Standards Must Be Maintained
I've already been in Australia with Matt for an eventful week, and I'm seeing a very different side of it than I do working in big cities like Sydney and Melbourne. One of the most remarkable things I've seen concerns the resilience and dignity of the people who live and work and survive in the Australian Outback. Matt and I arrived in Sydney November 3, spent a day seeing some sights and left November 4 for Alice Springs where we were to meet a tour. November 5, very early, we left for four nights camping in the outback.
The people of the outback are tough, and life is often minimal. It's hot in the summer and never less than warm the rest of the year. It's bone-dry and the sun is relentless. If you walk around under a layer of sunscreen all the time you get nothing else done, and so people don't, and they're browned and weathered. Major highways are two lanes of dirt. Red dust is everywhere and in everything.
But no matter what, certain civilities are observed. Even in the outback there are flush toilets everywhere. This bemuses me extremely. In such a water-deprived place, why flush it down the toilet? Apparently Standards must be maintained. We camped in a site way out on a cattle station - a long drive from anywhere. There was a bush toilet there. It had a roof and three sides made of corrugated steel on a cement pad, but by god, it was a flush toilet! I don't know how they got the water out there. There was a shower as well, equally as plain. To my chagrin, I got lost on the way to the toilet after dark and ended up having to use the OTHER bush toilet. I felt like such a barbarian. I did pack out the paper.
Australia's outback looks superficially like a lot of semi-arid desert lands I've seen. It has all the fragility and the obvious overuse issues as well. Close up, it's disturbingly different. The dominant vegetation is a plant called spinifex. Spinifex is a grass that grows in circles. It is harsh and spiky and very few things eat it aside from one species of kangaroo and termites. It is also extremely oily and flammable, so it plays the role of creosote in the southwestern U.S. - it provides fuel to brush fires which then recycle nutrients into the soil. Unlike the southwestern U.S. the Australian outback is still in play as a source of animal protein for people in the cities. Cattle stations run cows on land that has very little vegetation and no water. Water is pumped from the ground to water the animals. Prior to groundwater pumping, cattle stations routinely failed when one or another of the persistent droughts hit the outback.
Groundwater pumping has allowed cattle to run on cattle stations long enough to cause a slower form of damage: soil erosion. The hooves of cattle are hard and sharp. As they walk across the brittle crust of soil atop the land, their hooves break it up. As long as wind storms don't follow, the crust reforms in the next rain. When drought comes, so do long periods with no rain and high winds, and then the soil goes up into the atmosphere. If too many cattle graze the same land, the number of plants also decreases and their roots no longer hold the soil - or the water - in the land. The result: semi-arid lands become desert. We stopped to gather wood on a cattle station on the Giles highway (which is a two lane dirt road, though quite a good one if you don't mind some washboard).
There was a dead steer under a tree and every eatable plant had been stripped of its leaves. Between the remaining eucalypts was broken up soil and blow-outs, where dust devils had carried off the soil. All along the highway we saw dust devil after dust devil. The light strip on the right of the photo is hardpan, where all the dirt has been blown away.
It seems like I cannot get away from this issue lately. I never wrote in my blog about the desertification I saw flying into China, but it was shocking. Now, in Australia, I see the same process. The Southwestern deserts I've wandered for so much of my life went through this hundreds of years ago when the Spanish ran cattle on the semi-arid deserts to provide a source of easy food for the Indians. Now I see it in its early stages in Australia.
Otherwise Matt and I are well. Nothing bit us, though I came back to our ultralight shelter one night to find Matt asleep, partway on to my sleeping bag, and a centipede rapidly swarming its way towards him. That was exciting, more for me than for Matt, who required multiple shouts of "Matt sit up NOW" to sit up so the centipede could be tossed out the door. I am told they aren't very poisonous, though no one in Australia can blame me for acting as though they are. Every Australian I've known has told me Most Poisonous Animal In The World stories. We did see a Moon Snake in that same campsite, which is venomous, though not extremely.
We got to camp offroad in some remarkably beautiful places. We started at Uluru (Ayre's Rock), for which there is only a commercial campsite, but after that we were pretty far out in the wilderness.
There aren't many insects at night or much else, because there just isn't any surface water to support them. We also walked our way around Kata-Tjuta, King's Canyon (that's sort of the tourism trifecta out here) and also went to the West McDonnell Ranges - the fabulous Palm Canyon, where cycads still survive in a tiny pocket, Ormiston Gorge, Ellery Creek BigHole and many others. Here are two pictures, one of cycads and palms in Palm Canyon, and the other of Lindsey, our fearless leader, waiting in the vehicle, on the road (yes, that is the road) for us to finish photographing cycads.
