Travelling in Australia with a Baby who is Teething

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 
 

I have three words for you, and they are magic:  Australian Shearing Songs. 
            Australians don't have a wild west - not the way North America did. White Australia was a convict colony, pure and simple. There was no war for independence.  There was no indigenous populations sufficiently well enough organized to fight back against us.  We didn't need a manifest destiny.  
            We had Bushrangers for our outlaws, and because the police weren't always much nicer, we built them up a bit, but there wasn't anything more than wistful ambiguity about what those boys were up to. There was just the land - dry, dusty, marginal land spreading out everywhere you looked and with nothing we counted worth considering in our way, we spread out across it. With sheep.  We white folks sent sheep inland by the millions and colonized the continent on their wooly backs.

Guess what our folk songs are about?  Waltzing Matilda, Ryebuck Shearer, Click go the Shears, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport - they're all about those dusty, snaggle-backed sheep and the men who worked them. 
The songs have got Heroic Ringers, (the fastest shearers in the shed) and Dying Swaggers (the old worn-out men that hung around the place and died there, knowing the ways of the sheep and the shears through to their fingertips) but mostly, they've got the thousands of miles of dusty outback track that the shearers walked on their way between the stations.

            The Sproglet loved every single song.  Preferably played at fifty thousand decibels on the car stereo, with all of us singing along at the tops of our voices, waiting for the tired, grizzly howling to stop and the poor child to fall asleep.

            "Only two hundred more kilometers to Gundagai!"  We'd sing.  "'There's a track, Winding back, to an old-fashioned shack-"

One evening, at the end of a night cruise on the Katherine River, the Sproglet decided that she'd had enough.  Of everything.  Right on the edge of a dusty camping ground.  The smile vanished, the eyes squinched shut, the mouth opened and she roared.  She'd been battering around Australia strapped to a child seat in a van for weeks without any sort of proper schedule or proper bath-times and she wanted to tell us every single thing she thought about every single bit of it.

            It was late in the evening - almost nine o'clock. Australian camping demographic is mostly over 60. They tend to retire early.

            In a fit of desperation, I opened up my own mouth and joined her. 
            "Give me a home among the gum trees-"

            "-With lots of plum trees"  Pippa sang. Then Sandor, then Thea and Mr Tabubil  -

            " -A Sheep or Two and a Kangaroo-" 
            We belted the song out into the night. Fumbling with the door handle, Sandor wrenched open the driver-side door and rammed the key into the ignition slot -

            And fifty thousand decibels of bush band roared out of the car stereo across the darkened campsite

            "A CLOTHESLINE OUT THE BACK! VERANDAH OUT THE FRONT- "

            We staggered backward, stunned into silence by the sheer volume of the sound.
            "Bugger!"

            "Get in the car!"

            For a moment, her eyes popping with disbelief, even the Sproglet stopped howling, and then she opened her mouth again and let the world know.  

            "An OLD Rocking CHAIR" We bellowed right back at her, pitching her headfirst into her car seat and snapping the buckles shut.  Sandor turned on the car lights to look for the volume knob, and there we all were - spotlit like singing angels as we threw ourselves into the van, night-blind.  At any moment we expected mobs of campers with torches and pitchforks to surround us, screaming Australian imprecations and explaining what they thought of things.

            Pippa and Thea manhandled the van doors closed at the same time that Sandor found the volume knob and for the campsite, at least, the volume abruptly ceased.  Sandor wrestled the van into gear and we got the hell out of there in a choking cloud of Northern Territory Dust.

            And the Sproglet fell asleep. Just like that. While we wrung the sound out of our ears. It's a good life, being 14 months old.

Kakadu - the Yellow Water Cruise

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy!

Saltwater crocodiles are primordial monsters- low and squat and scaled,  with bloated jaws, ridged backs like dinosaurs, teeth like nightmares, silent, still, swift as lightning  -right out of the deepest human dreams.

            Like all the worst monsters, they don't play fair.  You can't read them.   There's nothing behind their eyes that you recognize to look back  at you.  

