Crocodiles, Koalas,Captive Kangaroos and Birds

We drove north to a Hartley's Crocodile Adventure, a crocodile farm/ wildlife center where I petted a koala (Yes, too cute for school), watched crocs being fed, learned the diff between fresh and salt water crocs (one will kill you, one will not.) Salt water crocs have sensors that allow them to feel the buoyancy of salt water. Fresh water crocs do not and do occasionally wander into salty areas and get in trouble. The park is a small part of the operation. The Hartley's do raise crocodiles for the meat and skin market. They feed them chicken heads...partly for our benefit, I'm sure. But the crocs do like them.

The koala fur is actually a little rough! They are careful to cycle the Koalas through the photo sessions to reduce the stress. Touristy? yes. But still cool.

I felt very bad for the captive kangaroos! They are nocturnal animals, so the likelihood of seeing them in the wild was low. But, that day at the Croc farm was the first day that the rest of the tour was with us. The Outback segment was a "pre-tour" of only 15 people. By Crocodile day, we were joined by at least 20 jet lagged people, too many of whom chased the kangaroos around the pen to feed them! The red kangaroos were especially shy. Feeding these kangaroos was a way different experience than feeding the wallabies in Alice Springs. That experience did not feel coercive or abusive. This one did.

Despite my misgivings about the captive kangaroos and the petted koalas, Hartley's appears to be a well run park, involved in maintaining not only the crocodilian species but the dry rain forest it is situated in.

The birds were great! Black necked stork! Kookaburras in and out of the koala cage. Black swans A Tawny Frogmouth! They blend utterly with the trees and have the largest mouths! I think it was here that we saw the Nanking Night Heron. At some point I will do a detailed blog about birding in Australia.

Paintings of Kata Tjuta & Uluru

I paint when I travel in order to understand the landscape. These watercolors are a "way of knowing" for me, not intended as great paintings or even intended for frames. They tend to stay in my travel journal to remind me. Along the route to Kata Tjuta, I saw cracks in the red, red sand. Distant mountains sped by. I drew the ink sketches on the bus and painted later. I heard it was very distracting for the bus driver. Kata Tjuta, or the Olgas, did seem very male to me. Indeed, they do have exclusively male sites. If an Aboriginal woman had been with us, she would have covered her eyes rather than gaze on the forbidden sites. Uluru, the back side, sketched on site, in a big hurry as we walked to a water hole, the most beautiful waterhole I have ever seen. Balancing the pad of paper, the camera and the pace was a challenge...but I did not want to miss what the guide had to say. Our bus driver was our guide and his love and respect for the Aboriginal people was palpable. A more sympathetic guide could not be imagined. When I drew this one, I sighed and said,"Now I understand." I felt like the form and the meaning of the mountain had entered me, somehow.

The Olgas or Kata Tjuta

I had heard of the Olgas, whose true name is Kata Tjuta, but I did not know what to expect. I just knew that many people said they were even more magnificent than Uluru.

We first saw them at a distance, looking like so many heads peeking up through the ground.When we got closer, we could see the red and purple colors of the rock. Deep canyons full of stories. Kata Tjuta is a series of conglomerate rocks of monolith proportions that are incredible.

In the presence of these rocks, and Uluru, one can understand how religions were formed here. When one is in the presence of the Earth's awesome power on such a scale, you cannot help but feel puny and awestruck. Kata Tjuta is the site of the male ancestors, male stories, male business. Business means male ceremony/ritual sites, secret sites where Aboriginal women are not even allowed to look.

Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park

The desert and camels on the way to Uluru

We left Alice Springs by buswatching for kangaroos> which we did not see, and feral camels, which we did see. In addition to the wild camels,we stopped at a camel farmwhere I experienced my oneand only camel ride that I expect to take in my lifetime, even if I do return to Egypt! Oy, it was rough! While I am sure that one can adjust to the lumpiness of the camel gait, it would be easier if the stirrups were properly adjusted. We no sooner took off than the stirrup flew off my right foot, making it really difficult to control the movement of my body in the saddle. The drover did not hear me, or chose not to hear me (hysterical woman, etc.). I finally gained stability by stretching my stirup-less foot out staight, with firm, locked knee. Had a few back twitches for days afterwardsThe trip across the desert was beautiful and austere.We saw birds of prey galore.We stopped at the huge salt lake I had seen from the airplane, climbing a sand dune for the blinding view.

