The Ross River Resort is an oasis of living civilization within the deserted wild that is East Macdonnell. We went there as our rest stop after visiting most of the natural sites of East Macdonnell.

I very much looked forward to a wonderful lunch there. The walking had exhausted my breakfast calories. It turned out that we met a man from Coober Pedy there as well. As I heard the story of the early colonists’ lives there, the fate of the one million camels and the impossibly fatty kangaroo tail as an aboriginal delicacy, the experience at River Ross Resort exceeded the expectation of a good hamburger.

Let’s get the food out of the way first. My hamburger was good!

A Brief History of Frontier Developments in East Macdonnell

The history of settlement by the colonists in the Outback was closely tied to two critical developments of the late 1800s, one was the establishment of telegraph stations, and the other was the Gold Rush. The colonists arrived with the intention to exploit nature for resources, and such efforts came with some grave environmental and sociological consequences.

Charles Todd Sets Up Nationwide Telegraph Network  

Charles Todd persevered through the rough terrains of the Australian hinterland and set up telegraph lines and stations in Central Australia. He immigrated to South Australia from London in 1855. 

As he was appointed the Government Astronomer and the Superintendent of Telegraph, he set out to establish the key infrastructures of telecommunications. In 1877, he successfully completed the journey to set up telegraph lines between Adelaide and Darwin, having made his way through half of the unexplored Australian continent. As both explorer and key government official, he was tremendously admired and credited for connecting Australia with the rest of the world, very much an accomplishment of national stature.

Those were the times of an emerging frontier narrative in the nation. There is no question that all the conditions of the Outback were tough — the arid weather, the general lack of infrastructure, and a rocky landscape that would have necessitated significant menial labor for exploitation and development. 

Even in 2024, the Outback was tough enough for me as a tourist. 

The Gold Rush and Its Socioeconomic and Environmental Consequences

Arltunga lies about 45 km northwest of the Ross River Resort. Once the town of miners during the gold rush era, Arltunga now stands in ruins as a ghost town with a lot of the old buildings being rusted by time. Established in 1887, Arltunga was the Northern Territory’s first gold field.

Both the expedition of Charles Todd and the Gold Rush years called for the introduction of camel as the key carrier of goods and people. This resulted in severe unanticipated consequences to the Outback.

The Culling of One Million Camels

“Hoof animals are not native to the Outback and they turned out to be bad for the environment here.” Kirsty said with a touch of disapproval. In the beginning, camels were perfect for the colonists of the Outback when they developed this region, chief reason being that camels could survive the desert here, where horses did not. A lot of the camels in the Outback were imported from Afghanistan. The Australians also requested cameleers, the camel drivers, to come to Australia on year-long contracts to help run the logistics of driving camels and cargos.  

These cameleers, although not all were from Afghanistan, were collectively known as “Afghans,” so much so that the areas where they lived became “little Afghanistan” as early as the early 1900s.  A lot of them were Muslims, who eventually built the first permanent mosque of Australia in Adelaide. The mosque remains the center of their descendants’ (and other Australian Muslims’) religious life today.

Both the humans and animals native to the Outback observed one rule when it comes down to water sources. Where the water is there for drinking, both humans and animals do not dip in it. The camels, however, did not understand this rule, and brought forth quite a bit of pollution of sacred water source for the natives. Although camels could go days without drinking water, when they are thirsty, they would gulp down tens of gallons in one go. 

The hoof animals also graze, large-scale, on the vegetation of  the Outback. Their traffic also affect the quality of the soil and results in erosion. Needless to say, by now, camels have long completed their historic role as indispensable modes of transportation and logistics in the frontier before the times of the automobiles.  

Since 2009, various different stakeholders have been culling them systematically. The way that it is done is simply to shoot them. They die in the open, without anyone making the effort to bury or dispose of them.   

This practice sounds appalling to outsiders, but the camels have caused significant adverse impact on the environment and human settlements (farms, mostly) in the Outback. It is believed that the camel population in the nation is one million strong, and they multiply rather quickly too.

The Red River Gum trees that we see today (at Trephina Gorge) are there because after a century or more the nature of East Macdonnell recovered from the heavy logging of the Red River Gum trees in East Macdonnell. The Red River Gum Trees are naturally hollow. The colonists learned from the aborigines’ heavy use of this tree to build their homes, first firing the hollows of the bark. They could be used for roofing.

The Ross River Resort

The predecessor of Ross River Resort is the historical Loves Creek Homestead of 1898. It is believed that the foreman at Arltunga, Alfred Tabe, built the Loves Creek Homestead. The former homestead stands testament to the colonists’ interactions with the nature of the Outback. 

