicts with the Bunuba were escalating in the Kimberley, and
Jandamarra soon found himself helping troopers hunt Aboriginal
renegades in the bush—acting as a traitor, in other words, to his
people.
In late 1894 the inevitable happened,
and Jandamarra was involved in
the capture of his own blood relatives. That night, as he guarded the
prisoners in their neck chains, the Bunuba pleaded with him to respect
his sacred tribal ties. Alone in the darkness, he made a fateful
decision: He shot the white trooper dead and set his relatives free.
Seizing a cache of Winchester rifles, Jandamarra and his makeshift gang
attacked some cattle drovers who were on Bunuba land, then hid out in
Windjana Gorge.
As we wandered the gorge today, Dillon
described how a posse of
white troopers finally found and attacked the group, shattering
Windjana's millennial silence. After an eight-hour shoot-out,
Jandamarra was hit three times and presumed dead; but he was,
Aborigines say, jalnggangurru, blessed with magical powers to
fly like a bird and disappear like a ghost. Three months later,
Jandamarra reemerged to make a string of daring raids, openly taunting
the mounted police who were sent to hunt him down, and for the next
three years, he played a deadly cat-and-mouse game, paralyzing pioneer
settlement.
Traveling with Dillon, I could
certainly appreciate why the troopers
never stood a chance. From Windjana Gorge, we took a turnoff into
Fairfield Station, an enormous cattle ranch operated on a long-term
lease by the Bunuba. We forced the vehicles up and down raw gullies,
across dry rock beds, and through soft expanses of sand. This was
Jandamarra's home turf, and I was completely lost. At one stop, Dillon
saw me scribbling in my notebook and became concerned that I might
reveal the route; I assured him that I wouldn't be able to find it
again for a billion dollars. Finally, after clambering through fields
of sharp "spear bushes," with lizards darting out of our way, Dillon
pointed to a squat sandstone escarpment—his clan's most sacred gallery
of rock art, hidden in the wilderness.
Down on my hands and knees, I shuffled
into the darkness of the
first stone overhang and was confronted by two wide eyes staring back
from the murk. A serene, otherworldly face was framed by halos of red,
yellow, and ocher: Wandjina, the spirit in the clouds, who gives the
Kimberley rain and speaks through thunder. In the next crevice, a
menagerie of kangaroos and dingoes floated across the stone, captured
by the artist with X-ray precision. Finally, I slid on my back into the
heart of the rock, to gaze upon the most haunting image of all: a
European sailing ship complete with mast and spidery rigging, manned by
an oddly feline figure. It was a creative vision of the first white
explorers to reach the Kimberley, probably based on word-of-mouth
reports. It may have dated back to the seventeenth century, when
English privateers such as William Dampier made the first tentative
landings on this alien shore.
That night, by a sandy riverbed
hopping with wallabies, I rolled out
my swag—a sleeping bag with a built-in pad—and stared up at the night
sky, counting shooting stars. I supposed that the twenty-first century
was going about its business somewhere, but here in the Kimberley, time
had gently ground to a halt.
For the next two days, Dillon showed
me around a landscape unaltered
since Jandamarra was a boy. One steaming afternoon, we hiked to a water
hole backed by cliffs that burned orange in the sunlight, where Amos
and Richelle went fishing and I cooled off by skimming across the water
like a platypus among the vines. When I emerged, freshly barbecued
bream had been ceremoniously laid out on a bed of eucalyptus
fronds—without a doubt the most succulent fish I've ever devoured with
my fingers.
But while the Bunuba world is suffused
with light, its spiritual
focus lies beneath the earth, in a sepulchral cave called Tunnel Creek.
This sacred spot was also chosen by Jandamarra as his long-term
hideout—and we headed there as our final stop.
