The Crow Eaters: A journey through South Australia

By Ben Stubbs

Outsiders think of South Australia as being different, without really knowing much about it. Combining his own travel across the million-square kilometres of the state with an investigation of its history, Ben Stubbs seeks to find out what South Australia is really like.In the spirit of the best travel writing and literary non-fiction, he lingers in places of quiet beauty and meets some memorable people. Along the way he debunks most of the cliches that plague the state. Travelling to Maralinga, Ceduna, Kangaroo Island, the Flinders Ranges, Coober Pedy, the storied Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth and the once-mighty river that is the Murray, Stubbs brings this diverse state to life. He even addresses head-on the question Is South Australia weird?'Readers will find it hard to resist the book's implicit invitation to take a look at places much closer to home, to take the time to drink in dramatic landscapes that are slow, deep and speckled with unforgettable characters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781742244563

Ben Stubbs

Ben Stubbs is a 28-year-old Australian travel writer. His writing appears regularly in the Sydney Morning Herald, Sun-Herald, The Age, The Australian, The Sunday Telegraph, Get Lost! magazine, Lonely Planet online, AFTA Traveller and the Toronto Star. This is his first book.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

A BEGINNING

O ‘Arcadian Adelaide,’ may you improve – may your people prosper, and be happy, in order that they may remain in their own Village, and inflict themselves less on the outside world.

Thistle Anderson, Arcadian Adelaide (1905)

South Australia often sits happily on the periphery of Australian understanding – out of sight and out of mind. Outsiders are often aware that the settlers here weren’t convicts, that eight bodies were found in barrels in a Snowtown bank vault and that the wine is nice, though for a state that is larger in area than all but 30 countries in the world – nearly twice the size of Spain and three times larger than Italy – it is confounding that so many of South Australia’s other stories remain on the edges.

The idea that South Australia is a place not worth one’s time goes back to the early 20th century. Thistle Anderson was a local poet, actor and satirist when she wrote a 40-page pamphlet, Arcadian Adelaide, to shine a light on the dullness of South Australia. She remarked that in 1905 the world was in the tumultuous grip of a Russian revolution, the Russo-Japanese war which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the Moroccan crisis which pre-empted the First World War, and the discovery of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, yet the only notable occurrence in Adelaide, according to the state’s yearbook, was the opening of South Australia’s first kindergarten. Thistle was the nom de plume of Mrs Herbert Fisher of North Adelaide, who had had enough of the nothingness of the ‘City of Churches’. So this educated woman, originally from Scotland, took the genteel city to task for its inability to shift the status quo, to get some blood pumping in its veins. She chastised Adelaide and wrote that it was a place only ‘remarkable for drunks’ and plain women, yet she also apolo-gised to the broader public for the poor quality of the state’s wine at the time. Thistle wondered if the main industry in Adelaide was ‘child-bearing’, though she was also curious whether the ‘Almighty Himself would approve of the perpetuation of some of the Village family-trees’ in Adelaide’s suburbs that were becoming alarmingly inbred. She thought the best thing about Adelaide was that ‘you could buy a ticket to Melbourne at the railway station’ to get out as quickly as you could.

Thistle lit something of a fire under the backsides of the previously polite Adelaideans. She was scorned from all sides; critics told her to ‘quit books for babies’ and that a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, especially for a woman. The broadside Thistle launched at the South Australian public also brought widespread praise for her wit and ‘sledge-hammer like force’ in waking up people. Shortly after her pamphlet’s release, Thistle left Adelaide for San Francisco and she never returned, though what her writing did was to get people from within South Australia and around the country to take notice of Adelaide, to talk about the state, to defend the city and to offer their own stories and experiences to show it as something more than a dull capital of booze and large families.

South Australia has once again become buried in hysteria and rhetoric. It is time to explore the state that looks like an apologetic frown on the southern edge of the Australian mainland to see what it is like beyond the clichés and the media scorn for wind energy, unemployment and out-of-touch politicians.

South Australia has become an enigma. It is either the butt of jokes or it’s treated as some tourism utopia of wine and wildlife, as seen with recent articles from The New York Times and Lonely Planet naming the state as one of the best places in the world to visit. What is there here beyond these broad strokes? There’s a big space of grey in the middle of its nearly one million square kilometres.

