The local aborigines have a tale for how the Flinders Ranges came to be. A dreamtime serpent slithered its way across the landscape, causing the massive ridges to jut out. I think a more plausible explanation is that the giant shark that lives in the centre of the earth mistook Australia for a seal and had a feeding frenzy on South Australia, the Flinders Ranges mountains being the teeth marks that jut out from the ground in a crescent shape. If you want to be scientific, the Flinders Ranges were caused when part of the earth sank, many years ago, pushing up mountains on each side, as if a giant had come along and smashed its fist into the earth. The soft soil eroded, leaving the red rock behind, and the clearly visible layers of rock, like the rings of a tree, going back in time.
The Flinders Ranges must be a geologists wet dream. They are 600 million to a billion years old, some of the earliest signs of life have been discovered here, and in addition, a giant meteorite struck the earth nearby, causing a shower of interesting rocks to fall in the area. For such an old set of mountains they are in good shape. Unlike the Himalayas, which are getting bigger year by year, the Fliders have been eroding for millenia. Australia was shoved down to the bottom of the planet relatively early, and it has become unique because of this, with species seen nowhere else in the world.
On my first excursion into the mountains I went to Arkaroo rock, which features some 6000 year old aboriginal rock paintings. I don’t want to seem culturally insensitive, nor can I claim to have been particularly impressed from an art critic perspective. It didn’t help that the rock was totally enclosed by a thick wire fence, more to keep people out than the paintings in. The Flinders Ranges national park service must have noted how the Romans went around carving their names into Egyptian temples, and didn’t want a similar spate of “Baz was ere ’99” all over Arkaroo rock. I understand that the Aborigines were more impressionists than relaists. After all, they were living in a gorgeous canvas, so what need was there to replicate it? My guess is that Arkaroo rock was used in initiation ceremonies, the daubs in the walls being adoloscent scribblings, while the good stuff was done on less permanent material, such as bark. And to be fair, the Mona Lisa would look a bit faded if you hung it outside for 600o years as well.
The next day I drove for miles on bad dirt roads, which my car bravely attempted. My car is a 4WD, but only in the sense that all four wheels move at the same time. It has a normal car shell, normal car tyres and normal car suspension. After crawling along corrugated roads and being bounced up and down for a couple of hours, I found my destination cut off by the only creek containing any water that I had seen for days. Being older than I once was, and as a result slightly more sensible, I didn’t charge through the water like Moses. I considered the possibility of the exhaust pipe becoming submerged, the engine stalling, and my becoming stuck, not in the middle of nowhere, but a long way from anywhere. Instead, I looked at the map and saw that I was only 6km from the ruined sheep farm that I was heading to, so I strapped on my pack and started walking.
I’m sure some of you are wondering why I was willing to walk so far to see a ruin. I’m not overly interested in ruins. I don’t mind having a poke around if I come across one, but I don’t generally go out of my way to visit them, let alone undertake a long walk for the pleasure of peering into long abandoned and weather worn rooms. I didn’t mind this walk because I was in a valley with beautiful mountains on each side, red, rocky and jagged, and the view promised to get better the further I went. I walked up a hill peppered with tiny wildflowers, either purple with white spots or white with purple spots. I came across a gorge, walked passed it and onward, and on, and on, on the alert for the Red Hill lookout. I never did find the lookout, but I got the views and a 25km round trip for my trouble. In the last 5km of my journey I began to wish that I had been adventurous enough to ford the creek, then I began to dream about fitting a bath to the top of my car, which would be heated by the engine. In the end I just kept putting one foot in front of the other until my car came into view, very nearly losing a shoe in the mud of that accursed creek.
The next day I drove even further away from people on even worse roads. They weren’t dirt roads, they were rock roads, and I was getting fed up with driving under the usual speed limit for a school zone. But Chambers Gorge made up for the difficult drive. In parts Chambers Gorge looks like the canyon in the last scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. What I liked the most about were the large number of caves, making it the ideal place to start a hermitage should I ever be that way inclined. As I strolled along the dry creek bed, my feet taking a pounding in order to give the car a break, I thought about how much safer I felt walking in Australia than in the United States. Sure, we have snakes here that can kill you within hours, but you would have to be an idiot to get bitten why one, whereas any fool can be stalked by a mountain lion or have the face gnawed by a bear. My main concern at the moment was that I didn’t lose my car keys, and I developed an obssessive compulsive habit of tapping my pocket every hundred metres to get that reassuring jingle.
Driving back from Chambers Gorge the road didn’t feel nearly so rough. Perhaps it was the afterglow of a majestic natural experience. When I finally got back on tarmac it felt like sleeping on slik sheets after a week lying on nettles, and the top speed felt so fast that it seemed like I had swapped my car for a ferrarri. My final assault on the Flinders Ranges was to climb St Mary’s peak. It’s the kind of mountain that gets steeper right at the end, and the top is always a little bit further off than you expect. The view was magnificent but the gale force winds nearly blew me off the edge.
The yellow-talied wallaby is not only not extinct, it is thriving, and it has plenty of company with rock wallabies, grey and red kangaroos teeming over the grasslands. There are almost as many marsupials in the Flinders Ranges as hop around Canberra at feeding time. I would like to extend a personal thanks to all the animals on my trip so far who have not leapt in front of my car, or added more dents to the side. I would also like to apologise to the bush pigeon for hitting it with my windscreen at very high speed. I’m sorry I hit you, but I can’t make my car duck.
Dave out.
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