            They're still and silent - until they're not.  We humans love our warriors - we valorize the hunt and the chase - courage, cognition, the face to face confrontation of the prey.  Animals that hunt the way we do - big cats and wolves and bears, we anthropomorphize  them,  giving them all our own carnivorous virtues.

            But the unreadable crocodile hunts by ambush  -from beneath a sheet of still water - a flash of jaw, a foam of water and then - it's gone.  They don't play by any virtues we acknowledge. Frankly, they're creepy.  Goose-pimpling, hair-raisingly creepy.

            Which is why they were permitted to bounce back from extinction - beyond the luxury-leather industry, they are so terribly terribly good for tourism.  Who doesn’t want to say that they have looked their ancient human nightmares in the face? 

            And faced it down.  Tamed it.  Photographed it.  Put it in an album, posted it on facebook and say "I was there!"

            We took a pleasure cruise along the Yellow River (Origin of name unknown. The water was blue) on a flat-bottomed twin-hulled swamp boat.  I had my Kakadu moment - blue water and fields of waterlilies (another invasive species- only this time, one that unexpectedly turned out not to be quite  so dreadful for the ecosystem as expected, with the additional benefit of being gorgeous as hell with its flat green leaves and electric pink flowers), and muddy riverbanks crowded with ducks and magpie geese, and pandanus and paperbark trees hanging low over the river, with electric blue azure kingfishers darting from branch to branch above our heads.  

The Sproglet was fretful - twisting and wriggling in Thea's arms.  She squirmed loose and clambered across our laps. while we sat in silence, crunching apples and staring over the sides of the boat.  Narrow passages lined with freshwater mangroves, the banks closing in on each side of the boat, loomed dense and dark and green, and lurking  among the mangrove roots - we saw crocodiles.  The boat rocked as thirty people swarmed and pointed - There!

A slab of grey resolved into  a ridged back - a three meter monster sleeping in the mud.  There was a gnawing sensation on my wrist - the sproglet in my arms was making like a crocodile on my apple with all seven of her teeth.   Primordial drool trickled down my arm and I watched the creature, disturbed by our low-voiced shrieking, slide down the bank into the water.  It vanished without a ripple.

Facts: Crocodiles are incredibly intelligent, highly vocal, and the only reptile known to have a genuine maternal instinct toward their young.  In physiology, they haven't changed appreciably since the days of the dinosaurs.  The terror statistics are very real.  Ironically, crocodiles  possess every one of the cognitive behaviors we valorise in the other big hunting animals - they track - patiently, and they learn.  If you're  camping in crocodile country, don't collect water from the same spot in the river every night - they watch you, and they begin to wait.  Don't sit on branches that overhang the water - a big crocodile can jump up to two meters.  And don’t - don't go swimming where you oughten't - if you do, the odds of being attacked approach one hundred percent. It's not your world up here, it's theirs.

            Crocodiles aren't the only things in the water.  There are  sawfish, barramundi, river rats, prawns as long as your arms - it's one of the worlds most vibrant, unspoiled ecosystems - and a world heritage site.  We saw a dozen saltwater crocodiles in an hour  - basking in the sun on the mud banks or on floating mats of reeds among the waterlilies. Cutting out of the major channel into a billabong, we came across a black dinosaur swimming .  Four meters long - he moved economically, his long black tail oscillating back and forth and propelling him swiftly through the water.   Storks and Ibis and Brolgas and Jabiru birds waded long-legged in the shallows - dipping, and reaching.  Our pilot guide did her best to provide a holiday atmosphere with a microphone and a horrendous patter.

            "Hey guys!  Got a good one - a good one!  I told you that bird there's there's called a Jabiru, right?  You know what his cousin's called?  He's called Poke-a-wallaby!  Hah!"

            We ha ha ha'd but were unmoved.  The sproglet, having reduced my apple to mush, began to work on Mr Tabubil's.

            Back on shore, two more boats were loaded and preparing to cast off as we pulled in.  Mr Tabubil was carrying the sproglet.  Two apples had cheered her up and she was ready to shine.  Wrinkling her mushroom nose into a face- splitting smile, she sat up in his arms and bowed, bestowing waves and kissed upon the inhabitants of all three boats.  All three boats were enraptured.  Travelling with that child is like making a royal progress , basking in reflected glory all the way.

