Mutawintji is where the going got
tough and the tough kept going. This was
our first experience with a major, numbered road turning into an “unsealed
highway”. Then a large portion of the
road into the park was also dirt. Wider, smoother, and
not as rough as the washboard park roads we had been on, but “red” dusty and
much rougher than a paved highway. We
made it in fairly good time and fairly good shape, but the gas-powered refrigerator
was not so lucky. It refused to ignite. The red dust of
We had come to Mutawintji to see some guided Aboriginal Cave Art. There are parts of the park that are only open during tours guided by Aboriginals. One of these was scheduled every Wednesday, the next day! The surprise was that it cost money, quite a bit of money. None of the literature had mentioned that. There was a nearby walk that was open to the public and free and it included some overhanging rocks with “paintings”. We decided to take the shorter hike, just say no to the surprise fees, and to get to White Cliffs, our next destination, where we hoped to get on to sealed roads and a place to clean out our caravan. The trouble was, we knew there was a lot more unsealed highway between us and White Cliffs, an opal mining town.
The hike was fairly nice. We didn’t even need to keep our netted hats on all the time. The cockatoos there were called Major Mitchell cockatoos and were a salmon pink color. The sulfur-crested ones near the coast had been white and yellow. There were also rainbow lorikeets and a new fairly non-descript camp robber type bird that came round in groups of about 12, hence its name, the Apostle Bird. The canyon with the cave paintings had some moisture left in it and a few flowers blooming, which a sight for dusty eyes. The cave itself had an interpretive sign and collection of glyphs that included some about like this “///\\\ |||”, called tally marks used to count events. Another figure of a stick with feathers branching out of the end was called “the clever man stick”. It was used by medicine men to chase evil spirits from sick people. A sign somewhat like a barrel, “((|||))” was a “grooniki mark”. It signified a spiritually significant area. There were also some stencils of hands made by blowing wet ochre over them as they were pressed against the wall of the cave. Also leaving his mark was, William Wright in 1862. He was chosen to support the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition of 1860. The support team left its base camp the day before the explorers returned after reaching the north coast of the country and they died not realizing food was still buried there waiting for them. Also nearby were pieces of rock left by years of stone tool knapping.
As we
returned to the Nissan, we noticed some large birds circling above a ridge
across the valley. As we drove out they came
directly overhead and we could tell they were Wedge-tailed Eagles, with their “fingered”
wings,
The good news was that there were hardly any vehicles on that road. Still we drove for hours on rough roads across a fairly barren landscape. The most frequent vehicles were large cattle trucks that left you temporarily blind in a cloud of red dust when they passed. White Cliffs is fairly barren itself having only received grid electricity in the last few years, but it looked very civilized to us. (For awhile, the whole town was powered by a solar power station. But it must not have worked very well since it is now abandoned. The power company didn’t want any more of that foolishness, and spent an unwarranted amount of money running a power line to the community right after that.) We got some maps and advice from the visitor center and found the “serve-yourself” caravan park. We also discovered that the plug to the trailer had come undone along the way and shredded off on the dirt road. We knew we had a spare plug to wire things back together and a lot of cleanup to do but we unhooked the A-Van and headed out to see some of the sites in White Cliffs since it was still fairly early in the day.