By Diana Somerville

 

Two days before we arrived in Curdimurka, South Australia, there had been a black-tie ball. More than two thousand people had flown from Adelaide to a rough-and-ready airstrip. There they pitched camp in the desert, put on their fancy clothes and celebrated a benefit bash for the efforts of Australia's National Trust to preserve Curdimurka's rustic old wood and stone railroad station.

The posh revelers were gone. Only bush latrines -- "dunnies" -- and stacks of black plastic trash bags remained of what, for a weekend, had been the largest city within a thousand miles. As rain clouds swirled across the flat, barren landscape, Curdimurka returned once more to a deserted railroad station alongside an ad hoc airstrip.

An overnight rain released the smell of limestone and turned the ground into a sea of gluey mud. The mud stuck to my shoes so determinedly that the further I walked, the taller I grew. Returning from the dunnie, I was a clumsy, lead-footed giant, my right eye swollen shut from bug bites.

 

"Welcome to bush camping," said Robin, her laughter seeming to halt the rain. The railroad that once ran through Curdimurka is still called the Ghan, a rough homage to the historic role of Afghan traders in opening up the desert to trade and travel.

Whoops of excitement drew us over to the Ghan's old "sleepers" -- railroad ties -- where a lazy lizard more than a foot long sat soaking up stored warmth, unperturbed by the curious travelers humming with excitement. Judy, the botanist, was summoned over to identify it. “It’s called a pine cone lizard, named for the texture of its fat tail. They’re part of the family of blue-tongues,” she said. The Australians all nodded and shuffled away. I remained curious about its blue tongue.

At Curdimurka the landscape offered a study in dryness, with a few striking tropical accents, like the palm trees that grew scattered along the roadside. The softly chattering palms were a botanic legacy of date-eating camel drivers who discarded pits along the track more than two hundred years ago, Judy explained. Confronted with so much desert, early European settlers recruited both camels and drivers from the Middle East. Ranging over most of the arid interior, Afghani traders brought provisions, news and necessities to people in the outback, marking their paths along the landscape with date palms and fuchsia clouds of rosy dock, seeded from the stuffing of their imported saddles.

As we moved from one part of the desert to another, I sensed  something hidden and mysterious, a subtle contrast to the frankness of the deserts of the American West. Examining whatever maps I could find, one thing struck me: the difference between the surface and what lay barely hidden, just beneath – the phantom lakes and ghost rivers and innocuous-looking holes that open into shape-shifting caverns.

Maps show Lake Torrens, Lake Frome, the Playa Lakes and Lake Eyre North and South. Tribal people speak of Lake Dieri that once covered more than a hundred thousand square kilometers. All are enchanted phantoms, dormant and invisible, that come to life only with rainfall then vanish into the sky. The Dimantina, the Thompson, the Bourke are invisible rivers threading through the Centre. Even the maps showed a dreamtime geography that could reshape overnight, a dry landscape that echoed water’s power to appear suddenly, transform, reshape and dissolve.

Walking the shores of Lake Eyre, the salt and sand underfoot crunched musically as Robin and I chose a vantage point to watch the shifting mirages over the purple-blue lake. Beneath my feet I seemed to feel the traces of ancient watercourses and rivers, vast features so blurred with time that they are evident only in satellite pictures taken from space. Here phantoms were real, mirages a part of the landscape in this country of sparkling white sand.

The whole continent is a sort of basin, gently tipping toward the South Pole, rimmed with mountains to the north and the east. At the bottom of the basin drain lies Lake Eyre, about fifty feet below sea level, the most enduring of the capricious salt lakes that form in the low spots of half a million miles of desert, then vanish in the sun. Water is a powerful shaping force in the desert; only Koori feet can hear its promise in the wind or trace its song lines across the sandy vastness.

In truth, I'd never heard of Australia's Great Artesian Basin and, standing on the edge of it, was startled to learn it's the Earth's largest, an area the size of France, Spain and Portugal. The Brobdingnagian depression that is much of the Red Centre includes an aquifer that’s capped by a rocky layer of shale and silicrete as impermeable as a kitchen sink. Floods and rain send water along the basin’s higher, more absorbent edges, where it seeps along a fragile underground web of cracks and fissures and, much like the system that creates the geysers of Yellowstone, forces the water up through the fractures to the surface. Over time, the dissolved salts, silica, carbonates and other minerals have created clusters of mounds at the mouth of each artesian spring; some reach a hundred feet or more above the lake floor; others have spread out flatter, creating raised drinking fountains. Each mound spring has a unique shape, each is the heart of a living system of rare plants and uniquely adapted fauna. I’d seen similar pools at the Yellowstone hot springs, but here the pools and fountains were more than a geological curiosity; they held fresh, drinkable water.

Throughout the desert, any fresh water source is something to be treated with respect, even reverence; dependable drinking water can spell the difference between life and death. In Koori folktales, fouling a waterhole is an act that brings swift retribution from the spirits of the spring. Nowadays, cattle ranchers sinking bores to water their livestock endanger the fragile flow to the mound springs in the process, Maurie, the geologist, said.

As I left the eerie artesian landscape, dune after rolling red dune wore a gauze-like cloak of pea-green vegetation, broken by stands of blood-red desert peas, their centers gleaming like black insect eyes. The air filled with the croak of frogs -- a special arid zone species that burrows underground to escape drying out and emerges only when it can feast on insects displaced by showers. A touch of rain in the past two weeks had produced this rare biological extravaganza. I regarded it as a gift.