Tag Archives: Western Australia

Kimberley Day 5 – Hunter River & Porosus Creek

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Saturday 17 August 2024 – Steve here, just popping up to say a couple of things before handing the reins back over to Jane.

Firstly, though I guess this is a somewhat dubious distinction, I am a trendsetter. Yesterday, having noted my sore throat, I heard the ship-wide announcement at around 3pm inveighing anyone to see the doctor in the case of symptoms, and immediately hotfooted it down to the medical facility.

Which was shut.

I found Dain in the corridor and he gently pointed out the noticeboard outside the facility saying it re-opened at 5pm. So I made absolutely sure to get there 10 minutes early, wearing a mask. Much to my surprise, there was no queue, so I just walked in to explain my situation. I think the doc and his assistant were a little surprised at my presumption, but they sat me down and, using what I consider to be the old-fashioned, long-handled, nasal swab that seems actually to touch your brain tissue, tested me. Twice; once for Covid and the other for influenza (I didn’t know there was such a test, actually). Negative for Covid, positive for Influenza A, so I was immediately dispatched to isolate myself in my cabin.  As I left, the medical facility’s waiting area was now crowded with people there, presumably, for the same reason as me. But I got there first. Hah! Li’l old trendsetter, me.

Unsurprisingly, the situation escalated, and the captain had to make a general announcement that, since the number of cases had passed the 4% mark, mask wearing anywhere inside on the ship was mandatory, and highly recommended outside and on the Zodiacs. Later still, he joined the evening briefing to tell us that there were, so far, 10 confirmed cases, six of Covid and four of Influenza.

So Le Lapérouse was now officially a Plague Ship.

It’s all under control, or so they say. Our cabin now has a notional quarantine flag against it, so our cabin girl, Verona, doesn’t come to tidy up after us, which seems sensible. We also get lunch and dinner menus delivered so that I can order a meal to be brought to the cabin. Thus far, though, because my appetite has not been immense, Jane has simply brought the occasional mignardise for me, which has been sufficient.  To their credit, the ship’s reception has followed up the menu delivery just to see if I wanted to order anything; the organisation has responded well.

And now, back to Jane…..

Today’s excursions were two zodiac cruises along the Hunter River and its tributary, Porosus Creek.

The morning cruise was at high tide. We passed a dramatic pair of rock formations as we entered the mouth of the main Hunter river

and passed under towering cliffs of the now familiar blazing orange and black sandstone.

The river is fringed with several species of mangrove

 

but behind the fringe of mangroves, naturally fragmented into specific ecosystems by the rock formations, are monsoon vine thickets: a short-statured form of closed-canopy rainforest, containing many food and medicinal plant species of cultural importance as well as supporting a wide variety of endemic flora and fauna.

The setting was extremely beautiful; the reflections in the water reminded me of Rorschach ink blots!

and the colours of the rocks together with the turquoise water were wonderful.

We were hoping for wildlife but to be honest there wasn’t much, and what there was was only glimpsed briefly: a snub nosed dolphin, diamond backed mullet, some substantial jellyfish, a night heron, a couple of kingfishers; we did see one of the salt water crocodiles (“salties”) that live here but it was displaying precisely why the salties are such dangerous predators by being virtually invisible.

So we returned to the ship for lunch, then ventured out again, as the tide was falling, along Porosus Creek.

Low tide = mud…

and mud = mud skippers! We had seen – at a distance – some tiny ones (a couple of inches long) in Talbot Bay; these, however, were giant mud skippers, up to around a foot long, and the males were showing off and leaping about to impress the females:

Sorry it’s such a hopeless bit of video – I was trying to hold my phone steady on a rocking zodiac while avoiding getting bits of other punters in the picture, and this was the only reasonably steady fragment!! Hopefully you will get the pro videographer back soon…

Anyhoo, mud also = crocodile tracks

And everyone knows that crocodile tracks = crocodiles!

