Through The Sandglass

Nuptials and sand

There's a reason I've been absent for a week or so - our daughter's wedding was on Saturday. You will probably appreciate that this has involved a certain amount of preparational activity that has somewhat distracted me from my blog responsibilities. The event was held in the garden of my in-laws' house outside Philadelphia and was determinedly - and enjoyably - informal (although to say that this does require rather more preparational activity than a formal and professionally organised event is something of an understatement). The photographic record of the day is still being assembled, but above is an illustration of part of the ceremony. But this clearly requires a little explanation as to what exactly is going on. 

The American half of our daughter is an East coast girl, her (now) husband is a West coast guy (San Diego, to be exact). So part of the imagery of the ceremony was the union of East and West, and this was celebrated by the couple each taking a vial of sand from, respectively, beaches of the Atlantic and the Pacific - New Jersey's Island Beach State Park, and Sand Diego's Mission Beach - and mixing them into a single container - which is what has just happened in the photo. So, a little excitement, a few logistics, a great party - and a symbolic sand ceremony. Altogether, a good week.

 

 

Fire in the sand

Some years ago, while researching the Sand book and indulging in one of my favourite ways to while away substantial amounts of time, I was rambling around Google Earth, investigating the dunes of Australia’s vast interior, when I came across images such as this:

Yes, there are those mega-striations of the endless longitudinal dunes (the entire continent hardly bothers with any other kind), but what on earth (so to speak) are those bizarre geometrical patterns? Swaths of greys, blacks, and yellows, as if an angular paintbrush had swept the landscapes. The blacks, of course, are a clue, but now I understand very clearly, having spent time in the midst of this painting: fire.

What I hadn’t really appreciated those years ago, was just how vegetated much of Australia’s desert outback is, and how easily fire takes hold, interrupted only by the natural fire breaks, such as dry stream beds, or the unnatural ones of roads and tracks. The vegetation is extraordinary, cleverly adapted to aridity, and hardy in the face of not only the absence of water, but the presence of fire.

Now, although the diversity of this vegetation is remarkable, there is one dominant plant: spinifex. Well, actually it’s not spinifex, but that’s what it has been called for a couple of hundred years, even though it is actually Triodia, a genus of hummock-forming grass endemic to Australia – there are reported to be 64 species. True spinifex is a coastal grass, but Triodia has successfully usurped the name as well as the landscape. It grows everywhere, its green clumps and fine waving stems proclaiming its dominance of the botanical demography:

Spinifex is not good for much: it’s essentially inedible, but it provides havens for all kinds of critters, and it can produce a resin that the Aborigines make effective use of as a glue. Its long leaves can be beautiful, but they are high in silica and can pierce the skin of men and beasts, often leading to infections.

Spinifex was the bane of every early expedition into the Australian deserts. David W. Carnegie, pioneering and prospecting around the outback around the end of the nineteenth century, titled his account of his adventures Spinifex and Sand. It seems that he and his companions would sit around in camp after a long day and occasionally compose poetry; he regales the reader with “the one considered by us the best",” and it begins:

I will sing you a lay of W.A.

Of a wanderer travelled and tanned

By the sun’s fierce ray through the livelong day

In the Spinifex and Sand

And spinifex burns – really, really well, and with an indescribably intense heat. We set fire to an isolated clump (the photo at the head of this post), and the rate at which the conflagration took off, and the heat it put out, was dramatic. Any spark, natural or otherwise, will set off a fire that rapidly consumes great swaths of the landscape – creating the brush strokes of the satellite image and a new, starkly barren and devastated landscape (of the mounds, probably more later):

 

Carnegie writes of travelling among the dunes, the sand ridges:

Before long we were among the ridges. What a desolate scene! Ridge upon ridge of sand, black from the ashes of burnt spinifex. Not a sound or sign of life, except the grunts of the camels as they strained up the sandy slopes. Presently, we sighted a newly lighted hunting smoke, not a mile from us; with my field-glasses I could see the flames of the fiercely burning spinifex lapping the crest of a high sand ridge.