Today we leave Alice Springs on the 'Ghan - the train that goes from Adelaide to Darwin on the north coast. We join it midway and will spend the next 24 hours riding north through the desert center of Australia. The Ghan replaced the camel trains of the 1800s and early 1900s, moving goods and people from Adelaide to Darwin. Those camel trains were driven by Afghans, hence the Ghan.
Next blog post from Darwin....
The people of the outback are tough, and life is often minimal. It's hot in the summer and never less than warm the rest of the year. It's bone-dry and the sun is relentless. If you walk around under a layer of sunscreen all the time you get nothing else done, and so people don't, and they're browned and weathered. Major highways are two lanes of dirt. Red dust is everywhere and in everything.
But no matter what, certain civilities are observed. Even in the outback there are flush toilets everywhere. This bemuses me extremely. In such a water-deprived place, why flush it down the toilet? Apparently Standards must be maintained. We camped in a site way out on a cattle station - a long drive from anywhere. There was a bush toilet there. It had a roof and three sides made of corrugated steel on a cement pad, but by god, it was a flush toilet! I don't know how they got the water out there. There was a shower as well, equally as plain. To my chagrin, I got lost on the way to the toilet after dark and ended up having to use the OTHER bush toilet. I felt like such a barbarian. I did pack out the paper.
Australia's outback looks superficially like a lot of semi-arid desert lands I've seen. It has all the fragility and the obvious overuse issues as well. Close up, it's disturbingly different. The dominant vegetation is a plant called spinifex. Spinifex is a grass that grows in circles. It is harsh and spiky and very few things eat it aside from one species of kangaroo and termites. It is also extremely oily and flammable, so it plays the role of creosote in the southwestern U.S. - it provides fuel to brush fires which then recycle nutrients into the soil. Unlike the southwestern U.S. the Australian outback is still in play as a source of animal protein for people in the cities. Cattle stations run cows on land that has very little vegetation and no water. Water is pumped from the ground to water the animals. Prior to groundwater pumping, cattle stations routinely failed when one or another of the persistent droughts hit the outback.
Groundwater pumping has allowed cattle to run on cattle stations long enough to cause a slower form of damage: soil erosion. The hooves of cattle are hard and sharp. As they walk across the brittle crust of soil atop the land, their hooves break it up. As long as wind storms don't follow, the crust reforms in the next rain. When drought comes, so do long periods with no rain and high winds, and then the soil goes up into the atmosphere. If too many cattle graze the same land, the number of plants also decreases and their roots no longer hold the soil - or the water - in the land. The result: semi-arid lands become desert. We stopped to gather wood on a cattle station on the Giles highway (which is a two lane dirt road, though quite a good one if you don't mind some washboard).
There was a dead steer under a tree and every eatable plant had been stripped of its leaves. Between the remaining eucalypts was broken up soil and blow-outs, where dust devils had carried off the soil. All along the highway we saw dust devil after dust devil. The light strip on the right of the photo is hardpan, where all the dirt has been blown away.
It seems like I cannot get away from this issue lately. I never wrote in my blog about the desertification I saw flying into China, but it was shocking. Now, in Australia, I see the same process. The Southwestern deserts I've wandered for so much of my life went through this hundreds of years ago when the Spanish ran cattle on the semi-arid deserts to provide a source of easy food for the Indians. Now I see it in its early stages in Australia.
Otherwise Matt and I are well. Nothing bit us, though I came back to our ultralight shelter one night to find Matt asleep, partway on to my sleeping bag, and a centipede rapidly swarming its way towards him. That was exciting, more for me than for Matt, who required multiple shouts of "Matt sit up NOW" to sit up so the centipede could be tossed out the door. I am told they aren't very poisonous, though no one in Australia can blame me for acting as though they are. Every Australian I've known has told me Most Poisonous Animal In The World stories. We did see a Moon Snake in that same campsite, which is venomous, though not extremely.
We got to camp offroad in some remarkably beautiful places. We started at Uluru (Ayre's Rock), for which there is only a commercial campsite, but after that we were pretty far out in the wilderness.
There aren't many insects at night or much else, because there just isn't any surface water to support them. We also walked our way around Kata-Tjuta, King's Canyon (that's sort of the tourism trifecta out here) and also went to the West McDonnell Ranges - the fabulous Palm Canyon, where cycads still survive in a tiny pocket, Ormiston Gorge, Ellery Creek BigHole and many others. Here are two pictures, one of cycads and palms in Palm Canyon, and the other of Lindsey, our fearless leader, waiting in the vehicle, on the road (yes, that is the road) for us to finish photographing cycads.
Today we leave Alice Springs on the 'Ghan - the train that goes from Adelaide to Darwin on the north coast. We join it midway and will spend the next 24 hours riding north through the desert center of Australia. The Ghan replaced the camel trains of the 1800s and early 1900s, moving goods and people from Adelaide to Darwin. Those camel trains were driven by Afghans, hence the Ghan.
Next blog post from Darwin....