Word: spinifex
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...sunset they look like squat people dotted across the plain. Here, 450 km below Karratha, the invisible population of the bush busies itself in mounds rising a meter or so above the spinifex scrub. Three hundred of the world's 3,000 termite species live in Australia. Most are rarely seen, but their monuments are everywhere on display...
...choppers) is parked not far from the old house. In a nearby paddock, a dozen fit horses graze; breathy plumes escape from nostrils in the cool early-morning air. Burton points out a rust-colored old shack. Surprisingly sturdy, it was built by Aboriginal workers out of anthills and spinifex. "This is where they'd sleep when they weren't camping out," says Burton. Those stockmen may have been flint hard, he says, but they were also well looked after. They were paid in provisions-sugar, tea, butter, flour and meat. Their kids were often sent to private schools...
...each morning to Riversleigh. Only one of the sites - D site - is open to the public. None of the others is marked, and their precise locations are kept secret to thwart looters and vandals. In all directions as far as the eye can see, Riversleigh is piles of stone, spinifex, scraggy trees and termite mounds. Apart from local Aborigines and the odd ranger, Archer's teams are the only people who set foot on this land. So how do they know their way around? Here, rogainer Creaser more than earns his keep. "This guy," says Frank Nissen, a surveyor with...
...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...
...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; peripheral vision catches the thick brown tail of a snake gliding face-high a meter away. This is not the place to suffer even a minor injury...