With the ease of travel it is little wonder that South Australia, and South Australians are often overlooked. You can be in a yurt on the Mongolian steppe within two days if you really want to be; you could be slurping gelato on the Amalfi Coast with minimal fuss by the weekend; or you could even be in Bali before breakfast tomorrow.

Despite this ease, the notion of travel is changing. An era of looking closer is approaching, where travellers will begin to look around them and below them, rather than always afar. With the precariousness of Donald Trump’s administration forcing even the most placid and mainstream travellers to re-think their need to go abroad, the time to look beneath our toes is upon us.

The idea of looking closer is something that I had never considered seriously until now. My curiosity was not provoked by Donald Trump’s absurdities, but by a book I picked up about a man travelling around his bedroom in the late 18th century. Xavier de Maistre wrote A Journey Around My Room while being imprisoned in his room for six weeks after he was caught fighting a duel in Turin in 1790. Rather than sit and sulk, he decided to write a travel book about everything in his room. He observed his surroundings through a different lens to give the reader an alternative perspective on what travelling could be and that there are things all around us that we don’t normally pay attention to.

What a comfort this new mode will be to the sick; they need not fear bleak winds or change of weather. And what a thing, too, it will be for cowards; they will be safe from pitfalls and quagmires. Thousands who hitherto did not dare, others who were not able, and others to whom it never occurred to think of such a thing as going on a journey, will make up their minds to follow my example.

I have also noticed that there is something strange about many of the South Australians I have met since arriving. They have a secretive pride about their state and the stories within it. It seems to me that many people here are protective of their own histories and it’s not until you stop and look a little closer and talk to people that you begin to understand the storylines which connect the towns and the ranges like curves on a topographical map. You don’t need to travel 10 000 kilometres to find a story; it can be right here, literally buried below your feet.

The history of this place was in my hands, hiding just beneath the soil. I pulled up a curved lip of clay from beneath a tangle of old roots and wriggling worms; it was the edge of a brick. Over the next few days, gardening in my backyard, I pulled up more than 30 shards of old bricks and pottery from the earth. I moved to Littlehampton, a tiny village in the Adelaide Hills, five years ago from the eastern states. I’m an outsider here, though it’s become my home and a place I’m curious to learn more about. Littlehampton was once a busy community with a railway station, abattoir and meat processing plant, a brewery, plantations and a travellers’ pub. On the corner of my street there was once a brick factory, Coppin Brothers, which began in the 1850s, using the rich clay soil beneath the hills to make bricks for the people of Mount Barker and to provide competition for the Littlehampton Brickworks, which still has a yard full of fired bricks and a kiln chimney and could once house 50 000 bricks. It is from the clay deposits on the corner of my street that many of Adelaide’s early houses were built.

Many years have passed since Coppin Brothers closed down. Before my family arrived here, an old lady who lived in a cottage surrounded by overgrown gardens and blue-painted walls owned our block. Within her overgrown gardens the history of the brickworks and the story of my street was gradually swallowed by soil and tree roots.

In Bruce Chatwin’s book In Patagonia, his journey to the south of South America is prompted by a piece of animal skin he finds in his grandmother’s cabinet – it was supposedly found by a relative of his who travelled along the edges of South America as an early explorer. As I dig up flecks of clay and brick from my own backyard it prompts me to want to understand my surroundings – to do what de Maistre did in his bedroom and Chatwin did with the piece of skin, and to look closer. There is nothing particularly remarkable about the discovery of a few old bricks, though it made me stop and think. What are the other stories of South Australia lying beneath the surface waiting to be excavated?

Like the spokes on a bicycle wheel, I will venture out from my home in all directions around the state, in cars, planes and boats; using feet, flippers, torches and paddles to discover more about the place I live. I’m not interested in a guidebook’s flippant coverage either. This is something different. Rather than hope to tread each inch of the state I will be guided by the stories I discover, the people I meet and the questions I’ve been storing about South Australia to act as my compass for my travels ahead.

CHAPTER 2

WHITE MAN IN A HOLE

The phrase ‘to die of thirst’ has little meaning to most people in modern Australia. Except in the desert. When extreme dehydration sets in, it starts with dizziness, headaches and cramps. Then your heart starts beating faster as your body works harder to function; a fever will develop and then, as the sun and the air suck the sweat and saliva from your body, your face will turn grey while the blood vessels under your skin shut down. The water acting as a cushion for your spinal cord will dry out, your kidneys will fail and that will be it. All prevented by something as simple as a glass of water.

