Split Rock
Biking through Outback Queensland, the thing that got me about the roads was all the truck mudguards.
On the most remote sun-blasted stretches of road, there they would be — crouched in a ditch, sprawled naked on the verge, or inching towards freedom behind a wire fence.
How did they get there? Why were they always on their own, no other vehicle wreckage nearby? And why were there so many of them? After a while I connected the link between dark stains on the road, and randomly jettisoned mudguards. That link was kangaroos.
Commercial road trains — sophisticated GPS-located, VHF connected trucks with as many as three trailers and weighing up to 200 tonnes — cruise the outback roads at around 100kph. They are not nimble.
Kangaroos, on the other hand are nimble despite their size, but unlike the trucks are not very smart. They frequently jump out in front of road trains, and get smashed to bits by the massive bull bars on the front. The heavily reinforced framework casually flattens the roo, and suffers no damage at all apart from a splash of blood.
The roo however, is hurled under the body of the road train, with its massive and powerful legs and tail (big and strong enough to disembowel a cow) flailing wildly in a futile dance of death. Then — and this is my theory to explain all the abandoned mudguards— its dying limbs get flung up behind the wheels of the killer monster roaring over its mangled body, ripping the mudguards violently off. Which roll to the side of the road as a kind of bizarre plastic tombstone for the still twitching and karked-it kangaroo.
Anyway. There I was, far North Queensland, 6am, early morning start, before the heat set in. I was headed out on the final few kilometres towards Laura, Cape York Peninsula, the very top of my ride.
Cape York is some 4,000km from where I’d started in Tasmania, and as far north as I could ride my Aprilia in Australia. Looking at the map, I noticed I was way closer to Papua New Guinea than I was to Brisbane. That’s north.
The previous night, I’d stopped at a motel (OK, a collection of concrete cabins) in a place called Lakeland even though there was no lake. In fact there was nothing apart from the motel. It was the last inhabited place before the roads started sprouting enormous metal warning signs. The signs read Beware of Crocodiles, Don’t Fall Asleep, Carry Petrol and Water, Monitor VHF Channel 16, Road to Coen Impassable and the like. You could accurately say Lakeland was on the fringes of civilisation.
“It’s 120 dollars for a double,” said the unsmiling motel receptionist, a backpacker from Hungary. I pointed out that was a bit pricey, and I only wanted a single anyway.
“Well it’s that or nothing,” she replied without a glimmer of emotion. I should mention that almost all the service stations, motels and pubs in places that Australians would accurately call the arse-end-of-nowhere were staffed by foreign backpackers who have to work in remote areas to ensure their visas get renewed. They were generally very pissed off at having to be there, and were happy to share that emotion with their customers. I took the room, but couldn’t resist a twisted attempt at bonhomie.
“So why did you come and work here in Lakeland, all the way from Hungary?” I asked warmly. “For the adventure,” she replied coldly, glancing at stumbling drunks in the dust outside the door. No wonder she was pissed off.
I made sure I cleaned all the road dirt off my boots with the towels in the room, and drank every single one of the horrible little milk buckets in the fridge. It wasn’t $120 worth, but it made me feel a bit better.
Next day, my route ran straight towards the horizon, vanishing into the early morning mists rolling off the distant ranges.
A hazy sun shone through scrubby trees at the side of the road, a mudguard or two winked at me, but apart from the noise of my bike everything was utterly still and silent. Massive, cloak-like quiet for as far as I could see. I felt like I was floating through a painted landscape; not the tiniest leaf moved.
After a while I came to the bottom of a big escarpment, and saw a wooden roadsign. Unusually, it wasn’t warning me about anything.
I slowed. ‘To Split Rock’ it said, with an arrow. I’d heard about a site near Laura that had some ancient rock paintings, so stopped and turned off up the dirt road to explore. At the end of the dirt there was a little hut with an honesty box, and a noticeboard explaining Split Rock and its place in the world.
Its place, it turned out, was one of the top ten rock art sites on the whole of our planet.
Split Rock is UNESCO registered, with its rock art estimated to be between 15,000 and 30,000 years old. Think Taj Mahal for culture, think Stonehenge for antiquity, think Luxor Temple for religious importance. Yet at Split Rock, anybody can just stroll up and check it out. No walkways, no spruiking guides, no rules, no entry fee, no electronic guide or printed hoopla — just the noticeboard, a kookaburra sat quiet and motionless in a tree and the flash of a lizard in the grass.
I walked slowly up a steep rocky path, feeling grateful I had stumbled across this place, humbled, and marvelling at my luck on being here alone. It was still early; way before breakfast but the sun was already starting to flex its muscles. I sweated as I walked and let the morning quiet spill over me.
Everything on the climb up was bone dry. Still nothing moved, not even the smallest of leaves on the gum trees. Then over a slight rise, I saw a massive boulder of weathered rock with steep overhangs. Split Rock.
Under the overhangs were some of the finest rock paintings in the world. Dozens of them, tens and tens of thousands of years old. And there they were, no fences, no guides, no trippers, and nothing to separate them and their potent presence from a grubby Tasmanian biker like me.
I stayed for almost an hour, totally alone, soaking up the atmosphere and feeling utterly insignificant in the face of such ancient culture. A single car crawled along the valley road, way beneath me, but even that didn’t break the silence or my mood. I could almost hear the ground gently breathing.
After I’d taken some photos and walked back down I put some money in the honesty box as respect for the local Ang-Gnarra people. Then I slung my leg over the bike and rode slowly back south, back towards Tasmania, and breakfast.
By now the quiet and stillness had become just a little more evident than was comfortable, despite the reassuring sunshine and lack of wind. As I rode back down the road, back the way I’d just come, a snake smashed out of the sky on to the road in front of me, dropped by an eagle to kill it. It didn’t surprise me. There was a feeling about the place.
But to be honest, I was more impressed than awed at Split Rock. Just to think that some ten thousand generations of people had come back again and again to this place to maintain their culture. That they had realised and kept the importance of rootedness and belief and ancestor respect over all that time was incredible to me.
I have no idea even where my grandfather went to school.
Months after I got back home to Tasmania I told Nettie, an aboriginal acquaintance, about my visit to the paintings. She asked me if I felt anything while visiting. I said yes, I probably had. I hadn’t fully appreciated it at the time but that early morning visit to Split Rock had marked me.
She already knew that.
Want to see more photos? Click HERE. And if you want more of my stories from the road? Click HERE.
