Word: plaines
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...would be another quarter of a million years before the first humans set eyes on the crater. During that time, sand blown on the desert winds filled most of the crater's depth, although its bottom still lies 25 m below the level of the surrounding plain. For thousands of years the local Aborigines in this arid stretch of the southeastern Kimberley region, members of the Jaru and Walmajarri tribes, have known the crater as Kandimalal. Here on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, Dreaming tracks meet and cross, and while traditional ownership is shared between the tribes, their...
...preacher." In the process, Marumba says he wants to give birth to a new kind of Christian worker - "a person that can float above all the issues." Laverton's Wongatha Wonganarra Aboriginal community is luckier than some - it's dry. The first indigenous community in W.A. to enact plain-English by-laws to help its members stay out of trouble, it's a relatively peaceful and orderly town, with simple modern architecture and vegetable gardens - except when chairman Bruce Smith turns on his outdoor electronic keyboard: "I can make all the noise I want and entertain the fruit trees...
...Tempting, but foolish. Marvel at the emptiness of the desert plain, but remember, Barbara Sturt and her people can find waterholes and billabongs here in a landscape that could kill the rest of us in hours. That kind of knowledge, you suspect, takes more than one lifetime to acquire...
...main street menzies these days, drive past the graceful Western Australian gold-rush town's lone pub and petrol station, and travel 50 km west along a gravel road to Lake Ballard. It's here, on a 70 sq. km lake dried to a shimmering salt plain, that Menzies shire president Kath Finlayson likes to meet and greet her townsfolk. To an outsider, the 49 metal sculptures appear almost extraterrestrial, with their pointy heads and pixie feet. But to a Menziesite, each is uniquely human. "This is one of the tribal elders," says Finlayson, 56, by way of introduction...
...sculptures, with the words: do you want a close encounter? Perhaps even more crucial than the lure of tourist dollars is the lifting of a town's sagging spirits. And it's taken an eccentric Englishman to show black and white Australia coexisting peacefully on a salt plain. "When you're totally starkers, you're basically all the same," says Finlayson. "Instead of it being Them and Us, it's We." It could be yet another mirage on Lake Ballard, tantalizingly out of reach. But for the moment in Menzies, the sentiment is real...