Day 261 - Grampians NP, Australia

THE GRAMPIANS NATIONAL PARK (19/09/09)

We awoke early in the morning to the distinctive call of the Kookaburra. For anyone who has never heard one it is a sort of bizarre combination of cackling old woman and jabbering monkey.

Leaving the paved highways we took to the red rock Grampian back roads. Not only was there far less traffic (none) and better scenery but it also gave the driving a much more Aussie flavour.

We had planned to visit some Aboriginal art sites which are all fairly inaccessible but as a result of this, untouristed. Both those we visited were ancient shelters, rocky overhangs where nomadic Aborigines would spend the night leaving their mark in paint before they left. This large, isolated rock in the middle of the bush has one such site underneath it.

The first shelter we went to was called Manja Shelter and the main feature was these hand paintings. The artists would mix crushed red ochre with saliva and animal fat before blowing it through a tube over their hand while it was pressed onto the rock.

These symbols represent the footprints of an Emu (single print on the left) and a Kangaroo (the two in the middle). Footprints were very important to the Aborigines who are famous for their tracking abilities (see Crocodile Dundee II).

Not far away is the Billimina Shelter where human figures feature prominently. These two were probably the easiest to make out.

The most striking thing about Billimina Shelter is that the walls are almost completely covered with neat rows and columns of small vertical lines. Every time a person visited the shelter they would leave one of these small marks, a kind of tally chart documenting the number of people passing through this way. Judging by the number of marks there it must have been a very busy place.

We decided to try and skip the highway as much as possible on our way back and take our Australian looking track instead. Due to the bad condition of the road we had to go at much slower pace, but we were in no real hurry.

Several times the track went through fords and several times Adam had to get out and check the depth in the middle wasn't going to engulf our tiny hatchback hire car. Somehow we managed to reach the other side of this raging torrent.

As if to confirm that our decision to avoid the highway was the correct one this Echidna crossed our path and we stopped to annoy it by photographing it and following it around for a bit. Echidnas appear very like a hedgehog but are in fact very different and unrelated. They, along with the Platypus, are the only surviving members of a group of mammals called the Monotremes and these two species are the only mammals in existence to still lay eggs.