The railway was moved at that time. As a result, all the sleepers and the beautiful trees were left there to rot. The people took those to the homestead. The roof is built with materials from a bridge.  

A lot of the original features of the Loves Creek Homestead are preserved at the Ross River Reserve. The outhouses that we see, now serving as dormitories, were built from the leftover materials (the sleep cars of the trains) from the defunct railroad.

Its décor is truly representative of the frontier life: bar stools that are made from the old horse saddles, the fireplace that would have kept the living space warm in the desert’s unforgiving nights. There was a clear sense that, be it wood or metal, every piece of material must be put to full use.

A Sweet Encounter of the Bower Bird Matrimony 

Bower birds are much-adored in the Outback. The ones we saw at East Macdonnell were western bower birds, with beautiful colors in their feathers. The bower birds decorate their bower, where the male attracts a mate. This one collected plastic and glass, to make his matrimonial home.  The rest was green grass, they make “only green and white bower.” It’s too bad that we didn’t see the birds, but the beautiful bower made a lovely impression.

When Kirsty took me back to the hotel in Alice Springs, I took home with me the lessons of East Macdonnell that I will forever embrace as the realistic version of Australia’s Outback. The relative roughness of East Macdonnell, be it in landscape or in narratives, represents the spirit of survival for colonists, aborigines and animals alike. It was with this learning that I visited the Uluru, the most-anticipated part of the trip in the Outback. 

Sources

Tour with Red Earth Roaming.

Biograph.org on Sir Charles Todd.

Discover South Australia History, Red Gum: Crafts of Necessity.

The official website of the Ross River Resort.

Daily Urban Report, A Guide to the East Macdonnell Ranges: Ghost Towns and Gold Rushes.

Science Codes, How Australia Got the Hump Over 1 Million Feral Camels.

The Wikipedia on the Afghan Cameleers in Australia.

At this point of the tour in the East Mac, I could not miss the obvious – that the East Mac is significantly less preferred as a tourist attraction than the West Mac. When we did meet a few souls there, they were local tourists (as in, Australians).

There are ways with which I agree the perceived preference for West Mac. The East Mac has fewer sites of interests. The area is a bit smaller, and the terrains appeared more “rugged,” “less refined,” and with less facilities for tourists (there were not even trash cans). It feels like a difference between a refined woman of the cities and a rustic, wholesome country girl.

One obvious reason to explain this disparity is the fact that West Macdonnell is a designated national park that is given specific state protection. East Maconnell has not been petitioned for the same status.

At East Mac, the learning goes back to the fundamentals. How the rocks are formed beneath their rusted crimson surface; how the birds woo their mates; what the aboriginals ate. If I say there is that veil of mysticism to the West Mac narrative, then the learning at East Mac serves to undo some of the mystery by filling in the necessary details to understand the nitty-gritty of human existence.

There was a certain “rawness” in the narratives I heard in East Mac, like the bush coconut (insect eating) and the kangaroo tail eating by the aboriginals, and the culling of camels and the exploitative logging by the Europeans. These stories were shocking to me, certainly in different ways, but they were presented as they were, no dressing up, or dressing down, was necessary.

Yet there is a way that the two sides of the Macdonnell ranges are united, and that is in its very geological origination.

The Macdonnell Range’s Beginning

The Outback sits on a tectonic plate. There is no actual fault line, and things are always shifting around. In around 350 million years ago, there was a pressure against the sedimentary rocks. They were pushed together in an orogeny. Right across the centre of Australia, the horizontal layers pushed up through the Alice Springs Orogeny, resulting in the formation of the mountain ranges in the former ocean seabed. That explains the abundance of sand in the East Mac sandy creek beds.

This was a major geological episode in the continent’s history. Across central Australia, a mountain range was formed, 10 km high. And then it kept breaking down due to erosion. All the lines on the rocks, as sedimentary layers pushed up in the air, used to be horizontal. They were then pushed up in diagonals.

The Aboriginal Way of Life

At West Mac I learned about the idea of the Dreaming, as a glimpse into the aborigines’ ancient worldviews. By storytelling, the aborigines impart knowledge in survival, life skills and laws upon their children. Not very much was explained as to how they lived their lives as nomadic peoples in the wild. I got my lesson in East Mac.

Bush Tucker

Kirsty picked up a seemingly random something from the ground and said, “this is a bush coconut.” “A bush coconut?” I stared at this dried “fruit” and wondered how the palm-sized glob of a thing could be food. Being peoples of the wild, the aborigines rely on bush foods as the staples of their diet, and the word for it is “bush tucker.”

