Up and Down the Track

  Katherine, Australia
Friday, September 12, 2008

The Stuart Highway dissects the heart of Australia, and the many miles between Alice Springs in the middle and Darwin in the north, are referred to as 'up the track' or 'down the track', depending on which direction you are heading.  On leaving the Barkly Highway we spent a  few days both up and down the track and I discovered that it's not just the distances that are big - it's the characters, too...
 

Jimmie the Bush Tucker Man

A night in the settlement of Tennant Creek introduced Jimmie Hooker, a toothy-grinned man who has spent much of his life in the bush and has some funny tales to tell, particularly of his first visit to the city, facilitating his first encounters with strange creations such as t.v. and escalators.  Jimmie was very friendly and so was his dog Husky, until he met Mick the Kangaroo who seriously raised his hackles.  Then there was Bruce, landlord of the Wauchope Hotel, a pub at the side of the road, nowhere near anywhere really, but with a fairly steady clientele anyway, it seemed.

Bruce the publican

What he lacked in stature, he made up for in personality and we sat and chatted with him at the bar for a couple of hours as he drank his way through the afternoon, recounting amusing episodes and cracking jokes.  We got talking to a visiting couple from a cattle station over in Queensland from whom I learned that the distance they move cattle across their land in one day's work is the equivalent of driving across a couple of European countries.  The scale of everything is just so different here.
 

Camping at the Marbles

Sunset at Devil's Marbles

We camped for a night at the Devil's Marbles, an area of gargantuan granite rocks, turned red by a geological process which I can't remember, and I wandered through the piles of boulders at sunset and sunrise, watching them turn to glowing orange in the low light.  During the hours in between the glorious shades of orange, the marbles' silhouettes stood out in the light of thousands of stars in the clear sky and we sat around a campfire listening to the stories told by Blackhat, an aboriginal elder in his eighties, and his friend the park ranger.  We might have been safely out of the reach of crocs this far inland,

Mick risking alien abduction

but according to Blackhat we were in just the right spot to encounter 'jabla jabla', 'wee men' of aboriginal tradition (or imagination?) who might come peering into the tent at night... more obstacles to negotiate on my midnight pee trips!  And if the Jabla Jabla ignored us, well there was a significant risk of abduction by aliens, this area having an exceptional level of UFO sightings, as I had learned at nearby Wycliffe Well that afternoon.  (It reminded me of the Little Ale-Inn at Area 51, Susan!  Only without quite as many nutters around...)
 

Bra display at Daly Waters

There were, however, no strange goings on in the night, and we moved north as planned the next day, camping in the grounds of the Daly Waters pub, in whose bar are displayed an assortment of objects left behind by years of visitors, including a whole rack of signed bras... I refused to contribute on the grounds that I am traveling too light to be able to afford to lose one!   My favourite larger than life characters in the bar here were 4 sun-blackened fellas in shorts and vests, up in the Territory on holiday to hunt wild pigs, on their dirt bikes... I just nodded my head and smiled! 
 

In Katherine we stayed for 2 nights with Servas couple David and Norma, on their mango farm and learned that Norma was recently voted Outback Woman of the Year, quite an accolade, and one which was well earned as a result of her efforts to set up a local farmers' market.  At present the mangoes are sold to a company who transport them hundreds of miles to a supermarket distribution centre in Adelaide from where the quota for Katherine's own supermarket has to then be driven back all those miles north again - insane!  I did my best to lighten the load for the transportation trucks, anyway, by eating my fill of the delicious fresh sweet juicy fruits...  mmmm!