Thirst is one of the defining characteristics of the arid land above Goyder’s Line in South Australia – the invisible line created by George Goyder in 1865 to identify a reliable rainfall marker across the state. Many men made their fortunes selling water to miners and explorers in the early days and, even now, people still die of thirst here if they’re caught in the hot, baking sun without a drink. As I drive north, past the burned earth and shimmering heat on the road, it’s all I can think about.

I leave Adelaide in the early morning. It is full summer and the week after Christmas. The roads are quiet so it’s easier to see the mirages levitating off the black surface as I creep northwards. The heat and access to water have defined much of the north. I want to experience it at its peak.

In the past, the hotels, inns and watering holes along the spine of the state were crucial for explorers, drovers, cameleers and others moving through on exploratory missions. It is a similar necessity now which forces travellers to plan their routes and watch their gauges before filling and refilling their vehicles once, twice or sometimes even three times in a day along the Stuart Highway which barrels along all the way to Darwin at the top of Australia.

A few hours north of Port Augusta, at Spud’s Roadhouse in Pimba, I see the daily special, ‘Beef Karma’, scrawled in chalk on a noticeboard out the front. It’s now 45°C outside. I don’t think the misspelling is accidental, though all I buy is petrol and I continue from the roadhouse 8 kilometres to Woomera along the Arcoona Plateau.

The town looks apocalyptic in the midday heat. The brick houses are shuttered. The grass is burned and yellow. A solitary boy weaves along the main street on his BMX, as if surveying the town, post-zombie invasion, for survivors. There are basketball courts, a theatre, a wellstocked supermarket and visitors’ centre, though they are all deserted. ‘It’s almost like you are living in another world, just as though you had been shot off in a spaceship and let down on some strange planet where men had never been before’ wrote Ivan Southall in Woomera.

Woomera is Kokatha country; there are still rock engravings within an hour’s walk of many of the campsites around the area and it is suggested that there were once many ceremonial sites around the cane grass swamps here, which could hold rainfall and sustain life.

On first approach, Woomera looks like an abandoned ‘Thunderbirds’ set. There are discarded rockets, planes and missile trackers repainted and displayed in the local park as if production of the 1960s puppet show simply stopped one day and the puppets upped and left the set with their rockets still waiting to launch.

The coolest place in town is the air-conditioned museum. Inside, grainy video footage tells the story of the rocket range here. It starts with stories of the Germans firing 1200 V2 rockets that travelled at the speed of sound across the English Channel during the Second Word War. I sit through stock footage of Winston Churchill and the explanation about these rockets motivating the British to find an area to begin their own rocket construction and testing program.

The modern history of Woomera started in 1946, when the British and Australian governments decided that a rocket testing range would be established in northern South Australia. The task of finding the right spot was left up to Len Beadell, regarded by many as one of the last great explorers of the Australian centre. He was an army surveyor who mapped and charted much of Central Australia, opening up 2.5 million square kilometres of the outback, including the 6500 kilometres of roads in Central Australia he constructed with his Gunbarrel Road construction crew in the 1960s.

In the early days of Woomera, the Kokatha Aboriginal people lived within a few hundred kilometres’ radius of the settlement and were managed by solitary Native Patrol Officers in LandCruisers. Unsurprisingly, the rights of the Aboriginal people were never seriously considered and many were resettled to the north or south with other tribes and without any consultation.

After returning from a year in the Northern Territory, Beadell was asked by an English colonel to find a suitable spot for ‘some sort of rocket range’, as he put it. Beadell told the colonel he had a pocket of land in mind larger than Gloucester in the UK, where the colonel was from. He set about surveying the Woomera site, agreeing that it was far enough away from Port Augusta to allow ‘any stray, off-course missiles to be destroyed in mid-air by radio before endangering any civilization’.

As the rocket program gained momentum, it coincided with the early stages of the Cold War, so despite there being little but hot, dusty plains and dry salt lakes in northern South Australia, the threat of espionage kept security tight on the place that was named after the Aboriginal words Miru (woomera) and Kulara (spear), signifying the force of the Indigenous warrior’s throw when using the two together while hunting.