As we approached Tunnel Creek, outside
Fairfield Station, Dillon
became melancholy. Even the land took on a mournful air: The bush for
miles around had just been scorched by wildfires, and the eucalyptus
trees were still aflame on either side of the trail leading to the
entrance to the cave; blackbirds circled in the smoke above, adding to
the Dante-esque atmosphere. We squeezed past a giant rock into the
cave, then had to turn on our flashlights to proceed. The beams
revealed hundreds of bats hanging from the ceiling like sinister fruit;
some flitted through the stalactites with sudden high-pitched shrieks.
The only way forward was to wade along an underground river, soon waist
deep. I shone my flashlight into the black water, spotting translucent
shrimp prowling the sand floor and a deathly white eel slithering in
the shallows.
"This is where Jandamarra was healed
by bush medicine and black
magic," Dillon said quietly, adding that the cave's walls were once
filled with the Bunuba dead. "You can feel the spirits here. It's a
very powerful place."
This hideout had served Jandamarra
superbly—once, troopers blocked
off both ends of the tunnel, unaware that it had a third exit—but his
luck ran out in March 1897. That was when the police brought in a black
bushman named Micki, who helped them track down Jandamarra's gang one
by one. Hunted to exhaustion and badly wounded, the nemesis of the
Kimberley, then aged barely twenty-four, was cornered on a bluff near
Tunnel Creek and gunned down. To prove Jandamarra was dead, the police
hacked off his head, which was displayed in a Derby pub as the settlers
drank in celebration. The skull was then sent to an English arms
manufacturer as a souvenir.
As I waded through the dark water with
Dillon, it felt like these
gothic scenes had all happened yesterday—and indeed, in the grand scope
of Aboriginal history, they had. The repercussions of those days can
still be felt in the Kimberley: Tunnel Creek and Windjana Gorge are now
protected by the Australian national park system, but the Bunuba have
little say in how their sacred sites are managed. Clambering out of the
cave, Dillon said that he wanted to see proper cultural training for
any white guides who bring in visitors, and that a percentage of park
entrance fees should go to the Bunuba, to improve their Third World
standards of health care, housing, and education. "It's time to give
something back," he said with a shrug, squarely focused on the present.
After three days of camping by a sandy
creek bed, I felt that I'd
earned a stint on the cushier frontier of Kimberley travel—the high-end
ecolodge circuit. Whereas Dillon's trips are inspired by the ancient
Aboriginal connection to the land, a string of fancy designer lodgings
have sprung from the more recent, white Australian passion for the
wilderness. In the space of a generation, Aussie urbanites in Sydney
and Melbourne have gone from seeing the Outback as a frightening,
sun-scorched heart of darkness, fit only to be exploited for mining or
beef, to the country's archetypal destination. Now, the farther you
travel from "civilization," the more luxurious the Kimberley becomes.
What Jandamarra would make of this new pioneering trend is anybody's
guess.
The monumental scale of the Kimberley
is an essential element of its
allure, but it makes travel planning a delicate art. It's not a place
you can rush through. But don't be daunted: The region has some of
Australia's most enticing ecolodges, and fleets of propeller planes zip
around like taxis. Still, driving in the Outback is, for many, a key
part of the trip. Four-wheel drive is necessary on the red-dirt roads
(windshield replacements and tire repairs are boom industries here),
and 4WDs can be rented in both Broome, in the west, and Kununurra, in
the east (from about $55 per day).
The weather is best during the dry
winter (June through August),
when the days are a comfortable 80 degrees and the skies are cloudless.
April and May are wonderfully verdant and are peak season for the
spectacular waterfalls; September and October are warm, dry, and
tranquil. Monsoons arrive from November through March.
The country code for Australia is
61. Prices quoted are for April
2006; tour rates are per person. The U.S. consulate is at 16 St.
George's Terrace in Perth (60-8-9202-1224; perth.usconsulate.gov/perth).
Touring
Begin with an air tour of the
astonishing Bungle Bungles, in Purnululu National
Park. Slingair
runs a full-day flying/hiking trip from Kununurra that delivers these
vast, tiger-striped monoliths from every angle. Hiking is limited, but
this trip safely penetrates Cathedral Gorge, a crevice of orange
sandstone that opens into the heart of the park (8-9169-1300; www.slingair.com.au;
$390).
