Mungerannie

Mungerannie is the only place between Birdsville and Marree – it’s a pub, where you can buy fuel and food, and there’s basic accommodation and a camping area. There’s also these two old trucks – relics of earlier days on the Birdsville Track, when it was just a track and not a dirt road, and outback legend Tom Kruse and men of his ilk made the difficult 500+ kilometre journey regularly to take the mail and supplies from Marree to Birdsville.

The Derwent River, like most rivers in the outback, rarely actually flows, but at Mungerannie the dry river bed is fed by an artesian bore, forming a small wetland area abounding in birds. At dusk, it is a beautiful and busy place – thousands of corellas and galahs feeding and jostling for roosts on bare tree branches for the night.

These images are a little dark, but it was dusk. I hope they convey some of the beauty of the area and the magic of the twilight time. Beyond, the red gibber plains strectch on, but in this small corner, water transforms the landscape.

Sturt’s Stony Desert

Leaving Birdsville around 7am, we crossed the Diamantina River, still holding some water from the wet season, 1,000 miles or so to the north. For Australians of my generation, the river always brings to mind the haunting song sung by the band Redgum, The Diamantina Drover.

This is the last decent amount of water we saw for hundreds of kilometres.

South of the Diamantina, we started crossing Sturt’s Stony Desert. Rains a week or so before we were there prompted some green growth amongst the red rocks, or ‘gibbers’. The tightly-packed gibbers protect the sandy soil from erosion.

The immensity of the desert is impossible to capture in a photograph. Those who haven’t been there will have to imagine a view like this, the full 360 degrees around, for several hundred kilometres… and the silence of isolation – only the wind, and the occasional bird cry.

There were still a few places where water from the recent rain lay in low spots – but they were few and far between, and drying quickly. The weather was mild… crossing the Desert in high summer, with temperatures way beyond the century, must have been a hellish nightmare for the early explorers.

An artesian bore spurts out water from the Great Artesian Basin, deep underground. The water is hot, but is essential to survival for the huge cattle stations (properties) in the Desert, as most of the year there is little other water to be found.