Nice blog Stephen!
I guess you know why I like to go out there every year too!
Our first
maralinga trip (2007) required permission from
Canberra as
well as the others, but was obtainable with a good attitude and a good knowledge of the history and the environment. We got a great tour from Leon and Diane who were the previous
Maralinga caretakers.
Our second trip was in 2010, with Friends of the GVD - did vegetation survey work on the
Maralinga to
Emu road (nice black oak country through there). It really is magic country. Since the handback to the M-T people, permissions have been easier to obtain and there are now many tourist groups visiting
Maralinga. Robin and Della are great hosts and Robin's knowledge is unbelievable. In 2010 we had acres of Sturts Desert pea over the
Maralinga area, which may not have been present this year.
The plates on top of posts were originally located every mile north of
Maralinga on the west side of the track. They were called "sticky plates" - an aluminium plate with a couple of paper clips to hold the sticky paper in position - they were used to monitor the fallout from the blasts.
The mallee fowl nest is very interesting - it's good to know that its still active - I saw some video footage of the mallee fowl at work on that nest - amazing workers they are. We were looking for mallee fowl tracks on
Googs track last month ( similar mallee country to the
Ooldea range near
Maralinga) and happily we saw fresh tracks in many areas including the
Nalara rock track.
Its nice country - the most pristine desert in Australia - no weeds, never been grazed and the vegetation is so diverse and ther are no watercourses.
The marble gums are also ideal breeding sites for the Princess parrot - if you are fortunate enough to come across some, they are a magnificent bird.
The history of the
Ooldea Soak is one that I find very sad and worth remembering. That soak was the central meeting point for aboriginal people from all directions for thousands of years - the Railway line came through in about 1912 - they sunk many many bores into the soak and turned the bedrock into a sieve so the soak stopped holding
water in the 1920's. Aboriginal people were forced to rely on the railway for their food and
water causing huge disruption to their nomadic ways and started the era of dependency. Daisy
Bates stepped in for a while and then the Uniting Church Mission until the area was supposedly cleared of aboriginal people in the late 1950's for the
Maralinga blasts. Some were relocated to
Yalata and
Eucla - others stayed out in
the desert. Sadly, white man certainly stuffed up life as the aboriginal people knew it.
The Daisy
Bates camp site is a very fragile area - amazing the kerosine tins are still there on the dune. Unfortunately if people keep visiting it and wlking over the site, it will deteriorate pretty quickly.
Anyway, enough rambling! Thanks for writing this up!
Cheers
Phil