A caning on the Canning, part III

So its now day 9 and  as we are packing up, Bren spots a pretty little gecko:

We grab some sweet water from the well and note the food drop left for Paul Davies, A cyclist from Tassie heading North from Wiluna.

There are 3 cyclists we are aware of. Paul from Tassie heading North, Martin Adersballe, a Dane heading South and some nutter on a home made bike, made from Bamboo....we are ready to hit the road @ 0800. Probably about time I opened up a little about these trip names. The idea came from Brenda. She chose Snoozy for herself, due to her uncanny nack of having little snoozes in the car, usually in the most roughest of locations. For Steve and myself, you will have to wait a bit longer. In all honesty, I cant remember the names she picked for Peter and Willie, but I chose Harry and Wilma. Which is probably a bit unfair on Willie, cause it has no relationship whatsoever, apart from her husbands knack of not getting names straight. In the morning, I would wake and great Peter with a g'day. He would reply back to me G'day Steve. So I would reply how's it going Harry. He would reply alright George. A bit of a laugh, I'm sure if we spent more time than 3 weeks together, he would eventually get that I wasn't bloody Steve! Morning noon and night, the Harry and George game played on.

My recollection of Brenda's names was not quite correct. Brenda corrects these in the comments section  where she says:

These were the nicknames I endowed everyone with.
Your fine self was Captain Flatulent, Steve was Mr Mankini, Willie was Mrs DamperMaker, Pete was King Campfire & I was Ms Snoozalot

We are now well into dune country. They were great to drive through. Unfortunately, there was very little run up, and some were quite wallowed, but apart from a couple of attempts at some for all of us, it proved no drama. Over the Dune and you would run parallel to the next dune for ages. Which in itself, wasn't a bad proposition, because the country was just gorgeous. The deep red sand contrasting remarkably against the green vegetation. I note the difference between here and the Simmo. The vegetation here is much vaster, lots of big gums around too. The problem with traversing the swales for long periods, was that they too were corrugated quite a bit. It was a real pleasure to start climbing a dune and not have to shake, rattle and roll.

We spot our first camels for the trip:

and push on for well 45. We pass another wreck and note the intensity of the fire. Melted alloy components such as gear boxes, wheels etc:

Well 45 is nothing of interest, but more rusted parts of yesteryear. We move onto Gravity Lake, where I pick up my first of 4 planned Canning Caches:

Well 44 another ho-hum affair. More dunes towards 43:

12 Km's from well 43, we finally meet Martin, the Danish cyclist:

Its about 1230, temps in the mid 30's and Martin is looking tired. We are nearly 400Km's South of Bililuna so I'm not surprised. He has had some tough going, these dunes are testing his endurance. He can ride down the dunes, but has to push his bike up them and also in the softer sandy sections of swales. We offer food and water, but he declines. His mission is to do the trek unassisted if he can. He has plenty of food, 14L of water and another 100Km's to go to well 38, the next source of good water.

So we get to a junction by well 43. Not sure which track is the well, I take the right. It was the wrong choice. I radio the others and they take left while I find a spot where I can turn around. The others have the bejesus frightened out of them when the wild man of Borneo pokes his head out the bush, waving his arms above his head. We have met Paul, the second cyclist. He was a bit spooked himself, he saw a white car drive off into the distance, thinking to himself...Nooooooo, they are not coming into the well, where he was parked up:

Paul was doing it tough. He had been on the CSR for 2 months now, since he left Wiluna. He had 5 days worth of food and no water. Well he had liquid. Something he scooped up from well 42. He pulls 2 x 2L fruit juice bottles out and said, I was about to have to drink this. The bottles contained a liquid that looked like Ribena. He cracked the lid. I was 20M away and was almost heaving at the stench. It was a putrid juice of bad water, camel poo, dead finches and bacteria any research scientist would kill for. In fact, I reckon had he been forced to consume it, it would have killed him too.

He greatly accepted as much water as he could take. Mind you, he really needed new water bottles too, cause rinse all we like, that stench had permeated those bottles and would be fouling his nice clean water we gave him. He also greatly accepted our food offerings, some fresh, some we were to burn that night at camp. We reckon the mouldy green corn cobs we gave him were being chomped on,  raw, as soon as we left his company. And maybe even the leaves wrapping the cob too.

I suggested he stay put, Martin would make his acquaintance in a few hours. But he had to push on. He also had 100Km's to good water at well 46. No doubt Martin and Paul had a great night somewhere in the spinifex encrusted dune country where they were about to meet.

