Wednesday 16th

Silence hung an orange curtain to celebrate the coming of the dawn, a butcher bird gave a melodious burst of song, cut short by the crows chant of doom. Then many other birds filled in the spaces and the morning orchestra gave a unique rendition of the Australian bush symphony. Sue snoozed on as the low rays of the sun lit the forest with it's warm glow.

We slowly emerged from our respective camping digs and had breakfast. It was going to be an easy day, Bruce is still not well and needs the rest and we need the time to catch up on various tasks before we make the final push for Toowoomba and home. Yes Mal gets itchy feet around now and thinks about his shed and all his little projects that await him and Sue knows that once we get home there will be lots of tasks to do and it will be hard to get away again - so her feet are anything other than itchy.

Bruce feels a bit better after a better nights sleep, so we head off on the Goon Goon Dari loop track. It is not a long way however there is much to look at in terms of wild flowers and rock formations. At one point on the loop there is a substantial rock outcrop about 100 meters long with some aboriginal stencil paintings. We sit and ponder. There seems to be so many different views of what life in Australia was like 500 years ago. Were aboriginal family groups happy campers or were they fierce and territorial? Was there harmony around the campfire or was there a hierarchy where the strong dominated the weak with violence either threatened or enacted? Were the most common causes of death accidental injury, disease and old age or did most people meet a violent death in battle as they bowed to the impulse for dominance?

All these questions and so many varied sources of opinions on the matter. I guess the truth is complex and may have changed substantially from area to area and from era to era - given there seems to be evidence that aboriginal people have lived in Australia for tens of thousands of years, that allows a lot of time for periods of peace and periods of war, periods of plenty and periods of drought and hardship - as long as we persist in looking for a one size fits all description of life before the white invasion then we are bound to be as wrong as we are right in any description. A hypothetical question that keeps coming up for me is how many aboriginal people would choose to go and live in the bush without a single implement that has been introduced by Europeans? Maybe there are many or more likely people will say it is an unfair question - and that may be so - it just strikes me that many white folk reminisce about how great life was in the 1950's - well the truth is that lots of really bad stuff happened in the 1950's - child abuse was swept under the carpet, homosexuality was illegal, religious and racial intolerance was endemic, just to mention a few. So it was not all peaches and cream and likewise my gut tells me that life prior to white invasion was also not a garden of Eden - it was probably a time much like the 1950's - full of contradiction.

When we got back to camp we had a pleasant lunch and the currawongs arrived with their fake invitations tucked under their wings and tried to get past security. One invaded the kitchen and nicked a couple of small yellow tomatoes and proceeded to eat them with a extended series of finely aimed pecks to remove the seeds one by one. Nearby a kookaburra ignored us and dug for grubs in the dirt - and found them I might add.

After lunch Alison and I lingered on and chatted about family matters and the others went off to their respective retreats for a camp.

Later on Mal sat and painted, Sue went off to the creek with her camera and Alison caught up on her journal - Bruce wandered in and out.

In the evening we lit the fire, cooked a stew in the camp oven, followed by ice cream and fruit for desert - such luxury.

We whiled away an hour or two gazing into a peaceful campfire as the night air cooled and eventually beckoned us to bed.