There was an interesting stand-off between these two at the entrance to a small side creek – but they obviously reckoned that discretion was the better part of valour and sidled past each other…

 

So all in all a delightfully riparian day! The morrow has more rock art in prospect. Since I am requested not to share pictures of the art on social media I’m not sure how this is going to play out; come back tomorrow to find out!

Kimberley Day 4 – Bigge Island

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Friday August 16 – My birthday, marked by the present, from Fate, of the ‘flu, I therefore took to my bed – however I should point out that I also received good wishes and a birthday dessert delivered to the room from the on-board team, and apparently Happy Birthday was sung to me in my absence at the daily briefing!

Anyhoo , while I languished, Jane went out and had all the fun. I let her take up the narrative….

Bigge Island was named by Phillip Parker King in 1819 after the English Judge and royal commissioner John Thomas Bigge. The Wunambal people of the Kimberley coast know it as Wuuyuru and it is a place of great significance to them, although it has not been inhabited for many years.

We were transferred to shore by Zodiac;

after a certain amount of milling about and depositing lifejackets, etc, our visit was split into two parts.

The first was a short walk inland (carefully avoiding the areas on the beach and in the dunes marked as turtle nesting sites)

onto rocky areas

where ceremonial sites – pathways and circles of stones – can be found.

The people who made and used these sites are no longer around to ask, but the pathways are generally thought to indicate the path of the Wunnguur, a variation of the Rainbow Serpent or creator; or (as perhaps in this case)

to indicate a significant natural resource such as fresh water.

The stone circles were most likely used for ceremonies such as marriages, places of judgement, or resting places for the dead before final interment.

We then moved on to the second part of our visit: directly on the beach are galleries of small narrow caves wherein can be found rock art.

We were asked to leave backpacks and hats outside so as not to risk scraping any of the walls or ceilings; and again the Aboriginal people request that the art is not shared on social media. However there is an interesting article here – presumably published before the no-share request – by means of which I can show you some of the art we saw.

Of particular interest are the representations of the Wandjina, the local weather deities who control rain, floods, storms and cyclones. Some Dreamtime stories say that they created the landscape and its inhabitants, and that when they left the earth they passed through the rocks, leaving an imprint of themselves behind – so what we see is not so much an artistic representation but more an imprint of their actual life force, and as such an object of reverence and respect. Whatever their nature, they date back around 4,000 years and seem to coincide with the end of a millennium-long drought that gave way to a wetter climate – which would make sense given the association of the Wandjina with water and weather.

Equally  interesting, are the “First Contact” drawings. Much more recent, since first contact was in 1788, and rather more prone to erosion than the Wandjina-era works (the skills involved in creating the art obviously dying out by a few hundred years ago) these depict sailing ships and men in European clothing, smoking pipes. The article referenced above has some (obviously processed) photographs showing some of these clearly. In addition there were representations of footprints – or rather boot-prints, from boots apparently with heels; and what we would call a churchwarden’s pipe, the characteristic clay pipe often dug up in English fields and gardens. Throughout there were handprints, the outlines of (presumably) the artists’ hands – “I am here. I am country. Country is me”.

It was a fascinating and thought-provoking excursion. I arrived back at the ship to find that Steve had just been tested in the ship’s hospital and confirmed as a case of Influenza A; he’s not going to be going anywhere for the next couple of days at least – confined to cabin! But at least it wasn’t Covid, and – so far at least – I don’t appear to be affected. So you are going to have to put up with my (deathless) prose and (second-class) photography [don’t be so modest – Asst Ed] for a bit! Here’s wishing us all luck!

Kimberley Day 3 – Talbot Bay and the Horizontal Falls

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If you’re not into the savage beauty of extraordinary rock formations, then there’s nothing here for you. Move on…

Oh, still here?  OK, then.

Thursday 15 August – Before anything else, some geological background to the Kimberley.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know exactly what “The Kimberley” meant, except as the highly scenic destination for a lot of cruise ships. Courtesy of one of the onboard lectures, I have learnt a few basic geological nuggets.

