Word: cratered
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...grinning barefoot toddlers tug at the visitor's clothes for attention, Long spreads a glowing acrylic painting on the floor. "This is where the star man came down," she says, her hand passing gently over a path of pink and yellow dots falling from a half-moon into the crater, which is viewed, as landscapes are in many Aboriginal paintings, as if from above. "He went in here," she says, jabbing at a blue dot slightly off-center. And though the ancient people who first told this story could never have known how close their falling-star story...
...cannot date the Jaru myth, but we can date the discovery of its factual underpinning very precisely, to 1947. Geologist Frank Reeves, then working for the Vacuum Oil Company, was conducting an aerial survey of the Canning Basin when he spotted the crater near Wolfe Creek. "He thought it was volcanic at first," says his daughter Peggy Reeves Sanday, "but was later able to confirm it was of meteoric origin." Sanday, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, grew up with stories about the crater but didn't visit it until 1999, when she learned tribal tales that were...
...trip to the crater is hard and hot: 150 km of corrugated red dirt road from Halls Creek, through a flat expanse of spinifex and low scrub. This Tanami Track, if you had a couple of days to spare, would lead you to Alice Springs, near the center of the continent, but instead the amateur crater hunter turns left into the desert. Twenty km on, the rim comes into view. Its 35-m slopes seem high after a few hours of traveling in only two dimensions, but a brief scramble over the rocks puts you on the lip. A wedge...
...Early morning and the temperature is already creeping into the 30s. A brisk breeze coming off the plains feels like a fan-forced oven. But there's no wind 60 m below, where the flat bowl of the crater is still and stifling, almost steamy from the moisture trapped in the sinkholes and fractures beneath the sand. The inside face is steeper. The rocks slip and clatter, startling ring-tailed dragon lizards that jut their jaws at the intruder in seeming defiance. A balancing hand placed carelessly into the spinifex needles is rewarded with a dozen tiny dots of blood...
...would be easy to turn mystical in such a place. Its scale is at once intimate and overwhelming, and standing back on the rim, the shimmering earth spreads endless all around. It is tempting, for a moment, to imagine you are touched by the emotion the crater must have inspired in those who first walked into it, and feel you share that connection with those who have cherished it as a sacred place for more than 40,000 years...