Later, back on crocodile-free dry land, we lay on a picnic blanket in the sun.  The little monarch collected frangipani blossoms and dropped them on our faces. And sat on them.  In her diaper- scented baby-fresh infant glory.

            It was extraordinary liberty, even for an absolute monarch.  Her removal occasioned much howling. 

Uibrr

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy!

 

Our hotel in the little town of Jabiru was shaped like a crocodile, with four legs and a tail and two glowing red eyes mounted above the reception lobby.

            The receptionist who checked us in handed us our keys and pulled out a map.
            "You're right here, in the mouth."  He said.  "Get back in your car and drive around to that carpark, over there next to his jaw.  Walk in through his front paw and go across his shoulders around the pool, and you'll find your rooms."

            We giggled, and asked if it got old.

            He snickered.  "Depending on the crowd, I'll tell them to go down to the tail, climb up his arse and make a left!"

            Our hotel was shaped like a crocodile because for the Gaagudju people, who are the traditional landowners of the Kakadu National Park, the crocodile is one of their spiritual ancestors and a part of their creation myth.

            In the beginning of things, Ginga was a man.  Sleeping next to a billabong, he rolled into his campfire and fled into the water to soothe his burned back -that's why crocodiles still have lumpy backs today.  As a crocodile, Ginga crawled and carved his way across the landscape, digging and raising it into the shapes that are there now.  And once he's completed the job, he turned himself into a ridge of stone - the lumps on his back still there for everyone to see.

            We wanted to see, so we dropped our bags on the floor in our rooms, climbed back into the car and drove to Ubirr.

Ubirr is located in the East Alligator region of Kakadu, because the 19th century European explorers didn't know their alligators from their crocodiles.

Ubirr is a natural gallery, a cluster of rocky sandstone outcrops and overhangs covered with rock art.  The rocks carry 40 000 years worth of stories, history and lesson and hunting trophies overlapping and interwoven, escher-esque and rorsach blotted, climbing up the walls and across the underhanging lips of the overhangs.
            We walked up to a 30 foot wall painted with every sort of animal that was hunted in Kakadu across its history.  The animals were painted with the insides and the outsides all together - a fishing and shooting guide and an anatomical reference chart all at the same time.  Archaeologists have used these paintings to date climate and habitat change - telling when certain animals were found here - and when the climate changed and went away, when they stopped appearing .  Among the later drawings there was even a skeleton painting of a white settler in his breeches and his rifle.  One wonders at him showing up on a wall of hunting trophies. 

Among them were long skeletal figures two stories tall.  These were the Mimih Spirits - the Australasian version of Europe's fairies and little people.  They lived inside the rocks and came out to teach people how to hunt and fish and weave and make fire.  You must be careful of them, because they can catch you and take you away with them inside the rocks.  So tall and thin that they could slip through cracks in the rock and could be blown away by a stiff breeze,  the aborigines believed that they had painted the oldest pictures - they could do that - they brought the rock down to ground level and painted them there.

A ranger appeared (out of the rocks?  We wondered.) and gave us story lessons.  She told us that in the wet season, where we were standing was under half a meter of water - for half the year it was all about boats and crocodiles.  So this explained the bare floor of the land we'd been driving over.  I was unreasonably happy.

            Other rock faces carried other sorts of paintings - stories about law and creation and the life of the people in this place.  We wandered from rock face to rock face, climbing up the cliffs.  All the time, people were joining us, all climbing upward. We climbed until there was no more up and we spilled over the lip of a flat rock plateau and - my Word, my Gods- in front of us was the sunset and below, as far as the horizon, there was Kakadu- the Kakadu from storybooks and travelogues - ten thousand square miles of water, green and blue and shining in the low light.

It was one of those moments, you know?

