Day 75 – 2nd August – King Edward River

The dingoes were out again last night.  They were a bit further away from camp but there were a whole lot more of them howling to each other…

We were woken in what seems to be typical fashion of late… with the kookaburras going nuts around 5-5.30am.  The thing is, up here, kookaburras don’t laugh… Down south the species is called the ‘Laughing Kookaburra’ whereas up north they are a ‘Blue Winged Kookaburra’.  For those of you who are familiar with a kookaburra, imagine the noise they make just before they laugh… that’s what these guys do.  They sound like they have a cold or something and just can’t quite work up to a full laugh.  However, they can still make a racket at the crack of dawn…

After three days without a shower we were all feeling a little icky… so we started the day with a quick dip down at the river.  At 8 o’clock in the morning the water is a bit ‘fresh’, but our motivation for a swim outweighed the chill…

Our agenda today was to check out a couple of historical Aboriginal art sites before packing up and heading back down the Kalumburu Road.  Both art sites were located in and around rocky outcrops like this 

One location had a few interesting little caves and one of the caves even contained the remains of three skeletons.  Unfortunately, there is no documentation at the sites so we don’t know the age of these bones. 

There are some paintings in a particular style, called the ‘Bradshaw’ paintings, that are apparently famous?  They depict tall, lean figures wearing ceremonial outfits and headdresses. Scientific studies have shown these paintings to be at least 17,000 years old…

The cruder animal paintings are supposed to be somewhere around 30,000 years old… mind-blowing… 

By this time it was mid-morning and we were hot and bothered.  We headed back to camp and donned the bathers for a quick dip before packing up the camper.  It turns out we had a visitor to our little swimming hole.  The heat was enough to convince us to brave swimming with a freshwater croc just on the other side of the river… In the first photo the croc is just above Aiden’s head.

We hit the road again to head back to Drysdale Station… that section of road, about 100kms, is by far the worse road up here.  Poor Dave had to deal with driving on the constant, unrelenting corrugations for the entire way…