Come on Rain
/‘We’ll need to get under this table,’ my wife Claudia said at dinner the other night, ‘and put the mattress over it.’ I cast my eye around our small accommodation. It’s pretty new and would have a steel frame, I thought. ‘Just there, where the rooms join together, would be the strongest place,’ I replied.
Last night a cyclone (or hurricane) formed at sea to the north of us. It’s over 600km away and the sky is clear blue this morning.
There was no Wet Season here in northwestern Australia last year. The rain never came. So, it’s been inspiring to see magnificent clouds gather here around. The Monsoonal clouds from Java—where there has been torrential flooding—build up in the afternoons. Rain comes thundering on the tin roof most evenings. I’m feeling happy and relieved to be in perhaps the only area of this big island where the weather’s all right. I may feel differently about after Cyclone Claudia has been through.
Cyclone Claudia brewing off the northwestern coast of Australia. Bureau of Meteorology image.
The coming cyclone pressures us to get out and about. Last night we drove out of town to the filling flood plains, where Claudia set up her tripod to photograph the rising moon: huge, full, orange-red, reflected in the wet lands. The noise of the insects and birds as the moon rose was almost enough to counter the whine of tiny mosquitoes in my ears.
Fitzroy Valley Communities map by Nindilingarri Cultural Health Services.
We’re in the Kimberley, a wild and vivid region. We’re at Fitzroy Crossing, a town created by Aboriginal people in the ‘seventies after Equal Pay Legislation meant fewer jobs. Most lost their jobs on the surrounding cattle stations they’d been born, lived and worked on. Fitzroy Crossing is on a slight rise from surrounding communities in the flood plains of the Fitzroy River and its tributaries. In this job, I have the great privilege of travelling out to the communities as part of a team providing medical care for the people. The Fitzroy Valley has about 36 communities (some are occupied or visited seasonally), maintained by and sustaining about two thousand people. Most of the people live in and around the six largest communities and most are Traditional Owners living on their Land.
From Fitzroy to the south-west community of Koorabye the pilot took our hot little plane over bumpy air above immense brown plains, deeply cracked, waiting for the rain to fill them up. Approaching Koorabye, I saw a river flowing and the tiny town surrounded by glowing green. They’d had their first good rain. Country drank it up. The Community of fifty people was deeply peaceful, with an excellent school run by a dedicated woman who loves her work. The bush is full of them, but these individuals are more precious than the diamonds.
Back in the Crossing after work, Claudia and I visited waterholes at a local gorge, called Danggu (Geikie Gorge) where two rivers meet. Stone walls tower white and orange. They have shells and other marine fossils embedded in them. They are part of the Devonian Reef, formed underwater 35 million years ago.
The Devonian Reef at Danggu (Geikie Gorge). The Fitzroy River rises to cover the white layer of stone. Photo ©Claudia Jocher 2020.
The waterholes teemed with freshwater crocodiles and birds. Wallabies came to the water’s edge at sunset, too.
The region is the home of pink diamonds—the name comes from the South African diamond bearing rock called Kimberlite, ubiquitous here. Even easier to find are the soulful boab trees, giant bulbous succulents that live hundreds of years. Boabs came from Madagascar years ago—whether it was many millions of years ago or tens of thousands of years ago is a topic of scientific debate. The trees have larger cousins in Africa called baobabs. Nobody even knows when sailors recognised them and gave them the Australian version of their name.
Boab tree. Photo ©Claudia Jocher, 2020.
Every part of the boab tree is useful. They are food, medicine, rope, shelter, water supply, art supplies and story keepers.
Kimberley rocks. Author photo.
The boabs preside in fields of termite mounds. These clusters of monuments, many over a metre tall, testify to insectivore organisation, vary in shape and colour according to earth they stand in. They play tricks on your mind. Some ant hills look like cities or towns. Some are distinctly like animals, people, clusters of beings convening a meeting or families of humans or pups piled on each other. Some are sharp-edged, some of blobby. A sharp-edged one might be a castle or a caped vampire. Many of the blobby ones look like the earth goddesses, like the Venus of Willendorf and her sisters. Or then there are one or two that embody that revolting parody of malignant obesity: Jabba the Hutt.
The rounded mounds are built by spinifex-grass eating termites. Sharp-edged termite hills are built by magnetic termites and all arrayed in the same direction so that their broadest side is protected from the heat of the sun, an example of building to optimise the power of your site.
Plain of termite mounds between Fitzroy Crossing and Derby. Photo ©Claudia Jocher 2020.
Fitzroy Crossing is inland over two-hundred kilometres from the magnificent Kimberley coast, where aqua waters meet red and orange stone and dirt at Derby. It’s four-hundred kilometres to the splendid coastal town of Broome, where you can go to a pearl farm and have a curry of pearl meat in the Dry season. Broome buzzes with tourists in the Dry. The hotels there are cheaper in the Wet.
To be here at the beginning of the Wet season is a pleasure for many reasons. Socially, it’s the time when the Kimberley people go inside their communities and look inside themselves, connecting with their environment and each other. The Aboriginal people participate in Ceremony, travelling through roads that have become rivers of mud: closed and deemed impassable. They are generally good, patient drivers in their minimalist vintage sedans. They hunt, garden, paint and carve. Non-Aboriginal people also take time to get into their own meaningful rituals: crafts, art or mechanics. The climate is stressy and steamy when the rain is building up, with uncomfortable humidity. But it’s a refreshing change from the scorched, smoke-filled air we breathed back east.