  • Everyone knows that bits of the Earth’s surface have moved around; at one stage most of the land was in a single great mass which had since drifted apart.  What I learned is that Australia is not just one of these drifting land masses, but is actually composed of multiple cratons – micro-continents – which over the millennia have crashed into each other and got stuck together – “sutured” in geology-speak.
  • It’s a law of geology that rocks accrete vertically, oldest, therefore, at the bottom
  • When lumps of land collide, unsurprisingly the bits of land at the edges do not have an easy time of it, and compete for superiority. One edge “loses” and is either forced underneath the other, (a process called subduction) or over it (obduction).
  • The Kimberley is the verbal shorthand for the Kimberley Basin, a craton which collided with Australia and got stuck to it around two billion years ago.

So, you can see that the land round the edges of the Kimberly basin is going to be full of these subductions.

Still with me?  Oh, goody!

Today we had arrived at Talbot Bay, towards the left-hand edge of the Kimberley Basin. One would therefore expect the rock formations to be somewhat tortured by this subduction/obduction process.

One would be right.

Here is what the area looks like under the serene gaze of Google Maps.

Geologically, though, there’s a lot going on.

 

The land has been buckled and twisted in a very unusual way. Erosion has worked its way through the more easily weathered layers, thus exposing those underneath.

OK, so what? I hear you cry. Well, you get to see some rock layers that are normally buried under millions of years’ worth of other rock. More to the point, though, the landscape is visually arresting, particularly now I’ve set it up for you.

So, there now follows a large number of photos of rock formations.  You may care to leave at this point in the symposium, or, alternatively, to skip to the bottom where something slightly less dull happens.

We cruised around for a couple of hours, giving us a opportunity to take lots of photos.

I hope you can see the extraordinary angles the layers have been buckled to – some are almost vertical and others remarkably twisted and distorted.

This is my particular favourite – the colour of the rock just blazed from underneath the darkness.

The darkness in all of these images, in many cases just above the water line, is caused by cyanobacteria. These would normally be a blue green, but when exposed to the light they go into stasis and their colour changes to dark grey or black until they are covered by water as the tides go up and down.

Ah, yes. The tides.

The tides are the cause of a phenomenon that pulls in tourists from far and wide.  Some of them like us, would be in boats; others would take seaplane tours, from platforms rather unattractively parked in the middle of the bay.

What attracts them is the behaviour of the tidal currents through a couple of gaps in the rock, one of which

is sufficiently narrow to create whitewater rafting-style currents.

But not for us, sadly.

Once again, that old devil moon was spoiling our fun; we were here at neap tide, so the thrilling flood looked more like, well, a dribble, really. It may not have looked like much, but the guides attempted to make things more exciting for us by jockeying for position in the stream.

Had we been here at spring tide, this is how it might have looked.

Now you can see why it’s called the Horizontal Falls.

It is – at the moment – a popular tourist activity to race up through the channel.  Our Zodiacs did not, out of respect for the customs of the indigenous tribes, for whom this area, traditionally called Garaan-ngaddim, is a powerful, sacred place; their belief is that boats that pierce these gaps disturb Woongudd, the serpent who creates this wonder by gliding between the cliffs.

Others at the scene were less respectful.

This was a craft from the luxury cruising ship True North

which was in the area at the time.

The practice will fairly soon be banned. Out of respect for indigenous customs? Or because there was an accident a couple of years ago? Your call.

In any case, it was just as well that none of the passengers described in that accident fell into the water;

this was a very large crocodile which we spotted further up the bay.

As well as the croc, and a couple of crabs and mudskippers, which I totally failed to get decent pictures of, we saw a plant called the Kimberley Rose.

It’s a deciduous tree, also known as the Sticky Kurrajong, or Brachychiton viscidulus
to grown-up dendrologists.

The expedition wasn’t the dramatic thing it might have been at spring tide, but the area is beautiful and the rock formations very impressive.

The morrow holds in prospect a visit to Bigge Island.  On the other hand, I’ve developed quite a severe sore throat. I hope that doesn’t presage anything unpleasant…