Australia/Wildlife
Alien Landscape
A Giant Screeching Cockatoo Appears In The Salt Lakes In The Outback Of Western Australia.
It’s an eerie view, as you peer out of the plane window on your way to Darwin.
Australia is a hard country — often dry, with burning heat and no mercy for those who do not respect it.
Flying from Perth to the northern part of Australia, I am fascinated by the alien shapes which sprawl across a rugged country. Sometimes they are broken by canyons and outcrops, hard to distinguish from the air against their background of an endless range of reds and browns.
Even the green vegetation has a rusty tinge and the only relief comes in the weird outlines of dying lakes, edges encrusted with salt; their remaining briny water reflecting a deep aquamarine from the cloudless sky above.
I have trekked through the Bungle Bungles, but to trudge the salt lakes of Western Australia is still on my bucket list. Especially Lake Ballard near Kalgoorlie, populated with 51 iconic statues by Antony Gormley.
Kati Thanda — Lake Eyre was a wonderful experience when the Cooper River was in flood for the first time in twenty years, and we camped, walked, drove and flew over its red earth, then turning green and populated by 1000’s of Pelicans and other water birds.
Author standing in front of the road sign to Oodnadatta — in the vast outback of Australia.
In spite of the Cooper Creek being in flood, the signs had not been updated to reflect the water which was coming. The Oodnadatta Track was flooded when we flew over it.
Unlike the Simpson Desert further north, there were no sand dunes where we were — just hundreds and hundreds of miles of flat red earth, with the rugged Flinders Ranges way off to the South. We flew several 100 miles north, just to get a glimpse of them.
We flew out to Wilpena Pond to see the remains of old mountains, worn away over millennia, but in spite of its appearance, it is neither an extinct volcano nor a meteorite crater like Wolf Creek.
One Lake was flooded, the other was dry.
Although the two lakes are connected by a 15km strip called the Goyder Channel, it’s the North lake which is filled by the monsoon flood waters coming down the Cooper. South Lake Eyre relies on sufficient local rain to fill it.
On one or two rare occasions, there has been sufficient rain to fill the Goyder channel and allow water to flow from North to South.
In fact, there is water in the Goyder Channel now in 2024, as a result of the monsoons but it’s unlikely to be enough to fill the South Lake.
The Rainbird of Kati Thanda — Lake Eyre is the Pelican.
No one knows how, but the Pelicans know when to begin to turn up at Lake Eyre North in anticipation of their breeding season. It takes twelve months for the headwaters to reach Kati Thanda — Lake Eyre from Queensland Channel Country, the source of the Diamantina, the Cooper, and the Darling Rivers.
Pelicans have no known way to communicate around Australia, but for three years (2009, 2010, 2011) 90% of Australia’s Pelicans were at Lake Eyre.
In 2010, as soon as I heard 160,000 pelicans were coming back, I booked my ten day trip to the outback. With the water still coming from the north, it was the biggest flood in twenty years.
They have only two breeding sites known in Australian and Kati Thanda — Lake Eyre is on of them.
Once the Pelicans arrive, locals know the floodwaters are close at hand.
Until the Rainbird comes.
The Red and Black Cockatoo is a totem animal for the local First Nations people where I live — on Nyoongar country.
Known as the Rainbird , my life has been blessed with lots of interactions with this amazing, intelligent bird. Thought to be a messenger from the Spirit world, the bringer of rain and the keeper of secrets, hearing them fly and call is usually a sign that rain is coming.
For the past twenty years I have been actively engaged in volunteering to help preserve their habitat — especially from logging of old growth forest in the South West where my mother grew up. Where her family’s life is acknowledged in Beaton Road, in the south east State Forrest near Carlotta.
My story — He Looks Just Like Elvis — is about our local Karrak. Our Black and Red Cockatoo and my observations of them in real life.
These magnificent Xanthorrhoea were photographed by me during one of our conservation efforts to help stop logging in old growth forests in WA
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