            A hundred people were struck dumb, milling about aimlessly and stretching and sighing and then, quietly, finding a place along the edge of the rock to sit and watch the sun go down.  Yellow, then orange, then red, then purple.  Small and swollen and utterly astonishing.  Except that the Sproglet was screwing up her mushroom nose like an infant Popeye and blowing kisses, and half the plateau rather missed the moment when the sun dropped below the green horizon.  There were seven tooth'd smiles going on.

Into Kakadu

Some statistics:  Kakadu National Park is enormous - almost 20 000 square kilometers in size.. That's half the size of Switzerland.

            Kakadu contains 4 major river systems, six major landforms, a dizzying array of wildlife and has been continuously inhabited for more than 40 000 years.  And for half the year, it's underwater.  It's Australia's Big Wet.  Kakadu has everything - from sandstone escarpments to enormous lagoons of floating wildflowers, pockets of rainforest, towering cliffs with waterfalls, salt water crocodiles, freshwater crocodiles, magpie geese, azure kingfishers, wading birds like the Brolga and the Jabiru, and the largest concentration of aboriginal rock art in the world - a pictorial record of a history that goes back 40 00 years

            In two days we were going to see an absolutely infinitesimal amount of it.  We knew that.  But we were going to give it a good try.

As we drove south, traffic tapered off until we saw only tourists in camper vans like our own, and trucks on the long-haul route south to Alice Springs. A road train is a tractor unit with a string of trailers behind it - four are average, six are common. They get longer out in the center where the roads are really, truly, primordially, flat and run straight for hundreds of kilometers.   On this big country, with its long highways, and rail lines that are drying up and shutting down their spur lines, it's an efficient and economical way of hauling goods. 

            You can hear them coming before you see them.  You can feel them coming before you hear them, and  if they're carrying sheep or cattle you can smell them before you feel them.  They're a roaring in the earth, and then a churning maelstrom of air as they blast past at a thousand knots on two lane roads, and then they're gone - hurtling away from you into the interior of the continent.

            As we drove further into Kakadu, the dry earth gave way to scatterings of  wetland.  Mean,  patchy things, as seen from the road - little ponds covered in water-lillies.  Pretty and pandanus-lined, yes, and - oh, it was silly, but thanks to childhood picture books I'd had the silly idea that Kakadu was 10000 square miles of water, and you parked your car at the waters edge and were poled into the park on a punt.  The crocodile warning signs posted every half kilometer along the highway soothed my heart.  These signs were dotted across dry basins and empty ditches and watercourses that looked like they hadn't run for centuries.  Maybe the Top End wasn't going to be a world-spanning lagoon while we were there, but at some point in the year, the world was water.

Australian Crocodiles….

When you see signs about crocodiles, they're referring to the saltwater species.  Saltwater crocs are at the top of the food chain.  They live comfortably in fresh wate and salt - paddling hundreds of miles out to see, and cruising hundreds of km inland.  They fear no-one.  They eat everything.  And particularly relish the tourists who think that nature in the raw is a theme park and Disneyland all rolled into one.

            Signs are posted at every single pond, rivulet and lake, and the warning is a very simple one:
            "Crocodiles are present anywhere there is water, and if you go swimming, the odds of being attacked approach 100 percent."

For the first part of the twentieth century, crocodiles were regarded as terrifying pests.  Hunting was encouraged and the  crocodile leather industry boomed, and the wild populations were almost eradicated.  My maternal grandfather was a crocodile hunter up here for a time. It wasn't until the sixties that policy makers recognized that crocodiles might play a genuine role in their own ecosystems.  Crocodile farms were established and slowly, people were educated to permit crocodiles to share the landscape.

            We also passed several fire-warning signs, on which  'Severe' was only the 3rd setting out of 5.  One presumes that there are actually 6 settings in total, the last being "Sign no longer here . Check pile of smoking ashes for residual heat."

            And then, right at the doorpost of the Kakadu National Park, we pulled the car to the side of the road, because there it was.  A swamp, a wetland, a carpet of blue water stretching out past the horizon, tangling to dark green trees on the very far edges of sight.  It was straight out of the film Ten Canoes - a massive and serene expanse of water.   Carpeted with enormous waterlillies -huge leaves, giant pink flowers. 