The first tests began in 1947 with parachute trials. Eventually more than 4000 missiles were tested at Woomera up until 1980, including fire-flash missiles from Meteor jets, surface-to-air missiles and ‘sea slug’ weapons for the navy. Now there are projects from the Australian Space Research Institute and it is open for ‘military and civilian’ projects, including a range of controlled explosions on buildings and research by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency which is developing supersonic jets at Woomera.

The more recent history of Woomera is one that the locals are less open to talk about. In 1999 the Federal government decided to open a refugee detention centre out of town. It was supposed to house a maximum of 400 people, though during its three-year operation it crammed in more than 1400 people at a time – all of whom had to share five toilets and three washing machines between them in the extreme conditions.

I stop at the cafe and pick up a copy of the local newspaper, the Gibber Gabber – now onto its 68th volume. While I’m flicking through it over lunch (certainly preferable to the karma of Spud’s beef down the road) I discover why the town might look so deserted. There is a story in the paper about the arrival of the RAAF’s new Heron remotely piloted aircraft, being tested in Woomera. It is operated by someone with a joystick in an office (or even on their couch), while they track ‘people, animals and vehicles and identify disturbances in the ground, usually associated with Improvised Explosive Device (IED) emplacement’. The article informs readers that the people of Woomera are going to help the Heron crews by becoming ‘red’ during summer. Such is the commitment of the helpful townsfolk, they will be exposed to ‘fake enemy activity’ from the RAAF, and it shouldn’t be alarming to see ‘camouflage netting, unusual vehicles and fake rocket launchers placed around town’. More unusual than the rockets and missile launchers they already have in the park across the road I wonder? The kicker, though, comes at the end of the article: ‘there may also be a simulated kidnap scenario’. My impression of the post-apocalyptic ghost town I encountered on arrival makes sense now. It wouldn’t happen now, surely? Not at lunchtime in January? I shuffle off to the car and on my way out of town I notice that the boy on the BMX is now nowhere to be seen.

Hours pass and the road unfurls across the red scrubby earth. The gentle hills are covered with squat saltbush shrubs and the ripples of hot air drift across this landscape which opens up towards the centre of Australia. Driving these stretches is meditative. My mind wanders as road trains whoosh past and emus lope along the plains. As sunset approaches I begin to see mounds of fine earth on the sides of the road; first there are a few here and there, and then, within a few kilometres, the ground is full of the small hills that look like giant ant mounds and indicate the sites of old opal mines. ‘The desolate landscape looked as if everything had died a million years ago’ wrote Rena Briand in White Man in a Hole, and this is what I’m expecting as I approach Coober Pedy.

The Indigenous population had been traversing the red gibber plains around Coober Pedy for thousands of years before colonisation. Due to the desert landscape and lack of reliable water, it was a transitory place rather than one of settlement. It sits on the edges of Kokatha territory and Arabana country, whose people would source water from tree roots in some of the most inhospitable territory in Australia. The ‘land of the mound springs’ was marked for the Indigenous people by the escarpment on the western tableland near the town. The area where Coober Pedy now sits was known as Umoona, after the tree of the same name once found here, signifying long life.

The modern history of Coober Pedy began with the early exploration by Scottish explorer John McDouall Stuart. In an era when hardy expedition parties would perish from lack of water, go blind from scurvy or disappear without a trace (as was the case with Ludwig Leichhardt – whose attempted east/west crossing of the north of Australia, along with eight men, 13 mules, 12 horses, 50 bullocks and 270 goats, ended with his disappearance), the determination of McDouall Stuart and his inland explorations led to the discovery of the area now known as Coober Pedy. McDouall Stuart arrived in Adelaide in 1838 and was attached to Captain Charles Sturt’s expedition to the South Australian interior as a draftsman. They travelled with 15 men, six drays, 200 sheep and a boat (as they expected to find a vast inland ocean in Australia’s interior). Eventually, though, they were trapped for months in the barren, waterless country of the north. Sturt’s second-in-command died of scurvy – the chronic shortage of vitamin C which leads to a lack of collagen in the body, causing easy bruising, bleeding gums, slow healing of wounds, joint pain and blood spots on the skin. The party eventually retreated to Adelaide, defeated.

