Day 21 - Iytwelepenty/Davenport Range National Park

Saturday, 19 June 2021

As we continue north on the Stuart Highway, we listen to a new audiobook, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. It’s lighter than the Brook’s book, which we finished on the bumpy road to Alice. I appreciated Brook’s personal account of his struggle with religion, his return to his native Judaism, and his eventual conversion to Christianity. He now has one foot in both worlds – as I do with Christianity and Buddhism – and a fair bit of doubt and questioning to accompany him on his continued journey – sounds familiar. I appreciate his honesty and humility, not easy for a NYT columnist with a rationalist reputation to uphold.

But for me, his final chapters fell back into moralizing, holding up exceptional human beings who’ve given their lives in selfless service to humanity. True second-mountain people. A great ideal, an important corrective for our self-indulgent modern world. But the rest of us who are still struggling to cross the divide between the first and second mountains can feel oppressed by the undertones of “we should all be like this” idealism. For me, the bumps in the rocky road to Alice were made all the more miserable by the internal jabs from my cranky, self-centered ego, “You’re not good enough!”

Sapiens is written to be both educational and humorous. A biography of our species and all its foibles. It has a way of rationalising why it is that none of us are “good enough,” which sends a wave of relief to cool the hot irons of my self-criticism. It’s food for thought as the miles pass and we strike up several conversations during the day about what it means to be human.

A walk through the Karlu-Karlu, the Devil’s Marbles, giant round granite rocks precariously perched as though sculpted by some divine hand, provides an opportunity to unpack Harari’s idea that what makes Homo Sapiens distinct from other animals is our capacity for fiction. In other words our penchant for making up stories. Our ability to imagine. One story about the Marbles comes from the Aboriginal Dreamtime, which says these are secret, sacred places deposited here during the Dreamtime, while the rationalist’s version looks at 1.4 billion years of weathering and wear that’s swept away the sandstone and exposed the granite under-layer. Both are made up to explain why weird phenomenon like these suddenly appear on the planet. Which one you align with will depend on your own story.

Our story currently bends towards the need to get away from mainstream travel. Since encountering Kata Tjuta, Uluru, Kings Canyon, Alice Springs and the Stuart Highway, we’ve had little true “outback time.” It’s time to correct that.

Shortly after the Marbles we veer right on a dirt road that leads to the Davenport Range National Park. A campground symbol on the map is 91 kms down this road, which is good quality and sparsely travelled. We’re feeling better already. The Whistleduck Creek campground, located in a cove of the range, has several water holes and 16 campsites. Every one of them is available. As beautiful as it is here, it seems few people are keen to take the side trip off the high-speed highway to Darwin.

We select a sheltered campsite near a waterhole and a bank of weathered pink rock. It’s quiet again, no road trains, caravaners, only the occasional sound of a jet overhead, and the frequent and varied bird calls.

It’s warmer again after a day of chilly winds. The half moon illuminates the checkboard clouds, creating mosaics of light and dark in the night sky.