EDIT: 28/08/16 - source: Facebook

Danish CSR cyclist, Martin Adserballe made it to Wiluna on Wednesday 24 August 2016 (he left Billiluna on 18 July -  thus taking 39 days)

Tasmanian cyclist Paul  Davis arrived earlier in the month on 5 August, but I'm not sure when he left Wiluna.

 
Well 42 was a dust bowl and a pissant little soak, full of that camel poo, dead finches and bacteria. Here is where he took his last water:

We pull up stumps at 1600 in a cleared section of swale, the 2 opposing dunes quite a short distance apart. Harry finds some more dead tree's and we have a good night again by the fire. Another 150Km's of CSR done:

Day 10. More Great Sandy Desert. I'm loving this country except for all the bloody corrugations:

We seem to be in the swing of things now. On the road by 0800, finished by 1600 and covering about 150Km's a day. Today, is no different. Onto well 41, another dust bowl with relics of an era long past representing a well. But 41 had water at least. I decided to transfer some fuel from the auxiliary and found I had no power to do so. Investigating the issue, I found I had blown a fuse. I have no idea why, as it hadn't been used, and after replacing it, it hasn't happened again. So a quick easy fix.

The scenery out here is just stunningly beautiful. We constantly remark about it on the radio. The contrast between the red desert sands of the dunes and the very green vegetation has to be experienced in person to believe:

But take note fellow traveler. This is a nasty landscape and its a fine line between an enjoyable experience and a nightmare. On the way into well 40, a 3km track through a lovely set of dunes, we spot another group of camels living the life of riley:

The well itself, nothing to write home about, but nearby, some history is evident. The grave of Michael Tobin, speared by natives. If you had to pick a resting place, this would do me just fine:

A balanced account of this comes from the National Museum:

During Canning's return to Wiluna in 1907, a member of his party, Michael Tobin, was fatally speared at Natawalu (Well 40). In the same moment Tobin shot and killed Mungkututu, the Aboriginal man who had speared him. To this day, the reasons given for this incident are varied. One account says that Tobin had taken Mungkututu's wife, while another says that it was revenge for the theft of sacred objects by Canning's men. Mungkututu may have been frightened by Tobin, afraid of being chained up, or angered by the uninvited intrusion of strangers at his waterhole. Whatever the cause, in both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal histories, the incident has come to symbolise the clash of cultures that defined the early days of the Canning Stock Route.

Times were tough back then for sure. Nearby we also spot a conspicuous site in the sand. The origin and reasoning of which, to me is unknown:

(EDIT: I am led to believe this a monument to Mungkututu, his body buried some considerable distance away - credit to Peter Gargano)




 And tracks in the sand. Yet another camel toe:

and what we believe to be a bush bustard:

Onto well 39 and we cross Tobin's lake, named in honour of Michael Tobin. Here we hit the flats and I reach my highest recorded speed for the CSR, a whopping 75KM/h. A wild dog, cross dingo, spotted slinking away in the bush. A mangy looking thing, the things required to sustain life, IE food and water, must be very hard to come by out here. Certainly a meagre existence to be had:

The plan was to camp at well 38, a known source of good water. Well 39 was another insignificant little soak, much like 41, so we are on the track again after a spot of lunch. More dunes to traverse, today not being my day. Steve was in his element though:

We round a rocky breakaway midway between 39 and 38, which is very bizarre to find in the middle of sand dune desert. Obviously the end of a rocky stretch that houses well 38 in a rocky ravine:

We take the opportunity to will up our water bags once again:

Its quite warm, a wind is blowing and the ground very rocky and exposed with no shade, so we decide to push on for a more suitable camp. A wiser decision one could not make. We haven't seen a desert oak for days now, but just prior to well 37, around 1630, we find the most spectacular grove of desert oak and a good clearing for a camp. This place was just bliss:

A fine specimen of oak, sitting just to the East of Camp:

I spy a suitable old tree 500m from Camp and "Harry" and Steve get to work. When it hits the ground, I'm sure it registered on all the seismic recorders around the country. Peter returns with the spoil of his labours and complains once again about our bloody hard wood, full of sand, and requiring the chainsaw to be sharpened once again.