            Dragonflies skittered.  Frogs croaked and plopped and a white egret picked her way elegantly across the face of the water, dipping and skimming with her long orange beak.  We all sighed and sat and stared, and stretched ourselves in the silence, and then we got back in the car and drove hell for leather into the park to find our hotel and check so that we could drive a further  40 km further to Ubirr because the ranger at the water had told us that we must go there to watch the sunset.  

So we did.

Drive to Kakadu -Obligatory Background Check

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 

Our first night in Darwin was rather disturbed. Our room turned out to contain a rather large population of cockroaches (all sizes), which seemed intent on bringing the party outside our window inside onto our bedside ledges - and bathroom - and into the mini-fridge, where, in desperation, we'd stashed our toothbrushes. 

            Next door to our hotel was a band with a live singer who was in a worse state, alcoholically speaking, than his parishioners and didn't seem to remember what he was singing past the first bridge. Mr Tabubil and I lay awake till halfway until morning, giggling helplessly.  With pillows over our ears.
            In the morning - we drove south to Kakadu. We had an enormous van; someone sensible (may heaven bless them forever and ever and ever) at the car rental agency had looked at the manifest - five adults and a baby - and made the appropriate deductions and given us a very large upgrade.  It's extraordinary - the amount of stuff that comes along with a baby seems to be inversely and exponentially proportion to the baby's mass.  The sproglet being 14 months old at present, her accouterments weighted approximately four metric tons. And it all fitted into the car boot (the car trunk, for Americans). Don't ask us about our gas mileage.

            Fully laden and riding rather low on the axles, we sailed out of Darwin.  Our car was, in theory, good for 130 on the highways, and fortunately the highways were mostly on the flat.

            Near the city there were mango plantations out to the horizon that make us all fratchety with temptation (it wasn't the season for ripe mangos, and the trackless rows of trees and their heavy mango smell were a source of terrible torment in our mango-less state).Further south, the land is mostly flat - baked red earth, pandanus palms, and termite mounds like cathedrals in Barcelona, with towers and buttresses all tall and accretive like the drip-castles you make with wet sand on a beach , if you made drip-castles six meters tall and baked them in an oven the size of a continent.  It was almost eerie - this flat land: trackless, towered, and the earth vacant between the trees  - no grass, no bushes, no scars.  Earlier in the dry, when the grass had still been faintly green, the bush was fired in small, localized burns - patch burning - to reduce the chance of serious bushfires later in the dry season.  After 40000 years of human management, many plant species now require the heat of fire to propagate, but right now, those plants were still charred seeds, and the ground was empty.

A history lesson:

             One of the first things the white Australian settlers had done during the great Northern Land Grab of the late 19th century was to put a stop to the burns. 

            The consequences were impressive - and eventually, the white powers were forced to concede that the aboriginal people of the great northern Terra Nullius might have had a point.
            They stopped the burns, but before the land had had a change to even begin regenerating, the same clever clogs brought in herds of Asian buffalo. The buffalo immediately went feral, stomping their way through the natural levees in the wetlands that separated the salt water from the freshwater and doing their level best to destroy any balance in the wetlands. At long last, during the 1990s, buffalo numbers were reduced significantly during a Tuberculosis eradication program, and artificial levees were erected to control the salt water flooding into the freshwater areas.  So on that front, at least, the Top End is doing faintly better.

            That's the modern history of Australia for you- a Terra Nullius that turns out to be not so nul - and managed by colonial types who paired wishful thinking and cognitive blindness with silly executive decisions. The latest scourge  in the north is the toxic Cane Toad. After it had wreaked ecological havoc in the Hawaiian Islands, and well into the sensible modern era of preliminary research studies, in 1935, some bright government sparks brought it over here to control pests in the Queensland sugarcane fields. Natural predators were abundant, Australia was told. We won't have the problems that Hawaii had.  Unfortunately, the study failed to connect a few important dots and didn't take into account that while the cane toads are day-creatures, their putative 'native predators' are all nocturnal.  On the Venn diagram of predator-prey relationships, the two groups never meet.

