Day 4 - White Cliff Rd

 

Wednesday, 2 June 2021

I wake in the night to a bright light, look out the mesh window behind our heads. A half-moon shines low in the sky. Above it, Jupiter and Saturn. The night sparkles.

We’re having a day off. We promised we would not go, go, go on this trip, but take it at a slower pace and stay in one spot for longer than our usual overnight.

I read somewhere that there are two kinds of people: those who go outside and see only the beauty and majesty of the natural world, and those who see only degradation, the environmental travesty caused by our modern world. Most see both; some would see neither, oblivious or uncaring about what happens outside the urban landscape. Modern humans, for the most part, don’t have a clue what the world looked like a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years ago. We live in a degraded environment, ecologists tell us. We just don’t see it because we’re used to nature the way it looks today.

Nature, no matter how simple or plain, as it can often be in Australia, almost always captivates me, frequently fills me with awe. It doesn’t have to be as vast as this open landscape we’re camped in, but when it is, it’s special, splendid.

And yet the eyes can shift so easily into seeing the other side, the hurting side. Mines popping up faster than outback towns in gold rush days; fences stopping the natural flow and migration of native animals; the lack of animals; acres and acres of land trammelled by cow hoofs, their plops of poo breeding flies, the native bush munched down to prickly stems; the lights of the 24-hour mines glowing orbs on the horizon of an otherwise black outback sky. The ubiquitous white ute striped with official fluorescent yellow pacing the highways, sturdy, single-minded blokes – and now, sometimes, women – behind the wheel. Mine employees intent on getting from here to there through this endlessly boring landscape. They own more and more of Australia’s interior and have less tolerance than ever for the sad and angry cries of environmentalists, or bleeding hearts like me.

The trouble with this glass-half-full-half-empty theory is it’s too easy to fall down the negativity rabbit hole when you consider the half-empty side. Grumbles, frustration, anxiety, despair. Not so easy to climb out of that ditch.

I play with these two views as we walk a wide five-kilometre circuit around our camp. The broad view is splendid: a low valley circled by a rim of craggy and crumbling red, ochre, and white cliffs. The vista is endless, spotted with low-lying trees and scrub brush. An occasional kangaroo. Quintessential Australia.

Walking through it, it’s easier to see the damage. The local station runs cattle, like so many super-sized stations across Australia. Their hooves, manure, and grazing scar the earth and keep the smaller more vulnerable plants from sprouting. The sturdier ones are munched to the point of looking dead. An ecologist we know told us recently that there are a number of endangered native marsupials in the outback. How? I exclaimed. There’s no development out there! Cows, he answered.

And rabbits, they’re ubiquitous too. Rabbit hole, rabbit hole…

The recent rains have left untrammelled multi-coloured ribbons from streams braiding through the soft sand. Occasionally a muddy pond or a surviving rock pool, clear as glass. We sit atop Point Kidman, the highest bluff, and drink it in.