McDouall Stuart was convinced he could open up more of the country than his predecessor, so he set out again in 1858 with an Indigenous tracker and sufficient financial backing to help him mount a four-week scouting expedition of 500 miles (800 kilometres). On this trip he discovered 103 600 square kilometres of usable sheep country and named the area the Stuart Ranges. McDouall Stuart was determined to blaze a trail through more of the scorched interior and he set out again in 1860. Despite suffering scurvy and losing the sight in his right eye, he named Central Mount Stuart, planted a flag on the spot where he surmised the centre of Australia to be and declared it, ‘a sign to the natives that the dawn of liberty, civilization and Christianity was about to break on them’. McDouall Stuart was known as a loner and a heavy drinker, though he still had enough sway to entice financial backing and supporters to keep exploring right up until 1863, when he had to be taken 650 kilometres back to Adelaide, ‘more dead than alive’ on a stretcher between two horses, teeth falling out, blind from scurvy again, dehydrated and exhausted. His companion, William Patrick Auld, noted that the only thing that got him through the last trip was a ‘magical’ jelly concocted by the cook to give him a final burst of energy. After six trips through the interior, McDouall Stuart returned to Scotland and he eventually died in 1864 of a ‘softening of the brain’ – no doubt influenced by the dehydration and malnutrition endured during his brutal excursions in South Australia.

One of the lasting markers of McDouall Stuart’s discoveries was the ranges he’d named previously in 1858. In 1915 a party of gold prospectors set out from Marree, hundreds of kilometres to the east. They were led by James Hutchison, his 14-year-old son Bill and two other expedition helpers. They had six camels and 530 litres of water for the trip as they didn’t expect to find much en route. When they stopped to search for water one scorching summer day in February around the Stuart Ranges, young Bill was left in charge of the camp. When the men returned in the evening, the boy was nowhere to be seen. Just as they were about to start searching the dark foothills, Bill returned to camp and threw a sugar bag down on the ground in front of them, ‘Have a look at that, Dad. I think you’ll find some good stuff in there.’ He had found the first opal in Coober Pedy.

Bill’s discovery of opal was complete luck, and unlike many other forms of precise mining, opal discovery has remained a game of chance for those willing to gamble their lives to find it.

The first ‘dug out’ underground home, which has come to define the troglodyte living arrangements of Coober Pedy for more than 100 years, was hand scooped in December 1915 by miners Fred Blakeley and Dick O’Neill. Despite the temperature being 43°C outside, they mainly dug it to escape the flies, which were so thick, they could not see in front of them and their boots would leave imprints of crushed flies on the dirt in the evening. They ‘lived on rabbits and saltbush in hard times, and carried their water for fifty miles on bicycles, or bought it from camel-teamsters at £5 a hundred gallons’ wrote Ernestine Hill, in The Great Australian Loneliness, of their trials.

In the early years of Coober Pedy, it was surely one of the most brutal places in Australia. There was no water source, no facilities and the men would live in poverty, ‘content to be chained forever to the slavery of a precious stone’ buried in the fine soil to push them through the hot, airless days. It wasn’t all misery, though, as many commented on the ethereal beauty of the vacant landscape, of the ‘barren sands and buried bones of the oldest continent’ which would shimmer during the hottest days.

‘There were 47 nationalities here. Until the Eskimo died,’ says Debby. I look up from my note-taking and she waits, stone-faced, until my brow creases in confusion.

‘It’s a joke’, she says with a smile, hoping I get it. They’re used to having ‘fly-in, fly-out’ journalists here who come to capture the ‘quirk’ of Coober Pedy in a lightning visit from Adelaide before flying back as soon as they can, so the locals have fun with it and test out whether you’re a FIFO journalist or not. I take the hint and put my notepad away.

During my time in Coober Pedy I’m staying at the Comfort Inn. It doesn’t sound like an inspiring choice, though once I enter the motel dug into the side of a hill, I see that it is every bit as grand as a cathedral inside. The salmon-coloured sandstone walls are streaked with veins of limestone and glistening with the echoes of opals. It is in the 40s outside, though immediately as I enter the motel it drops to 23°C, which is the constant temperature underground here no matter what is happening outside

Reviews for The Crow Eaters

[faradaydon_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Has the potential to be a great read, but sadly let down in a couple of chapters where the author appears to have padded them out with rambling quotes. Still, it's an enjoyable book and worth reading. I hope he writes a sequel.