And there is a clue as to origin of fire in the sand – yes, today, many fires are caused by lightning strikes, but historically, and still today, they are started by the indigenous inhabitants as both a method of hunting, to drive the critters out of their spinifex havens and burrows, and as a form of rotational land management. We describe Aborigines as nomadic, but they will deny this. Rather, an individual group will move around within their own well-defined territory, gathering food, hunting, and then burning the area before moving on, a pattern that is cyclic, the group eventually returning to the original tract once it has renewed itself post the burn. And this renewal is astonishing – in any but the most recent areas of burn, the green shoots are everywhere, thriving in their newly spinifex-free environment:

 

I find these images of renewal and rebirth exciting: compelling testimony to resilience and adaptation, and to the indigenous people’s intimate understanding of their land and its management. 

And then, of course, there's the other kind of conflagration: thanks in large part to the destruction and renewal in the desert, there's always plenty of material for the very necessary camp fire in the cold evenings.

 

Sunday sand: Georgia Bore dune

Georgia Bore is the place along the Canning Stock Route where we spent more time than planned - thanks to the mechanical failure of our primary four-wheel-drive vehicle. But there are far worse places to be stranded, not only in terms of being able to arrange being de-stranded, but it's also in the midst of spectacular landscapes - including those of the long, seemingly endless, dunes that striate the western deserts of Australia. And the "Bore" refers to the drilled well at the location, a piece of good fortune, since we were never short of water during our sojourn there.The name "Georgia" originates from a tradition in the company that drilled the well that each of their camps should be named after the most recently born child of individuals working on the project: Georgia was the daughter of the senior geologist.

Having a little time on my hands to explore, I wandered, predictably, around the dunes. Like seemingly everything in Australia, they're different. Not only kilometres long, not only vegetated, but the sand itself is not exactly typical of a standard desert dune. If you look at the grains of an Egyptian dune, they bear all the classic hallmarks of long periods of aeolian work: smoothed and rounded, frosted by the impacts with their brethren, and all much of a muchness in terms of size. But most of these antipodian grains, while clearly showing signs of having been knocked around, are still quite angular, and the variation in grain size is considerable. Does this suggest that their story is a fast and furious one, relatively brief but hyper-active periods of extreme aridity, punctuated by long periods of stability? I'm not sure - any suggestions?

Little fellah bums

 

The critters who make their lives in the sands of the Australian outback are not by nature publicity-seekers. Shy, discreet, and often nocturnal, they are, with the exception of the occasional cunningly-camouflaged lizard, rarely seen, but their journeys are recorded, with astonishing diversity, in the sand.

Birds, dingoes, lizards, insects, snakes, dingoes all leave their tracks and trails. But what of the print in the photo at the head of this post? Any guesses?

The Aborigines of Western Australia had an explanation: these are “little fellah bums,” the tracks of small spirit-beings who make their way across the sands on their backsides. This is a delightful and culturally sound interpretation, but the truth is that these are the footprints of change, and a change that would contribute to essentially dismantling the lives of those indigenous inhabitants forever.

Here’s another clue, the prints this time crossing a dried-out playa lake bed:

You’ve probably guessed by now – here are the culprits:

 

For a hundred years, camels were the engines of the opening up of Australia’s interior, enabling early exploration, construction, mining, and, vitally, water-supply. In the initial expeditions into the “ghastly blank,” horses and mules had proven more of a liability than an asset, and it was in 1839 that importing camels was first suggested as a solution. The first camel to be imported into Australia was named Harry, and he accompanied John Ainsworth Horrocks on his venture into the unknown in 1846, an ambassador for his kind. Harry proved his worth, but, unfortunately, decided to lurch as Horrocks was re-loading his gun: the consequence would prove fatal to the explorer and, very unfairly, to Harry. But, as a Melbourne newspaper reported, camels could carry

from seven to eight hundred pounds weight ... they last out several generations of mules ... the price paid for them does not exceed one half of that paid for mules ... and it is proved that these 'ships of the deserts' of Arabia are equally adaptable to our climate.