The author approaching a damaged termite mound, probably struck by lightning. Photo ©Claudia Jocher 2020. Pieces of ant hill have medicinal uses by local Aboriginal healers.
Fires engulfing this island have burned for several months now. Claudia and I saw the fires: huge fronts with flames visible even from a jet. Smoke covers most of the southeast of the continent. And then, we saw more fire in the west. Loss and grief are building like an emotional fuel load.
There is a lot of discussion among us all as to the cause. Knowledge of Aboriginal management of land by fire has only begun to reach the mainstream recently. Many farmers, foresters and environmentalists are keen to learn more about it and integrate Indigenous knowledge into local land management programs. Given that it was managed by fire, in different ways in different environments, it’s evident that by Aboriginal standards the land in Australia has not been properly cared for since the British came over two centuries ago.
Some people I talk to still blame environmentalists for the build-up of fuel load by not allowing pristine forests to be cleared. I don’t think environmentalists are so powerful in Australia, but there is a point hidden in there. The garden-like meadows and sylvan glades of pre-invasion Australia were made that way by the people who had lived there for tens of thousands of years. The country that the Europeans found was not as it naturally arose. The land needed to be managed, and was cultivated in ways that were more sophisticated than most of the new settlers or invaders could comprehend or imagine.
That rising temperatures and drought are caused by climate change is inarguable. Many people have been astonished and horrified by the ferocity of the fires. Fifty-metre-tall walls of flames that escape and run at unprecedented speeds may be fuelled by gas brought to the surface in fracking wells. That’s speculation—looking inland from the east coast to raging fires where we know the wells are. Claudia saw fires burning next to fracking wells from the plane here in Western Australia, but we’ll need to wait and see whether there is a causal effect there. Fracking wells can ‘blow out’, polluting the air as they burn, like this one in Louisiana, which blew out on August 30, igniting two adjoining wells.
Burning Mountain Nature Reserve, NSW. Photo courtesy NSW National Parks.
There’s a brown coal seam that burns perpetually in northern New South Wales, called Burning Mountain. It’s been burning for five and a half thousand years. Are the old coal mines in the Hunter Valley burning now?
Near there, in New South Wales, where we’ve rented a house, the smoke-filled air stung our eyes and burned our throats. The sun was an unnatural red every day. It felt like the end of the world. Our real estate agent postponed the first inspection of the house because her parents’ place was burned in an early October fire. She had to go help them. More recently, my mother messaged me about family members who’ve lost their houses and businesses. All they have materially in the world was burned. There are over a hundred fires still burning in New South Wales. Nobody is untouched by the fires.
I’ve seen red skies on the coast before. A dust storm that turned the skies orange in Melbourne in 1983. Half a million tonnes of topsoil blew across the city from the drought-stricken monoculture-stripped interior. That day was over 43 degrees (nearly 110 degrees Fahrenheit), the hottest day on record up till then. Claudia and I saw another dust storm that turned Sydney blood red when we lived in NSW in 2009. We’d just come back from a trip to the desert. I’d brought a little bag of red dust back for one of my Aboriginal Health Worker colleagues who was missing the red dirt. It was redundant. The desert imposed itself on the city with undeniable force. But conditions returned to normal within a week or so, when the thin layer of topsoil that took a few hundred years to be created blew out to sea.
Wollongong Harbour during the 2009 dust storm in New South Wales. AAP photo via Sydney Morning Herald.
We’ve had plenty of warning that this environmental holocaust was coming. Rural fire service chiefs pushed for a meeting with the Prime Minister all through last year in an attempt to muster government forces to help prevent these fires.
The PM seems to hide in his religious belief that he’ll be all right while the rest of us are doomed to hell. I guess if our planet becomes a hell he thinks he’ll be somewhere else anyway. He is a worshipper of coal, too. What if he knew he’ll have to come back and live with the consequences of his actions? It could happen.
The absence of a Kimberley Wet season last year left the flood plains surrounding Fitzroy parched and deeply cracked. Plants around our house and along the roadside looked dead. The cattle, ancestors of drought-tolerant brahmans-were bony and exhausted. We came hoping to see rain.
Our dreams of big cold drops of water, shining puddles and a rushing river came true. The string of waterholes has connected up into a flowing, foamy river. An Aboriginal colleague told me that the people wait for the third big rain of the season before they go swimming and fishing, so that old dust and rubbish are washed out and animals have had a chance to reproduce.
Country near Wangkatjunka, one of the communities I visit—greening up. Author photo.
Last week Cyclone Blake came into Western Australian—crossing south of Broome. It answered peoples prayers: causing no damage and bringing delicious rain.
Cyclone Claudia is due here tomorrow or the next day. The Fitzroy River has the capacity to be several metres higher. This place has evolved to take a lot of water.
When we lived in Central Australia an older woman, one of my patients who became a friend, used to say that nowhere in Australia gets any rain until the Monsoon comes to the Kimberley. We’re witnessing that here.
Our little pine table might become our shelter for a noisy night or so this week. We have enough water and food to last us a few days and the torch is charged. Or, the cyclone might go further south and fill up the canyons and gorges of Karajini and turn the fossil fuel mines to lakes. I’ll let you know.
Weano Gorge in Karijini National Park. The park was divided into two to permit mining. Photo courtesy Bob Tarr.
Thumbnail photo of boab at sunset by Summerdrought.
