Innamincka and Cooper Creek

It is Saturday evening, 8^th, and I’ve already lost a day somewhere. As is becoming usual (and one of the best parts of this travelling lark) the sound of the Tilley lamp provides a comforting backcloth to the frogs and cicadas, sounds of birds’ wings and the turn of diary pages as Helen catches up with her day. History again. We are on Cooper Creek about a quarter of a mile downstream of R. O’H. Burke’s “Dig Tree” at his Camp 65. Innamincka is about 70 kilometres to the west. The tragedy and irony of that ill-fated expedition is well described here; and it is good to be here almost on our own, to absorb the place. Three aircraft departed yesterday – the airstrip is right next door! This area has a future – gas fields all about, but you don’t see much of them. Santos owns the place with the Kidman Company sub-leasing to run stock. A delightful old fellow sits under the shade of the information hut and yarns about his days flying for the Kidman Coy all around this area in the 70’s. His tale of dropping medical supplies to stranded cattle stations during the floods in the early 70’s, with medicines stuffed into the middle of loaves, and dropped from 20 feet from the open door of his Cessna 172, are the stuff of yesterday’s outback.

Sunday 9th, and time for a nice drive! We camped beside Cooper Creek at Cullyamura waterhole last night, all alone again and happy as Larry (what put a smile on his face?). Except for the sleeping. Very hard mattress and not a decent night had yet. However we managed a relatively early start this morning and set off on back roads that are thankfully fairly good, for the short 2.5 hour journey to Innamincka. Whilst the main roads are stony and slow at 40kph, cut up by the heavy trucks that service Santos et.al., the back roads are good and take you deep into the gibber plains where distant mesas edge the horizon and you start to feel almost, you know...intrepid. Innamincka’s history is interesting. It was the centre of medical support for the whole region until 1951, sporting two unmarried registered nurses and a lovely purpose built hospital constructed in 1928.

The nurses married the policemen and so there was a regular turn over every two years. Marvellous photographs of the social life that people out here had, with tennis parties and annual picnic races, but things went pear shaped and by 1952 the place was a ghost town. And so it remained until 1993 when the National Parks reconstructed the old Australian Inland Mission hospital and it stands today in its former glory, but as a place for information. The pub next door, and the general store beside it just about describes Innamincka township. Ten kilometres east, along the banks of the creek, is the spot where Burke died under a Coolibah tree, marked with a modest rendered memorial with the simplest iron plaque “Robert O’Hara Burke died here. 30^th June 1861”. After such a journey somehow that is all that need be said at that spot.

We are camped again on the creek, but where the midges dive for the light. Two kilometres walk along the bank takes you to a place called “the choke” where rock banks crowd in and reduce the otherwise broad creek to about 10 metres. The stone is an iron rich sandstone that has blackened with a dark oxide coating. For an area of perhaps half an acre this rock has been covered in petraglyphs, pecked into the surface over thousands of years by the once resident aborigines. What a wonderful place this must have been millennia ago; a crossroads for indigenous culture and trade.