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...abound: even the untrained eye can spot them protruding from the gray limestone outcrops. In an area of 40 sq. km, Archer's teams have found and named hundreds of sites since 1976, when he and palaeontologist Henk Godthelp decided to check out reports that Riversleigh - then a cattle station, now part of Lawn Hill National Park - might contain valuable fossils. And it did - in the same way that the Louvre could be said to house some nice paintings. Riversleigh has since provided an annual bounty of exquisitely preserved bones and teeth, the remains of creatures - fish, frogs, crocodiles, turtles...
...springs, postcode 0852, consists of one establishment: the Wanda Inn roadhouse. But the petrol station?pub?motel, 300 km southwest of Katherine, has the feel of a small town. Within its tidy sprawl of accommodation blocks, trailers, caravans and tents - powered by a shed-sized generator and watered by an artesian well - manager Terry Jones and her seven staff (plus Spike the dog, Pickles the wallaroo and a resident python) host a shifting population of local cattlemen and Aborigines, road workers, tourists and truckers. Isolated the place may be, says Jones, a former hairdresser, but it's never lonely...
...Outdoor Life Across the road from the gas station forecourt, an Aboriginal family have made their home beneath a slender tree; friends and relatives come and go. "The grass keeps the wind off," explains father Leslie Robbor (standing, with back to the camera). On weekday mornings, his son Darren and daughters Brenda and Jasmine scrub up in the ablution block and go into the roadhouse, where manager Jones gives them breakfast and correspondence lessons sent from the Aboriginal community at Kalkarinji, 170 km to the south. If the kids are good, they get to cool off afterward in the roadhouse...
...work is involved with the comforting constancy of "hatch, match and despatch," as Bishop Wilmot likes to call it. Out on the Eyre Highway, isolation has taken its toll on the young station and roadhouse workers to whom Murray also ministers. "A lot of people think they're going out there to get away, but they take their problems with them," he says, "and a lot of them don't last terribly long. There's not much to do in places like Cocklebiddy, and a lot of people turn to alcohol." As with the stranded motorists he regularly finds...
...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...