A journey up the Tanami Track

A journey up the Tanami Track
In 1896 drover Nat Buchanan was the first known European to cross the vast Tanami Desert, looking to pioneer a new stock route from Tennant Creek to Sturt Creek. In 1900 Allan Davidson made an extensive exploration of the area looking for gold. There were a few small gold rushes, but the remoteness of the country and the difficulty of travelling across it deterred all but the most determined prospectors. Many of them perished trying to cross the Tanami to the diggings. Today’s alignment of the Tanami Track began in the 1960s, connecting the working gold areas of the Granites and Tanami mines, the vast pastoral stations and the remote Aboriginal communities of Yuendumu, Balgo and Billiluna. The track starts twenty minutes north of Alice Springs on the Stuart Highway with a small sign indicating 1050 kilometres to Halls Creek, which is the quickest route to the Kimberley from Central Australia. At first the track follows the northern flanks of the spectacular Western MacDonnell Ranges through clumps of thick acacia woodlands, the trackside is dotted with witchetty bushes, whose roots contain the grubs so prized by Aboriginal people. Just past the Tilmouth Well Roadhouse the road cuts through a singular line of hills, the Stuart Bluff Range. The break in the hills is like a gateway opening to the vast expanse of the Tanami Desert. To the east of the Aboriginal community of Yuendemu is Brooks Soak, where the terrible Coniston massacres occurred in 1928, widely regarded as the last time a sState institution engaged in the slaughter of Aboriginal people. Frederick Brooks was trapping dingoes and wild dogs in the area, and a dispute had occurred over some Aboriginal women, which seems to be a recurring theme in these sad events. Brooks was beaten to death and his body parts were stuffed down rabbit holes. Some historians believe that successive punitive parties led by Constable George Murray in August and September of that year murdered more than a hundred Aboriginal people. At a subsequent hearing in Darwin Murray stated, ‘We shot to kill. What was the use of a wounded blackfellow hundreds of miles from civilization’. Another sad event that occurred in the Tanami Desert was the loss of the Kookaburra. In April 1929 famous aviator Charles Kingsford Smith and his navigator Charles Ulm became lost while flying their plane, the Southern Cross in the Kimberley area. Fellow aviators Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock flew their plane the Kookaburra up to Central Australia to join the search. The plane developed engine trouble en route and they made a forced landing at Algebuckina, south of Oodnadatta. Hitchcock repaired the tappet with a chisel and the end of a corkscrew. On 10 April the plane took off from Alice Springs loaded with fuel, but hopelessly short of tools. They only had three litres of water and some sandwiches and cake to eat. Halfway into the flight the unimagin(e)able happened; the tappet started playing up and they were forced to land in thick scrub in the middle of the Tanami Desert. With no tools to clear a runway, they tried clearing the scrub with a penknife, then they tried burning it, but it was hopeless. A message scribbled on the tail fabric dated 12 April indicates they were alive and records that in their desperation they were drinking urine mixed with petrol, methylated spirits and oil. On this same day a DeHavilland search plane spotted Kingsford Smith and Ulm beside the Southern Cross and radioed the message, ‘Found, found, all safe’. Sadly not for the crew of the Kookaburra. A Qantas search plane located the plane on 21 April and a ground crew reached the site on 29 April. Both pilots had perished. Further up the track you enter the kingdom of the termite. As far as the eye can see termite mounds like skyscrapers stretch to the horizon. There are more than 800 termite mounds per hectare, some up to 3 metres in height and each one containing tens of thousands if not millions of termites. Different species—of which there are hundreds—coexist by gathering food at different times; nuptial flights also take place at different times, almost like an agreed delineation. The total biomass of termites in the Tanami is more than all the other grazers—cows, kangaroos and so on—put together.

			Tanami Track Road Conditions Click here for an Interactive Map with live updates of road conditions from NT Government Balgo Art Amazing Aboriginal Art Centre open to the public half an hour off the Tanami Track in Western Australia

Also busy digging on the Tanami Track are goldminers. There are three large commercial mines—the Tanami, Granites and Coyote Field mines—where workers are flown in and out by plane. A bit further up the track is one of the most remote roadhouses in Australia—Rabbit Flat. Since 1969 Bruce Farrands and his Parisienne wife Jacqueline have sold fuel and food and freely offered information and opinion, all from a small caged hole in the wall. They assure me the cage is for security: ‘You never know who is travelling in these parts’. I can see their point, but it does seem incongruous after all that expanse out there in the desert. The roadhouse is a little over halfway up the track, and a short distance beyond is the border—well, the border that is not actually the border. The highways department has conveniently placed the border signs on top of a scenic rise, whereas the true border is several hundred metres west, halfway down the hill. On the ‘Welcome to Western Australia’ sign, an irreverent vandal has carved, ‘Lummo says turn your watch back an hour and a half and your attitude twenty years’.
The half hour detour to Balgo is the highlight of any trip up the Tanami. Balgo art originated from the sand stories of the indigenous people living in the region and things really took off when Catholic missionaries introduced acrylic paint and canvas in the 1970s. Balgo art is now world famous for its energy and vibrant colours.
Back on the track, it’s a bone-jarring hour up to the Sturt Creek crossing, where white-gummed coolibahs fringe the waterholes, and you get the feeling you have arrived in the wet-dry tropics. The road swings due north and the vegetation changes markedly. The spinifex plains are dotted with grevilleas, their black trunks and blunt leaves looking as though they come straight out of a Fred Williams painting.
During the dry season there are always fires burning in the area, and you see great plumes of black smoke rising from the spinifex. Nearby is Wolfe Creek Crater, where a 50-tonne meteorite slammed into the earth 300 000 years ago, creating a spectacular crater almost a kilometre in diameter. To the north in the faint distance are the southernmost hills of the Kimberley. The road passes Ruby Plains station, the only Kidman property in the Kimberley, and winds its way through spinifex-covered hills and over numerous creek crossings. Above are the spectacular escarpments that are typical of the Kimberley. The topography here is very different from that of the MacDonnell Ranges far to the south, and the traveller is reminded of that vast flat space that separated the ranges—The Tanami.

Excerpt from OUTBACK- Recipes and Stories from the Campfire
By Andrew Dwyer
The Miegunyah Press ISBN 0-522-85380-3 More...


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