2006/07 Australia trip - Bullita Homestead, Gregory |
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Our next stop was going to be a couple of hours’ west in Gregory national park, famous for its rugged scenery, but remote enough to have few visitors. Gregory has east and west units, separated by private land around the Victoria River. We stopped at the Sullivan campground in the east unit, and found that it did double duty as a rest area and it was also squeezed between the highway and a creek, with little for us to do there, so we moved on.
The Victoria River Gorge is spectacular, with a very wide river bed and great red cliffs on either side. Most of the river bed was
now dry but the river must be awesome when running full during the Wet. Of course, few people get to see it then as it often flows over the road bridge too, stopping all traffic.
We walked along the river bed for a while. I suppose I should have known better with nearby places called Agate Creek and Jasper Canyon, but we now have a few pounds of Australian agates to carry back on the airplane. Parts of the gorge are very pretty with whitewater rapids, green grass and trees, light-coloured sand, and the red rock walls, similar to some of the red rock country of the American West.
We had decided to camp at Limestone Gorge in Gregory’s west unit, but when we took the road into that part of the park we saw a sign saying that the road to the campground was closed. We also saw our first wild boab trees as we entered the park. (Fran has a small planted boab in the garden behind her tea house.) These boabs are the same as the baobab trees that you often see in African nature programs: wide, bottle-shaped trunks and bark like elephant skin. We saw some that looked like wine bottles and other dumpy ones that looked like brandy bottles. Sometimes they grow in bunches and push each other over.
Boabs are common from Gregory right across to the Kimberley coast and we loved their weird shapes. They are sometimes called “upside-down trees” as the bare branches look like the roots of other trees. Healthy boabs have no leaves in the dry season. The few we saw with leaves were either fire-damaged or fallen on hard times. They are also called “pear trees” as they carry large pear-shaped fruits. These are supposed to be edible but we didn’t try them.
We saw that there was another campground at Bullita Homestead, about an hour down a gravel road, so decided to head for that one. We found a good spot there, but had no time for any exploring as the light had almost gone. There seemed to be a lot of screaming and shouting going on up in the tree tops, so the campground is popular with the local cockatoos.
The clouds had thickened during the day, and it now looked ready to rain. We hoped it wouldn’t, as we’d driven through about a dozen flowing stream beds on the way in and wouldn’t want to seem them come up a foot or two!
Friday June 30th
In the morning we found that the campground is on a bank of the East Baines River. Just downstream, the river is wide and shallow where it passes through beds of limestone, resulting in lots of pools and tiny waterfalls. Shrubs were growing in the dry
spots and birds were swooping in to feed, drink from the river, and to party. What we had thought were cockatoos were actually “little corellas”, white birds with white beaks and white crests, but with just the occasional hint of pink and yellow when they are flying. They seem to be very social birds, roosting in pairs, but getting together in dozens for feeding and screaming.
This spot is also the beginning of the Bullita Stock Route, a 4wd track that loops back towards the main road. We’d hoped to camp somewhere on that route, but the route is one-way only and nearly sixty miles long, so we were dubious about trying it. The first hundred yards of the route are a crossing of the East Baines River. The limestone beds would give good support but we couldn’t tell how deep it was in the middle. The snorkel would keep the engine running even with the hood underwater, but campers have to have vents for propane and batteries, and we weren’t keen to have six inches of water in the camper. Wading across a crocodile-infested river to check the depth didn’t seem such a good idea either, so we gave it a miss.
We opted for a more sedate visit to the actual Bullita Homestead. This was cattle farming country, and Bullita was one of the toughest stations to make money at, because of the rugged landscape and extremes of weather. The station has been preserved, mainly just corrugated iron buildings, but with some mementos and letters from the people that lived there. One letter tells the story of the flood of 1977, when the rancher’s wife spent a day wedged into the fork of a fallen tree while the flood washed away the cattle, the dogs, and most of their possessions. The night before she’d had to shoot a giant brown snake (very poisonous) that had invaded her kitchen and smashed it up. The snake had probably saved her life by waking her up before the floodwaters became too deep.
Despite the sign, the road to Limestone Gorge looked to be partway open, so we drove along there looking for a spot for lunch.
We found the tufa dams on Limestone Creek, formed much the same way as those at Flora River. The dams have created a beautiful water park in the midst of the dry woodland. The track continued over more tufa dams, these ones ancient and crumbled, a very rough piece of road even in our lowest gear.
The road was gated and closed soon after that, but there was a trail climbing up to the canyon edge so we explored that. Up there, some of the limestone has been eroded by acid rain, resulting in knife edged “rillenkarren”, very unfriendly to tyres! The aborigines used to heat and quench this limestone to make knives and axes. Some of the limestone was formed by colonies of stromatolites, the earliest form of life to leave fossils, and we found a few of those, tens of millions of years old, like great cabbages in the rock. (Much later in the trip we would see some living stromatolites at Hamelin Pool, near Monkey Mia.) The dry waterfall at the head of the canyon was stained white by the same chemical, calcium carbonate, that made the tufa, but in this case it had 
resulted in white calcite deposits.
The road was closed because of “flood damage”, but we were able to walk along it to the campground. Sandie was getting too hot and dry so I finished the walk alone. The “flood damage” was to the section of track that followed the creek bed, and that had been ripped up and redistributed, with lots of the pieces of limestone up on end. It might have been drivable, with a lot of luck, but it was probably as well that the rangers had closed it. The campground would have been a nice place to stay, on the edge of Limestone Billabong, and surrounded by the weird boab trees and the pretty kapoks. The kapoks are small bare trees covered in big yellow flowers in the dry season, but only leafed out in the wet season, when they have big glossy leaves.
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