This heralded the forced immigration of large numbers of camels whose stamina, fortitude, and – generally – good nature, would support the development of the country’s economy for almost a century. And, vitally, along with the camels came the men who knew them and could handle them, the cameleers. Although collectively referred to as “Afghans,” they, together with their camels came from essentially anywhere that the ships of the desert did - Baluchistan, Kashmir, Sind, Rajastan, Egypt, Persia, Turkey and Punjab, as well as Afghanistan. Australia’s iconic trans-continental railroad, “The Ghan,” is named after these workers and its emblem is a camel with an “Afghan” rider. The tragically disastrous yet successful Burke and Wills expedition of the 1860s was made possible by 24 camels and three cameleers. All the heroic early infrastructure projects that opened up the outback – the telegraph, the railroads, the mail, mining – were only possible through the efforts of the camels and their masters.

The Australian Government has a fascinating and informative website on the history and culture of this extraordinary community. By the 1930s, the heyday of the camels and cameleers was over (except for a few, largely tourism-based, operations here and there). From the website:

The last of the cameleers

By 1940, few cameleers remained. Philip Jones relates the tale of some of the last of the Afghan cameleers in reCollections, the Journal of the National Museum of Australia:

In the Adelaide summer of 1952 a young Bosnian Muslim and his friends, newly arrived immigrants, pushed open the high gate of the Adelaide mosque… As Shefik Talanavic entered the mosque courtyard he was confronted by an extraordinary sight. Sitting and lying on benches, shaded from the strong sunshine by vines and fruit trees, were six or seven ancient, turbaned men. The youngest was 87 years old. Most were in their nineties; the oldest was 117 years old. These were the last of Australia's Muslim cameleers... Several had subscribed money during the late 1880s for the construction of the mosque which now, crumbling and decayed, provided their last refuge.

It is only in recent years, with the South Australian Museum's Australian Muslim Cameleers exhibition (developed with support from the Visions of Australia program) and book, that the story and the contribution of these pioneers to Australia's history and development has been told.

The primary (and largely accomplished) goal of my recent foray into the ghastly blank, was to travel the Canning Stock Route, “one of the toughest and most remote tracks in the world.” Developed in the first decade of the twentieth century by Alfred Canning, the 1800 kilometres of strategically spaced wells allowed a route to move cattle from the Kimberley to Perth that avoided the tick-infested coastal regions. The project, and particularly Canning’s methods in terms of treatment of the indigenous inhabitants (who were, after all, the people who knew where water was to be found), will perhaps be the subject of a later post. But for now, it’s the fact that, yet again, it was camels that were the key to it all. There are 51 wells along the route, and it was not only their construction that was made possible by Camelus dromedarius, but their operation. Here, from Gordon Grimwade’s survey, The Canning Stock Route: Desert stock route to outback tourism, and from the collection of Perth’s Battye Library, camels set out in 1908 carrying materials for the wells:

Many of the wells are now in complete disrepair, but a number have been restored:

 

The canvas bucket in the photo is for the hand windlass only – the main means of drawing water for the cattle was a much larger canvas or sheet metal bucket. Thirsty cattle need to be watered quickly in order to avoid chaos, and these buckets, of a couple of hundred litres capacity, were beyond any manual ability. Each well was therefore equipped with a “whip pole,” the angled and pulley-wheeled feature in the photo. An animal was attached to the rope that ran over the pulley to draw the massive bucket – and you can probably guess what animal did the work.

As their usefulness drew to a close, most of Australia’s camels were simply set loose. It is estimated that more than a million wild camels now roam the outback, and they have become a nuisance. At one point on our journey, the tranquillity of the desert was rudely disrupted by the sound of a helicopter, and we shortly encountered the camp of those responsible: they were camel-shooters, culling dozens each day from the air, and leaving the carcasses for the dingoes.

I hope that the group of camels I showed above haven't fallen victim to this pragmatic necessity – but, if they sadly have, perhaps their spirits still roam the sands as little fellah bums.

 

[For further information on Australia’s Muslim cameleers, see http://www.cameleers.net/; images of camels and cameleers above from the remarkable image collections of The State Library of South Australia. For a modern tale of travelling with camels, read Tracks by Robyn Davidson – it’s compelling, much more than just a travel book.] 

Colours of the "ghastly blank"

Playas, creekbeds, dunes, hills. The interior of Australia was popularly referred to in the nineteenth century as "the ghastly blank." It remains in reality a harsh land, but one of extraordinary beauty and breath-taking diversity.