On to Alice Springs

More or less rested, more or less adjusted to missing a day and walking upside down...we boarded an airplane for Alice Springs. It is easy to forget that Australia is a country and a continent. Flying to Alice Springs was like flying to Los Angeles...lots fasterthan driving.Flying over vast landscapes of changing colors, over chemical lakes, sand dunes, mountain ranges...all severe. You can see the water courses from the air, even where there is no visible water: follow the trail of the plants.

Alice Springs was begun in the 19th century with a telegraph station at a spring that was subsequently named after the station master's wife, Alice. At the telegraph station I became more interested in the birds. I looked through Judy's good binoculars at this gallah, the ubiquitous bird of down under. They steal food even more blatantly than the seagulls.

The station was the center of operations for communication, mail, medicine, commerce that was brought in by the Europeans. This was one of the areas where there was little hunting of the Aboriginals, thankfully, although their lives were changed for the worse through disease, abuse, and the destruction of their ecologically sensitive and sacred lands. Throughout the history of the Europeans in Australia, there was a mis-understanding of how Aboriginal society worked, and indeed, worked well. The Aboriginal world view was essentially spiritual with the land as sacred and cared for with serious responsibility by those who were mature enough and wise enough to hold the stories and the rituals that would maintain the land in the Dreamtime, the present and the future all at once.Time, for the Australian Aboriginal was circular and ongoing, much like the Inuit.

There are over 300 language groups (tribes) of Aboriginal peoples. The languages can be remarkably different...not just dialects. Language, symbol and sign language were used to communicate over territories. Aboriginal art was part of the communication systems. Today it is on canvas and in bright colors, painted for the burgeoning art market. However, its roots remain practical : describing food sources and locations, seasonal changes, rituals and ceremonies or stories necessary for the maintenance of the land, in some areas mortuary concerns are also a topic. Shields and barks were carved or burned with information that identified your language group, your territory, your family affiliations (sometimes called skin groups) and acted as your passport or calling card. Sometimes bodies were painted with this information as well to help insure safe travels through foreign territories.

As soon as we entered Alice Springs we went to Mbantua Gallery. Mbantua is one of many, many galleries in town. As far as I can tell they all have honest relations with the artists. Most of them give the artists their materials and purchase the finished product outright and pay a further fee upon sale of the painting from the gallery. the painting above is the one I bought.It is by Pauline Morgan Petyarre. Pauline speaks little English. She has been painting for about 10 years. This piece refers to the Pencil Yam Story of the dreamtime, where 2 seeds were born creating 2 different species of pencil yam. The tubers are an important food source and the plant also attracts kangaroos. Pauline and her people perform increase ceremonies to ensure the productivity of the yam.

Alice Springs is a dusty, windy place, raw looking. It was quite cool, since it was winter, but you can feel in your bones that summer would be a scorcher! The air was desert dry, most of us had bloody noses by the time we left the area a few days later. The whole center of town is devoted to Aboriginal arts. It is BIG BUSINESS. The different galleries represent artists from different area, but dominantly in desert dot style here. Many are either fully Aboriginal owned or have boards of directors which include the artists. The galleries are mostly attached to art centers in the outback which function as production facility, store, bank, medical supply, welfare...Art is the primary employment, especially for the women, in the outback areas that maintain a more traditional or isolated lifestyle. Supposedly it is well controlled and not exploitive.

Before we went to Bojangles Pub for a mixed grill of crocodile,bison (water buffalo), kangaroo, camel & emu, we fed the rock wallabies at the Heavitree Gap Outback Lodge. It claims to be a premier resort, but in the dark...it looks like an old style Holiday Inn motel. It is situated at a gap in the McDonnell Ranges where black footed rock wallabies live. At sunset, they descend from their rocky home to eat. It you sit very still and remain very quiet, they will feed from your hand. One young girl communed with "her" wallaby for such a long time that she could stroke it. Two wallabies had joeys in the pouch. It was interesting to see them contract the pouch to protect their young when alarmed. I had never thought of the pouch as having volitional muscles! I thought it was just a stretchy pocket of skin.

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