But the fire was great:

During the day, one of Peter's gas bottles had became unsecured and took the handle off the kettle. The next morning, being the bush mechanic he is, it was sorted with some fencing wire and a couple of Tek screws:

Day 11 is a late start of 0900, mainly due to Peter's kettle :). Onto well 37 and again no significance here, except Steve spots some structure in the bush. We go over to investigate and find 2 graves. One belonging to Thompson and Shoesmith, the other a Chinaman. A bit of digging reveals the following:

Constable Thompson became one of the first drovers to travel down the route in 1911. He and his droving companions, George Shoesmith and ‘Chinaman’, were killed by Aboriginal people at Well 37. The route was scarcely used again for twenty years.

Back at the well, we find 2 old rusty signs. Hard to read the first states T+S graves 118 yards. The other seems to say Mclernon's grave 60 yards. The sign, just propped in a log, could have been moved dozens of times so we dont really know the direction. We scout a wide area looking for evidence of another grave, but come up empty handed.

Drovers referred to Lipuru as the ‘haunted well’. The graves of nine people, all victims of violent death, are said to lie near Well 37. Drovers George Shoesmith, James Thompson and ‘Chinaman’ were killed at Lipuru by desert people in 1911. Their bodies were found by Thomas Cole, the next drover down the route. It was later rumoured in Perth that Cole took his revenge on an Aboriginal family near Lipuru. Martu accounts support this. Two Aboriginal men and a woman and two children who were shot by white men are said to be buried on the other side of Well 37.
In 1922, three members of the Locke Oil survey expedition, John McLernon, Leo Jones and William Turner were camped at a site about two days south of Lipuru when they were attacked in their sleep by three Aboriginal men. McLernon received a fatal blow to the head. Turner woke to see a man standing above Jones ready to club him and called out in warning but realised that he was about to be clubbed too. Both sustained blows to the head, but their attackers scattered and fled when Turner began firing shots. The next day the two men transported McLernon’s body by camel to Lipuru where he was buried.

I have found an excellent source of reference on the CSR as listed below:

http://mira.canningstockrouteproject.com/


On the road again and we find more evidence of vehicles that never made it:

Well 36 seemed to have some reasonable water, well 35 is just a bore casing and well 34, very similar to the rank little soak at 42. However we had been warned from the start that wells 34-31 were the worst conditions on the track. Around Breaden Hills I was saying that I doubt they could get much worse, but I was wrong. Even at 20Km/h, the literal shit was shaken out of everything:

Unfortunately, just short of well 33, one of my shocks gave up the ghost too:

Righto. So I need to put some perspective into this. Conditions were severe. I was near 400Kg over GVM. Tyre pressures were down to about 20psi hot, trying to balance comfort against the risk of staking. I was probably pushing a bit hard at the start, but adjusted speed accordingly once I knew the situation. A temp measurement showed the shock at 105 degrees, much cooler, by up to 80-100 degrees than 2 competitor's shocks. So they were doing the business well. I had made 800Km's of CSR by now. One of the competitor shocks lasted 100Km's. Everyone we spoke to was having suspension issues, and lots of people had to bail out for new shocks. So I was not alone in that regard.

I have been in contact with the manufacturer and they have never seen this happen in their product yet. So I still hold faith in the product. I will work with the manufacturer to sort this engineering issue out and we will all end up with a superior product, one that can handle the rigor's of probably the worst piece of road in the country one could travel. Watch this space.

So into well 33 I limped, to replace the shock. Unfortunately I didn't get to see or enjoy much of that well as we arrived at 1615 and t it was a mad scramble to replace the shock before dark.

(credit to Mrs Snoozalot for the following picture)

And so ended day 11, a hard, 100km day.



Well 46-37:

Well 37- 33:

A Caning on the Canning, Part II

So day 7 we leave Wolf Creek at around 0830. In the 6 preceding days I have covered 3200Km's and am looking forward to a bit of a break of big mile days. The plan is to get out to Bililuna well before the 11am closing time. With 65Km's to travel, and at 0830 in the morning this should be a piece of cake.

However....on the Junction of the Wolf Creek entrance and the Tanami Rd, A solo fella in a van has broken down. Well, the independently sprung van has spat one sides pivot bolt - so he was going nowhere. In the spirit of helping a fellow traveler, we stop to assist. Miles from anywhere, we offer to call his roadside assistance on Steve's sat phone. 10 minutes of "please press 1 for...." - at sat phone call rates, then finally onto a person, it has taken well over 20 minutes to find out Halls Creek don't have a truck big enough to extract the van. One will have to come from Fitzroy - it will be 2 days.

