Vikings in Australia - Víkingar í Ástralíu

3rd September.

We went to the community store to get our permit to visit places outside Kalumburu. They gave us a better map with some information on places to visit. We also looked at the available groceries as Sibba wanted to shop later in the day to stock up on a few things. The selection was not great, but sufficient to get the basics.

We then went to the mission office to pay for our camping and enquire about the mission museum. There was a scheduled guided tour at 11am, so we decided to come back. We mentioned that we were interested in rock art, so the Mission manger offered to give us a sheet of paper with some GPS co-ordinates for the rock art. He couldn’t find it, so he offered to bring it to the office the following morning. We then went to the community store to do our shopping while we waited for the museum tour. Some of the locals were there and had a friendly chat to us, mostly about AFL clubs they supported. One local pointed out his family and told us that none of them supported the same AFL club! So it must make for a lively discussion when the AFL season is on! We finished our shopping and then went back to the camp site to store the groceries away.

We showed up at 11am at the museum and there were around six of us with the young bloke acting as the guide. He is actually one of the youth works but does the tours on the side. The museum came about as one of the priests was a hoarder for all things. Since the mission started, he had collected aboriginal items and anything else that came his way. So the museum has a lot of aboriginal artifacts with their native names, plus items from all over Europe. The priest had some rich friends and they sent him things from Europe that they thought were of interest for his collection. Anyway the most interesting things are of course the aboriginal artefacts. A lot of spear heads and completed spears are on display.

Apparently an aboriginal warrior spent a lot of time making spears, as the spear heads were pretty hard to fashion out of the rock. If you used a completed one and missed the animal you were trying to kill, the spear would in most instances fracture so a new one had to be made. That explains why these half made spear heads are all over the place. There are also a couple of digeridoos, but they called them “Djalabun” and as you can see they were not decorated at all. The decoration only came later for some ceremonies or purely for the tourists! Of course there is a fair bit of history on the mission and how it started back in 1908. It used to be located at Pago, which is further out than Kalumburu today. It was moved to Kalumburu in the late 1930’s as the water wells in Pago were giving out. We plan to visit Pago tomorrow to see the old ruins and check out the bay.

After the museum tour, we decided to go for a swim in the pool at Narawali Falls. The problem is that the track is not sign posted and these places are not marked well on any maps. Another couple were driving around, like us trying to find the right track. In the end we used the map from the community store, plus the Memory Map program on my tablet. With those two we found a track and drove it to the end and found the place. The last bit was quite rocky and eroded, but the cruiser had no issues as always. We found a way down to the pool and had a welcome swim in the cool water.

Then it was back to Kalumburu to go to the lookout on the hill closest to the village and look over the place. Using the community store map again we tried, but after we ended up on one of the runways of the airport, we gave up!

We then tried to find a place marked on the map with some rock art. After a while and some deductions, we found the place. It’s pretty amazing to see. The rock art is placed on house size boulders that have probably been eroded by a creek or the elements in some distant past. The rock formations are varied and quite interesting. This is of course sandstone rock that glitters red in during the sunset. Most of the rock art in this area depicts stick figures. You can see that some of the stick figures have been painted over older animal figures. These rock art drawings are thousands of years old, so they are quite interesting to see firsthand. One can only speculate on the content and also why this location was chosen! We are told that these rock art figures are all over the place here and only some of them have been catalogued.

Back in camp, we realised that we are still the only visitors camping here at the mission, so things are pretty quiet.