Alice - Mataranka

We were going to ceremonially divest
ourselves of our jumpers for the photo
 - but it was way too cold!

Leaving Alice, it seemed that half the state was on fire, and the other half had just been burnt. The drive out of Alice showed us how close the bushfire came to town last time we were here. We travelled back over familiar territory and crossed the Tropic of Capricorn for the third time. It was our first chance to take a photo! There were two huge wedgies on roadkill at the side of the road. They couldn't care less about cars, but kept a wary eye on me as I tried to get closer for a photo. Another moment when a really good zoom lens would have been handy!

Ella said "Two Eagles having a date at a cafe"

Mark Egan's Anmatjere Man Statue

Aileron is home of the huge warrior statue. The spear tip is 17m high!  He has a companion statue and she is quite anatomically correct, as we discovered as we walked closer! We met the sculptor Mark Egan (Ted's son) and bought a piece of Aboriginal art before travelling on.

We had lunch near Central Mount Stuart, which Stuart calculated (very nearly correctly) to be the centre of Australia. At this point we were over 1000 kms from the sea in any direction.

Master Shi-fu beats travel boredom!
Gum has 101 uses.

After kilometres of bushfires, we stopped for the night at Karlu Karlu (Devil's Marbles). The dingoes were still there, although Ella was much braver this time! We were stoked to see a rock wallaby silhouetted on the rocks at sunset.

We spent a very pleasant evening with our neighbours in the next site, Di and Mike, swapping “Best Of” travel tales, as they were heading south and had many great recommendations for our journey north. Just as we were all heading to bed, I noticed a fiery orange glow in the sky, far too close for comfort. And so it was another night of little sleep worrying about fires and wind direction – but knowing this time that there was no-one fighting it. Jackson was worried too, as every hour or so he’d ask “What’s the fire status Mum?”. Fortunately the wind did not change and we did not have to put my emergency plans into action – roll the caravan a couple of metres forward into the gravel, get rid of the gas bottles, wet all the beachtowels and put out the fire at the edge of the campsite! (Someone told us the next day that the whole place was burnt out by lunchtime, so we were very lucky!)

Took these photos of the fire as we left the next morning – it was less than a kilometre away by the time we drove off. We stopped at Tennant Creek to refuel and went up to Battery Hill for morning tea. We decided to book into the caravan park there to go to “Jimmy Hooker’s Bush Tucker Show”. The Battery Hill Gold Mine Tour also looked too good to miss. It was. Ray, our guide, took us into the mine at 3 p.m. and proceeded to yell at us (he had a bad case of industrial deafness) for the next three hours.

Drilling with the Panther Drill

We were the only ones there, so he really went to town, telling us so many colourful stories. He arrived here in the 1970s, passing through (as most people are) and got talked into a job earning “more than the doctors in Adelaide”. He turned up for his first day at work, having no idea what he was going to do. He was more than a little surprised to find that he was going down to the bottom of a mine to fix equipment! He demonstrated all the mining equipment for us – it was 1930s vintage – and let the kids climb aboard for photos. In the “crib” room, there was a large lunch table, which we thought must have been convivial. Ray soon set us straight: “The tables are big enough to take an injured miner while you do first aid. Two miners fit when it gets busy”

A card game in the crib room

You do what on this table?

Ray casts an expert eye over the noodling

At the end of the tour, he took us out to the noodling area and showed us how to find gold in the magnatite rocks. It was abundant, so in no time flat the kids had all filled their jars and we prised them away to get back in time for the Bush Tucker show.

Jimmy and bush coconuts

Jimmy Hooker was another great character. He told us his life story around the campfire, performed some bush poetry that he’d composed, and then showed us a range of bush tucker. We tasted some new things and Lachie was very adventurous, eating a "water caterpillar" from a bush coconut. We all really enjoyed the evening and learnt a lot.

The night took a turn for the worse when an Aboriginal guy started beating up his girlfriend a couple of metres away from our caravan. There was a high  barbed wire fence around the van park, so Dave raced over and shone a torch on them. The guy ran away and the girl then talked us out of calling the police, saying she'd give the boyfriend a second chance. We thought he'd probably had more than two chances already.

We headed out of Tennant Creek the next morning, feeling that we had met two of the town's great characters and two of the town's less fortunate. We stopped at the Tennant Creek Overland Telegraph Station, and found 3 native plants that Jimmy had shown us. Marcus collected some native lemon grass to make us tea. We had a stooge around the station and the graveyard, then headed north. It was already getting hot, and we remembered the 3 year old's comment from the social history museum in Tennant Creek. He had been sent outside for being naughty, but knocked on the door 3 minutes later. "It's too bloody hot out here Mum" he said!

Our travel went well, as Ella was having a great time playing with a tiny tea set that I bought that morning as part of her birthday present. Marcus kindly offered to play "Teapots" with her which brought hoots of laughter from the other two. Ella was disgusted with them. "Well, none of you other buggers will play with me."
("Teapots" turned out to be "Teapots and Evil Guys", but they were both happy!)

We heard on the news that the Fire Alert from Katherine to Darwin has been revised from Catastrophic to Extreme, but is likely to go back up to Catastrophic tomorrow. There will be no more camp fires for a long time, I suspect.

We found more of "Jimmy's" native plants near the John Flynn Memorial. Marcus added the wattle seeds to his collection. They are great as soap and also stop insect bites from itching. It may come in useful as we head into mossie territory again.

Collecting wattle seed pods. The closest Marcus has
come to soap for a month!

We did a free camp at a layby and Jackson was absolutely thrilled to be invited in to a renovated school bus. He has been designing a touring bus for the last couple of weeks and Ian and Alana kindly let us all troop through their home. (Mum -Ian has recently retired from Principal of The Channon school, and Alana worked in the office at Blakebrook School.) Back to the caravan, where Jackson spent an hour and a half tightening all the loose screws and we tried to wedge the fridge back into the kitchen unit. While in the Northern Territory, the fridge has decided to go walkabout.

Met a drover - he was a big fella.

We watched our last big plains sunrise for a while. The vegetation changed dramatically just outside the tiny town of Newcastle Waters, where the drovers used to meet to take stock through notoriously dangerous routes. The introduction of road trains has stopped the droving - the last big drove went through in 1988 as part of the Bicentennial celebrations. We spent the morning absorbing the history of the place and visiting The Junction pub relic and the old store.

A friendly bar-tender in The Junction
Hotel ... but you could still see the bullet holes!

Newcastle Waters was aptly named - water everywhere and we saw lots of water birds, including some brolgas and egrets. We were also very excited to see grass for the first time in a month!

The birds were magnificent

The famous Daly Waters Pub was our  next stop. It was built in the 1930s and is a truly unique place. The whole pub is covered in collections ... tshirts, caps, bras, identity cards, licence plates ... and it is a visual symphony.

We reached Mataranka mid-afternoon and set up quickly so we could swim in the hot pools. We practically ran down the path through the palms and forest - except Ella, who was dawdling along. I asked her what she was doing. "I'm going slowly through the forest to enjoy it - we haven't seen one for a very long time" she said!

Enjoying the cool forest

Hippos in the watering hole

The kids all blew up their swim shirts and made noises like hippos, so the Mataranka Thermal Pools sounded like an African watering hole! After a long swim we visited the replica Elsey Homestead, which was the setting of We of the Never Never, filmed in the 80s. We sat for a while on the homestead verandah, watching the wildlife water at the bore. The rest of the evening was spent feeding the peacocks and wallabies around camp.

Stay tuned ...