In the interim, Peter, being a dab old hand  is an excellent bush mechanic. Whilst we waited for RAC to call back to find out the score about the Fitzroy truck, Peter has removed the jockey wheel clamp bolt, inserted it into the pivot bolt hole, banged the ends over like a bent nail and had the van mobile again. When RAC finally rang back, we said don't bother, he will now limp into Halls Creek for repairs.

I should mention, if you are going to travel solo you should have a basic understanding of some principles. No offence to the retired teacher of 40 years, but he didn't have a clue how he was going to get out of his mess. With no money or way of contacting the outside world, it was his lucky day we gave a toss. He did throw Steve some loose change for his +20 minute call @$2 P/minute on the sat phone. Mind you, we nearly all fell over laughing when he said he was going to write to the dept about the woeful state of the road into to a world class facility. It became the brunt of many a joke for us on the canning. Whenever we hit a rough patch, someone would repeat the statement over the uhf. We even did it when we hit one of those rare smooth patches, Why, I think I will be repeating it for years on the radio now. I would hate to be the letter opener at the dept.

We got a voice mail on the sat phone some days later from the RAC. The gentleman wanted us to know he made Halls Creek ok. So we felt a bit warm and fuzzy over that.

We had wasted nearly an hour and a half and were concerned we would miss the cut-off for fuel at Bililuna. We arrived with 20 minutes to spare. Only to find about 1/2 dozen vehicles all lined up for the bowser...bloody great.

A stupid fuel delivery system is to purchase a pre-paid card from the shop with a $5 deposit on top. So we bought our cards, explained our dilema and the store owners assured us they would wait till we got our fuel. Mind you, at least 2 of the pre-paid cards were void, mine included, so this slowed the procession somewhat. But by 1115, we were on our way, the start of the Canning Stock Route.

Now, it wouldn't be worthy not to mention Alfred Canning at this point. The Wiki link below should explain better than my ramblings:

Alfred_Canning

It should be noted, whilst Canning basked in the glory of a little used route, there were plenty of others well before him that he owes a lot of gratitude to, such as Carnegie, Forrest and the black fella's of the region. Not to take away the efforts of Canning and his team on the work they did, but history also needs to record the work he picked up on to do this initial survey. He didn't just wander into the desert and say, by George, I think this is a good place to sink a well.

And we are off down the Canning. And a few hundred meters in, the corrugations begin. A quick detour to Stretch lagoon was in order:

A large body of water in an otherwise arid landscape. We had travelled near 25Km's before the state of play raised its ugly head. Just prior to Bloodwood bore, Steve's bullbar mount for his aerial broke its bolts and the aerial now rested on the bonnet. He would stop at the bore in about a Km to fix it. Who would have thought, that kilometre could rub so much paint off a bonnet. Not a happy chappy, but rummaging through our spares we got it going again:

Then to top it off, Steve, in his Japanese safety boots, didn't see the strand of barbed wire in the grass and managed to impale toe skin on the rusty barb. Ouch.

By 1400, we headed over the first dune and onto well 51. I have nearly 700 photographs to select from, so I wont bore you with a picture of every well on the CSR. Stopping every so often, we temp measured our rear shocks. Steve's new ones were alarmingly up to 180 degrees. later, he stopped when he could smell something. It was the plastic boot on the left shock starting to melt. So we had to adopt a new strategy: reduce tyre pressure some more and stop more often to let them cool down. My Dobinson remotes at this stage were working brilliantly, recording temperatures under 90 degrees. At 1615, after 120Km's of CSR, we stopped for the night at well 50, just a depression in the ground with some rusty relics lying about the place. The camp site, a massive area, well shaded, in a large dry clay pan. A day of about 185 Km's:

Day 8 begins at 0800. We are into some desert dunes now and the start of the Great Sandy desert:

Unfortunately, we are only on the road for an hour and at well 49, bad news prevails. The smoking left shock from yesterday has now spat its oily content on the desert sands and the underside of Steve's vehicle. So we spend an hour replacing that unit with a well worn, second hand Billie Steve had brought along. Another change of plan - reduce more pressure from the tyres and make more cooling stops.

The shiny new paint from a day ago, now a blackened charred mess.