I was simply unprepared for what I was about to hear as Kirsty explained the eating of bush coconut to me.

Bush coconuts are bush food. It begins when a little insect stings the bark blob, and inject chemicals. The tree grows a bowl around it and she lives within it. Because the trees are called Bloodwood tree, they are also called bloodwood apples.

A male insect flies into the air hole to mate with her, she then has larvae. The population inside the bush coconut is equal in the number of male and female larvae. When the larvae grew, the male brother takes a sister with him to fly out. She then lands on another bloodwood apple tree. Only the gray tree coconuts are alive (the one she picked up from the ground was black, hard and dried). The aborigines open up the bush coconuts to eat the female, the larvae and the white sap, which has water content. It can last as a food in a desert.

Now, insect eating is not new, as the Chinese people eat insects too. I do not get appalled out of a disparaging attitude against the aborigines. It simply sounded gross to me, in whatever culture that does so.

But it does make sense for the aborigines because the female insect and the larvae are great sources of protein. The water content inside the bush coconut would have been critical for survival as well. I looked online and a non aboriginal person said that the witchetty grub, which is a similar idea, tastes like the fats of a chicken. When roasted, the skin of the female is crispy.

“Oh dear, no more,” I must have looked so appalled that Kirsty laughed. I thought to myself, “the Dreaming was all dreamy and romantic and mystical, but the actual survival of this environment will call upon human beings to try all things.” These manners of survival maybe “gross” in our terms, but like the Dreaming, they are time-tested cultural practice for the aborigines. I can’t take the Dreaming as a fascinating other-worldly culture and then deny the validity of what the aborigines eat.

The Kangaroo Tail as a Delicacy

The ways that human beings develop their diet throughout times are instinctive and cultural at the same time. Without naming the modern buzz words of protein, fats or fiber, every civilization understands what are essential to them in terms of sustenance. Now, the kangaroo tail is yet another marvel that I learned in the Outback.

It might still be true that there are more kangaroos in Australia than its human population, and the Australians eat them. I have no problem eating kangaroo meat, and I have. For the lack of a better word, it is a tougher version of beef. But the kangaroo tails are a thing that non-aboriginal Australians do not necessarily entertain. They are a BBQ delicacy for the aborigines.

Well, we met a gentleman from Coober Pedy, which itself is a wonder to behold as the traditional opal mining town in South Australia. People live underground in caves there. He told us about the dense, sickening fattiness of the kangaroo tail, roasted on open fire as a feast for the aborigines. “Oh, how it smells!” But in a desert climate, that is what keeps the aborigines fed, satisfied and warm.

At that point of the tour, I started developing realistic views about the aboriginal ways of life, beyond their beautiful storytelling art and the learned use of herbs and natural elements. All of their ways of life must be appreciated in the context of desert survival. The foods that they eat and don’t eat are equally valid expressions of ageless wisdom.

As to the culling of one million camels by the European-descent Australians, that’s the story for the Ross River Resort.

It is my view that a realistic understanding of the Outback, especially in its cultural and historical significance, must consist of both trips to the West Mac and the East Mac.

Sources

Tour with Red Earth Roaming.

The tour was approaching its end and it was with a bit of unwillingness that I had to say goodbye to West Mac soon. I thought the Ormiston Gorge was one of the most amazing sites that I had visited thus far in the Outback. But before then, we did a quick stopover to view Mt Sonder.

The Pregnant Lady Rwetyepme

It is said that Mt. Sonder looks like a pregnant woman lying down. It takes a certain degree of imagination, but see if readers agree with that.

Now, the meaning of that interpretation of Mt. Sonder is perhaps not well known. I looked online and found a likely explanation. Mt. Sonder, in the native language named “Rwetyepme” (pronounced “roo-choop-ma”), means the Pregnant Lady. According to Reverend Michael Armstrong on the Anglican Board of Mission, the Dreamtime as told to him by an aboriginal elder goes like this:

In the dreaming a man and a woman, who were not permitted to marry due to their kinship relationships, had run away together. The woman was pregnant. They were hunted down for their breaking the law, and the man was killed. The woman was allowed to escape. However, she was so grieved by what occurred that she laid down on the ground and died.

Mt. Sonder and the Larapinta Trail

At 1,380 meters high, Mt. Sonder is the fourth highest mountain in Central Australia. It is named after German botanist Wilhelm Otto Sonder.

