Getting to Jarlmadanga, Western Oz

Two Weeks of Australia, #4

Jarlmadangah

It’s raining so much we can only see the road when the windshield wipers have just swept across the window. Out the side windows, I see acres of photographs, filled with whimsical boab trees, giant termite mounds and sprinkles of wattle trees. My camera is in my lap, feeling like a useless limb. Downpours and digital cameras are not handmaidens. Like the Aboriginals see a landscape such as this as food, shelter and waypoints on an internal map, Marc Banfield, my guide, sees the landscape as elements of a garden. When Marc’s not on Gibb River Road adventures with journalists, he’s a landscaper, and as he relates, more and more people are looking to landscape with endemic trees, shrubs and flowers. So, all along the road Marc sees ideas and each bit of flora he names with the Latin name. It’s a momentary realization that life is truly lived individually, we all see a tree and our thoughts about that tree hardly converge. But, he's savvy on the local lore and tells me that the Aboriginal god on Wandjina came with the rain, and is responsible for it. What the what, Wandjina? Enough already.

We reach a turn-off after about two hours. I say a turn-off, but it’s really just a barely discernible double track road, that only reveals itself after we part some bushes. It’s meant more for pack animals than a car, even a 4WD like ours. There’s a gate after about 800 feet, which we open and enter, but on either side of the gate there’s no fence. Bumping along the road, it’s as if the road builders followed behind a snake through the bush. The road winds and turns for no reason other than going straight would mean missing a bump or hole or thump and this road seemed to exist solely to thud my spine through the floorboards. This road leads to the Jarlmadangah Aboriginal settlement, which sits in the shadow of Mount Anderson, the highest point on this plateau. After an hour of this pleasure path, we arrive, almost as if it erupts from the ground in front of us, in Jarlmadangah.

I meet Rob, Marc’s father who will join us. We're due to go on Camel trek. I’ve come all this way, so no rain’s gonna stop me if the camels are willing.

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