Whilst we thought our shock troubles were worrying so early into the trip, we didn't have long to wait to see how fortunate we really were:

By 11am, we come into view of the Breaden Hills and are absolutely blown away. As Steve would put it,it's like you have just been dropped into Arizona. I was in the lead this day, and every time I turned a new corner, the view just got better and better. Its hard to believe, but for my CSR experience, these hills were the highlight of the trip:

Joe Breaden was sure a lucky man. And Carnegie saw the value of the asset as he describes thus in Spinifex and Sand:

A fine specimen of Greater Britain was Joe Breaden, weighing fifteen stone and standing over six feet, strong and hard, about thirty-five years of age, though, like most back-blockers, prematurely grey, with the keen eye of the hunter or bushman. His father had been through the Maori War, and then settled in South Australia; Breaden was born and bred in the bush, and had lived his life away up in Central Australia hundreds of miles from a civilised town. And yet a finer gentleman, in the true sense of the word, I have never met with. Such men as he make the backbone of the country, and of them Australia may well be proud. Breaden had with him his black-boy "Warri," an aboriginal from the McDonnell Ranges of Central Australia, a fine, smart-looking lad of about sixteen years, whom Breaden had trained, from the age of six, to ride and track and do the usual odd jobs required of black-boys on cattle stations. I had intended getting a discharged prisoner from the native jail at Rotnest. These make excellent boys very often, though prison-life is apt to develop all their native cunning and treachery. Warri, therefore, was a distinct acquisition.

Carnegie honoured him with at least 3 naming rights that I know of. The hills as described by myself above, the pool in those hills which Breaden discovered in the search of water, and a set of caves and rocks, Breaden's Bluff,  just South of Empress Spring, which I mentioned in Part I.

So we detoured off the CSR for Breaden's pool and were not disappointed at the sight:

Here I climbed the cliff walls for a view of the deep rocky ravine that fed the pool. Finding nothing of interest, except a long deep channel that in times of rain must funnel a fair bit of water, I couldn't find a way down. But Willie to the rescue, showed me the way I went up, and with a bit of logic, I got back down unscathed.


From there we hiked the 20 minutes out to Godfrey's tank. Godfrey Massie, also a member of Carnegie's expedition, had set off in the opposite direction to Breaden and also found a great body of water, 20 minutes walk away:

On the south wall, to the right of the picture above behind the tree, many inscriptions had been made in the rock:

Here I got a bit excited. It looked like Wells 1885 had been inscribed. I thought at the time it was Lawrence Wells from the Calvert Scientific Expedition. However, that date was a bit too early for that. Manipulation of the photograph on the computer seems to show the date as 1985. So a modern day vandal, much like some of the other inscriptions, barely visible until you tweak the image. The Trotman inscription belongs to Canning's 2 IC. In the old days, explorers would blaze a tree or scribe a rock face, to show following explorers where they had been. Much like the great example at Chambers Pillar in the NT. However, I see no excuse for modern day people to be defacing such treasures, such like the woman, clearly trying to hide her actions, when I was at the pillar in 2013. Sad really. Carnegie scribes this rock face, the "c" circled around 96, being 1896. The other later inscriptions I need to do more research on.

Back to the cars we go, and Brenda adds a non vandalistic appendage to the landscape:

Its now 1300 and we hit the CSR once again. The short venture out to well 48 wasn't worth the effort, so we make our way to well 47 which was also the same. We decide to head for the restored well at 46 to make camp.  On the way, Peter calls up, he is stuck on a dune about 2Km away. So I stop on the next crest and wait till I ensure he is underway again. In the interim, I get out to take a picture. I reach into the rear door, and I am purchased precariously on sloping sand, and subsequently loose my balance. I go down hard, butt first, straight into a clump of spinifex. The first sensation was that of a native spear penetrating the back of my gonads. That was luckily just a puncture wound, no  travelling companion would be willing to pull that spine. Unfortunately, the second sensation was the mryiad of spinifex spines now embedded in both hands and the back of both legs. Some 3 weeks later, as I write this, I still have spines in the back of my legs. The next couple of days was torture, particularly the legs, whose broken spines would rub on my seat cover and give me some grief. Trust me, sitting on spinny is not a recommended thing to do.

Well 46 was a great choice. Clean water from a restored well and an awesome place to camp. Arriving around 1645. Peter getting down to duty with the chainsaw, supplying us with the 3rd most valuable product in these parts - wood. And an awesome fire it was too.

Day 8 ends up with a further 150Km's traversed. And I'm now about half way through my photographic record. I'll sign off for now and continue with the next part shortly.