            Today cane toads multiply like rabbits and poison every day-time creature that does try and eat them and the government declares state-wide states of emergency as the toads work their way across the continent. All hail 20th century agricultural management!

Welcome to the Top End

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy!

Before we flew across the Pacific to Chile, we had an important engagement in Darwin with Theadora -a school friend of mine from California, and her Hungarian husband Sandor, her mother Pippa, and her year old baby-  to be known hereafter as the Sproglet.*  Together we had planned a week's holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End. 

            The Top End is the northern part of Northern Australia - the half a million square kilometers, more or less, of land pressed up into a bulge at the top of the continent.  The Gulf of Carpentaria is its eastern border, and the Indian Ocean lies to the west.  To the south, it peters out into the arid stretches of the red center - but between the sea and the desert is Australia's monsoon country.  And the gateway to the Top End is Darwin.

            The climate is tropical bichromatic: there is a dry season - hot and parched and baking and eventually hot and thick and humid, and just when everything is flat and drooping and suicide rates have peaked under the pressure of the flat white sky - the monsoon hits and six months of water drops in a week. Then the sky settles down and there's a wet season.  It rains steadily for six months; the rivers fill, the wetlands south of the city flood, and everything is peaches and cream and bush tucker for everyone.

            We were there in the dry - one week too early for the Darwin Festival (with which  the top-enders stave off the suicidal peak of the dry blahs) but just in time for the Darwin Cup, and next to that, the dry season looked like a picnic.

            We flew into Darwin in the afternoon, booked into a hotel on backpacker row and wandered out into the street to watch the world go by - the parts of it that were under 25 and deeply, madly, falling-down toasted.  There's a double standard to Australian fashions that bewilders me.  Men get baggier and girls get tighter.  There were twenty thousand people out at the racetrack, and back in town, the pubs were full, stacked three deep at the bar with strapping young men smart in their tropical formal shorts and singlets.   Behind them, perched precariously on tall stools around cocktail tables,  drinking things with sticky umbrellas clinging damply to the glasses, were gaggles of  desperately drunk young women, wearing cocktail dresses that had been too short at both ends before the night even got going - by now they were shrieking sideways down the street with their fascinators tilted over their eyes and falling out of their clothes sideways.

            It was a wild town that night.  About how it used to be once upon a time, one reckons, if one wants to wax poetic, back when it was a real frontier town.  It still IS a real frontier town.  But 95% of the would-be-crocodile hunters staggering down the sidewalks had flown in from out of state for the occasion, staggering sideways and singing old school songs (the versions with the ruder words) imagining that their drunkenness meant; meant anything - romance and excitement and really wild things - a poke in the eye to someone - who remembers and who cares?  20 000 conformists non conforming to rule.  

            Theadora and her family flew in by a later plane, just before sunset.  Thea is long and blonde and teaches high school science.  Pippa is long and blonde and drove a Mustang and danced to the Beach Boys back when they were both the latest thing.  Sandor teaches history and smiles with white teeth through a neat brown beard.  The baby had committed no sins beyond having learned to walk and growing seven teeth. (Eight, as of that evening.  We dined exclusively on ice cubes.)  It was Sandor's first visit to Australia.  He was desperately disappointed not to find the streets of Darwin awash with saltwater crocodiles, but settled for a roasted haunch of same - served civilized fashion, medium-rare, with french fries.   And Chardonnay.

* Sprog = Australian for child.  In Australia, you're a bub until you're walking and talking, but after that you're a sprog. Until you're out of Primary School. (Grade 8.)  

Bah.

The only thing worse than the temperature being 27 degrees C inside your apartment with the windows open is not being able to LEAVE the apartment and go find somewhere cooler because you have to sit and wait for a plumber.  And the only thing worse than THAT is having to sit in an apartment that is 27 degrees C inside waiting for a plumber while a gardener mows the lawn on an ancient manual mowing machine right outside your window and across the street, a handyman is cutting steel. The noise is UNBELIEVABLE. 
Fingernails on a blackboard are nothing to it.  It gets right under your skin and you feel like you are going to go MAD and jump out into the super-heated air and go swimming through it!