Sites related to the Bunuba Aboriginal
hero Jandamarra lie in the
West Kimberley. For genuine Aboriginal insight, Dillon Andrews's Bungoolee
Tours
offers $1,050 three-day camping trips on Bunuba land, with visits to
Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek, starting from Broome. Book through
Adelaide-based Outback Encounter, which is owned by
Aussie Drew Kluska, who has worked in the high-end safari market in
Kenya. This outfitter is also an excellent place to start organizing a
Kimberley trip, from ecolodges to air safaris (8-8354-4405; www.outbackencounter.com).
Lodging
Broome, the Asian-influenced pearling outpost, has become a favorite
beach resort. The atmospheric McAlpine House,
a former pearling master's mansion, has been converted into a
wonderfully Maughamesque B&B by Lord Alistair McAlpine, Maggie
Thatcher's former treasurer. Aim to be there during the weekly cocktail
party, which features champagne and "pearl meat" (large oysters)
marinated in citrus and lemongrass. Be sure to take a sunset camel ride
along the creamy white sands of Cable Beach (8-9192-3886; www.mcalpinehouse.com;
doubles, $175—$285).
In the desert interior, an hour's
drive north of Kununurra, El Questro Station
is a working cattle ranch on a million acres. Celebrities stay at its
luxurious Homestead, overlooking the Pentecost River, for $640 per
person—including unlimited Veuve Clicquot—while mere mortals book the
tented cabins at Emma Gorge, by a spectacular swimming hole
(8-9169-1777; www.elquestro.com.au;
doubles, $100—$165). Birders may prefer the new Mornington
Wilderness Camp,
where a string of luxury tents have been raised on a vast Australian
Wildlife Conservancy sanctuary in the heart of the King Leopold Ranges.
The land is home to more than 170 bird species, many of them endangered
(8-9191-7406; www.australianwildlife.org; doubles, $285).
The barely inhabited Diamond Coast has
even more edge-of-the-world
comfort. It's accessible only by air, but most camps offer airport
transfers. The Bush Camp at Faraway Bay is the ultimate in
rustic Aussie luxury: bungalows that almost disappear into the
landscape, excellent meals in an open-air dining room, and days in a
powerboat speeding along the coastline, admiring newly discovered rock
art or fishing for the elusive mangrove jack or the barramundi, prized
by Australian anglers for its succulent white flesh (8-9169-1214; www.farawaybay.com.au;
doubles, $895, all-inclusive). Equally remote, the Kimberley
Coastal Camp is a string of cabins run by local characters Liz and
Rocky Terry (417-902-006; www.kimberleycoastalcamp.com.au;
doubles, $940, all-inclusive).
Reading,
Etc.
In this rapidly changing region,
guidebooks struggle to remain up-to-date. Lonely Planet's Outback
Australia is the most detailed, although it is geared toward 4WD
trips along the wild Gibb River Road ($25).
For information on the hero
Jandamarra, pick up Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance.
It's a good read despite lapses into politically correct jargon
(Magabala Books, $16). Hugh Edwards's Kimberley: Dreaming to
Diamonds is an entertaining journalistic history (Scott Print,
$27). "The Pigeon Heritage Trail," a pamphlet from
the Western Australian Heritage Committee, has a neatly condensed
historical introduction (9-322-4375; $2).
Perhaps the world's oldest instrument,
the low-pitched didgeridoo
has become a darling of international DJs. For background on the
yard-long wooden tubes—including playing instructions—visit www.aboriginalart.com.au,
the Web site of the Aboriginal Australia Art & Culture Centre,
based in Alice Springs. For music by modern musicians, buy the Rough
Guide album Australian Aboriginal Music ($15). The
Northern Territory group Yothu Yindi, the nation's most famous
contemporary indigenous band, has played with Carlos Santana (albums
available on www.amazon.com
or at www.yothuyindi.com).
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