colour of australia Another Visit To A Wonderful Place

On a recent visit to the Outback of Australia, I travelled again to Lake Mungo National Park.

Human remains, dating back 50,000 years, have been found in this place. This is so far back that some anthropologists have used the age of the find to challenge the "Out Of Africa" theory of human evolution.

The "lunette" (a lunar landscape of ancient sand dunes mixed with clay, layer by layer) extends about 10 kilometres along one side of the dry lake Mungo. In ancient times it was full of water, fish and fowl and was a Garden Of Eden for the original inhabitants.

Most of these formations are only a maximum of twelve feet tall, yet (in the best traditions of fractal mathematics) they emulate great valleys like the Grand Canyon and Olduvai Gorge: perfect - if miniature - in form and shape.

It is a truly fascinating place to visit. You go there for ten minutes and end up spending (like I did) many hours just wandering the breath-taking formations.

All you need is a little imagination... and a camera.

Incidentally, the air temperature while I took this photo was one degree Celsius. I wore two coats, gloves and wool-lined boots... and I was still freezing.

Tony, I could believe that I was out in the Caprock Canyons of West Texas, which has formations similar to these, but of intermediate size--not miniatures like these, but certainly appearing much larger than they really are. That kind of country is often hot and dry.

The area with maximum glare seems to show that the soil might have been wet when you took this. If so, then it was cold and wet, not hot and dry, when you took this.

Impressive picture, in any case.

Thanks Lannie,

To give some idea of the scale, here's a shot of my travelling companion Koert. I shot one of the panels twice - once with him in the picture and the other with him hiding behind the lunette formation at the left.

Koert is a good man to have on any trip. Not only is he a good friend but he comes prepared. He's the manager of the local liquor store.

It was the coldest week in eastern Australia for decades, the very week we extricated ourselves from wives, pets, children and grandchildren for a long anticipated week-and-a-half trip to the desert. We had much cheer warming ourselves up in various remote outback campgrounds with robust sample bottles from Koert's inimitable collection of alcoholic souvenirs that (somehow or other) fell off the back of a truck in his store's loading bay.

Unfortunately the mighty Subaru's starter motor decided to fail just as we were about to hit the real desert at a place called the Cameron Corner Pub (the "corner" in Cameron Corner refers to the conjunction of the boundaries of three Australian states: New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia), literally the last building for three hundred kilometres.

Luckily we finally got the engine started after two hours of trying (by the power of prayer and pig-headed persistence, because nothing else worked). It would have been a bad scenario if we hadn't been able to coax the car into life, as the last person who was towed from Cameron Corner paid $4,000 for the privelege. We limped to the next town with a mechanic, Broken Hill, a mere 478 kilometres away across really rough dirt roads (reminding ourselves out loud and often not to reflexively turn off the ignition when we stopped along the way). On this trip another fault appeared: the car's engine lost about half its power. So now we had a dicky starter motor and severely reduced engine torque to push the car along. Despite this, after 7 hours driving, we made it Broken Hill. The first thing we did was turn off the engine and attempt to restart it. Naturally it worked perfectly and continued to do so. But the loss of power was still a problem.

Eventually, the next day, we bailed up both the local Broken Hill auto electrician (the starter motor had been inundated with sand from some beach driving at Christmas) and the town's Subaru dealer and got the car fixed after the dealer spent 3 days coaxing a meaningful fault code out of the vehicle computer. The problem was not with the engine, but with the so-called "airflow sensor" that tells the on-board computer how much fuel to inject into the motor based on airflow. The new sensor immediately increased our mileage by 25% above what I had been used to back in Sydney (and decreased my bank balance by $457 for parts and labor). As the engine was slowly failing, on the trip down from Cameron Corner, we had gotten down to 250 kilometres per tank from the usual 450 (I had been complaining for months about the gradual loss of economy, but no-one could find the problem). Now we had 560 kilometres per tank and could go anywhere, but, after three days lost had run up against another obstacle: time.

So we went south to Lake Mungo as a consolation prize.

I might also add that I've never had any trouble with this car before. What a time for two faults to appear! Two faults in the same day! I suppose it could have been worse. It might have conked out when we were in the *middle* of the desert, not just at its edge.

Lake Mungo and its lunette are completely dry. Those "shiny" surfaces you see have been polished by wind blowing off the dry lake bed for thousands of years.

"... from Koert's inimitable collection of alcoholic souvenirs that (somehow or other) fell off the back of a truck in his store's loading bay.

Unfortunately the mighty Subaru's starter motor decided to fail just as we were about to hit the real desert at a place called the Cameron Corner Pub..."

The typical case of the drunken Subaru. I wonder when the Japanese are going to fix that. They are pretty reliable otherwise, you know? (I mean Subaru's)

Hi Tony,

Great picture of a remarkable place..

I would not call this place a consolation price (although I am sorry to hear about your car trouble and you guys not achieving your initial goals).

It is not a consolation price in my view considering its beauty and the fact that human remains were found, dating back more than 50000 years.

Apart from the picture, that is wonderful to watch, your prose is -as always- also great to read. Thanks.