At the view of Mt. Sonder, we were told that the Larapinta Trail is the hiking route that would scale the mountain. The Larapinta Trail prides more than 220 km in total distance. On this trail you will garner insights into both the nature and the cultural aspects of the West Mac. Again, planning is necessary if you want to hike any or all of the sections of the Larapinta Trail. Hikers should consult a local travel operator if they want to do multi-day hikes. The Mt. Sonder section of the trail is a 16km hike.

We stopped only briefly at the lookout. The day appeared to be waning, and we headed out to the very last, and the most enjoyable for me, site. Ormiston Gorge was next.

The Finke River

Central in the learning here is the Finke River. Brent told us that the Finke River is the oldest river in the world. The Finke River formed as early as 300 to 400 million years ago, and not from glaciers or tectonic movements.

According to Britannica, the Finke River is a “major but intermittent river of central Australia that rises south of Mount Ziel in the MacDonnell Ranges of south-central Northern Territory. The Finke passes through Glen Helen Gorge and Palm Valley and then meanders generally southeast over the Missionary Plain. Entering a 40-mile (65-km) gorge between the Krichauff and James ranges, the river emerges upon mudflats and sand flats to be joined by the Palmer and Hugh rivers.”

The river flows intermittently, only at times of major rainfall events. Yet the Finke River was still a key water source for the fauna and flora in West Mac. At times of flood only, the Finke River would reach as far south as South Australia, which is the state in Central Australia that lies directly south of the Northern Territory.

That sounds like a whole plate of learning. But geography aside, the cultural aspects of the Finke River was tied to Australia’s European past as well. In this story the explorer John Stuart visited the Finke River in 1860. He named the river after his patron, William Finke.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the Dreamtime also features the Finke River, known as Larapinta, meaning “salty water.” The Wester Arrernte aborigines believe that the Rainbow Serpent emerged from Lake Eyre, thrusted north and formed the Larapinta.

The Ormiston Gorge

Where the Finke River passes to its west, the Ormiston Gorge lies still in the folds of time. Known as Kwartatuma in Western Arrernte, the Ormiston Gorge is a sacred site for the aborigines. The Dreaming involves the emu ancestors that traveled from the Ochre Pits to the Ormiston Gorge. They were hunted by a man here.

The popular hiking options at the Ormiston Gorge are the Ghost Gum Lookout (20 minutes, upward climb), the Waterhole Lookout Walk (5 minutes) and the Pound Lookout, a 3 to 4-hour loop. I opted to do the Ghost Gum Lookout and took a look at the Waterhole too.

From the Ghost Gum Lookout, I saw how unlikely colors of the Outback came together in a landscape full of life. At the fissures, the rock cliff faces consisted of the rusted Heavitree quartzite are exposed, and at the lookout this rusted earthiness becomes strands of brightness amidst a vast expanse of arid colors, mostly in chestnut hues and lots of dull greenery.

The river water here is not the navy blue that I saw at the Ellery Creek Big Hole, but perhaps it is so clear that the colors of the riverbed sediments are shown through in dark emerald. The river meanders in this gorge, like the velvety belt of a wholesome country girl.

The Waterhole was a fantastic place for reflection. The scenery there was serene, and more so than the Ellery Creek Big Hole. The Ormiston Gorge Waterhole features plenty of vegetation and tall gum trees to line its shore.

The waterhole is near-permanent here. At its deepest end in rainy season, the waterhole measures 14 meters deep. In here I felt the stillness of time under the slightly waning daylight. A book here for a whole day would be exceedingly pleasant.

There are also campgrounds at the Ormiston Gorge. For a pretty thorough factsheet on traveling to Ormiston Gorge, see this document by the Northern Territory Government.

Those who are interested in a learned immersion into the cultural aspects of the Ormiston Gorge, be on the lookout for the Kwarta Tuma Festival. The website is here.

My day at West Mac ended on a lovely high note. Would I come again? You know what, now that I have had the experience planning a trip to the Outback, I really might do a self-guided tour here, and explore some other spots that were not covered on this trip.

Sources

Reverend Michael Amstrong, Anglican Board of Mission Archives, Rwetyeome, The Pregnant Lady.

Ausemade, Mount Sonder / Rwetyepme.

Ausemade, Ormiston Gorge and Pound.

Clayton John, Larapinta Dreaming, heartfulness, January 2, 2023 at https://heartfulness.org/magazine/larapinta-dreaming

Kate Leeming, Following the Finke: A Modern Expedition Down the River of Time, www.breakthecycle.education.