"(THEME MUSIC)" "You don't have to be in the outback to be alone." "This beach is east of Darwin at a place called Shoal Bay." "It's a great place to have a bit of a walk." "And if you look around hard enough, it's amazing just what you can find." "Look at that." "That's a tremendous specimen." "That looks to me like it's a prawn or a yabby or something like that, but it's calcified, it's rock hard." "You can see all the body and the tail bending back there, and all the head features round there, it's terrific." "You can get lots and lots of those down at the beach here." "All sorts of different things." "I reckon you could have had a real good feed here one time, about 10,000 years ago." "Just a bit of rubbish, that one." "Oh, have a look at this." "Look at that." "That's a bit of a crab, I think." "Bit of a mud crab." "Look at the detail there..." "all the little indentations and fittings, the little, tiny teeth along the claw there." "That's terrific." "One of the problems with this job of mine is the fact that I'm always on the move." "Sometimes, I get a bit sick of it." "And I look forward to a holiday, a bit of a break in the bush." "I'm heading for a camp site I know, downstream from here on the Mary River." "It's a huge wetland area, a couple of hours drive out of Darwin." "Years ago, this wetland country was part of a cattle station called Wildman." "Before I set up camp, I need to get some fuel and some supplies from an old mate of mine, Geoff Swayne." "Mr Swayne." "Hello, Leslie." "What are you doing in this country?" "I'm just going to the camp up at Wildman." "Good." "How are you going?" "Good." "Kids alright?" "You wanna fill that?" "Yeah, while I'm here." "Yeah, they're OK." "Got any sliced bread in there?" "Yeah, Sharon's inside." "I'll fill this up while you go and talk to her." "How would you be for a potato sack?" "Yeah, I've got one of those." "I'll see her for a minute." "Yep." "I had to get some bread here, but really what I wanted to show you is this post here that holds up the verandah on the bark hut." "If you look really closely, you can see these little native bees." "What's happened is they've turned this verandah post into a beehive." "It'll be hollow all the way to the ground here and filled up with honey all the way down." "I reckon if you could chop it open, you'd have stacks and stacks of honey leaking out all over the place." "Get out of my bees." "You're still trying to get into my bees." "Here's the bag you want." "Thanks, mate." "See you on the way back." "OK, see you in a couple of days." "One day..." "I've been wanting to chop into that log and get that honey out there for years and years now." "But His Nibs in there won't be in it." "I reckon what I'm gonna probably have to do is come back here one night with a brace and bit and get it out that way." "That'll fix him." "Taking time off in the bush might seem like a busman's holiday, but after I've made myself comfortable, sort of a home away from home," "I'll be able to put my feet up and just relax for a bit." "This is where I'm heading, out along the Mary River." "The flood plain stretches for miles and miles, and when it fills up with the monsoon rains, it forms these magnificent wetlands." "Because this water is permanent, you can always find lots of wildlife." "The variety of water birds around here is quite unbelievable." "You know, this wetland country round here is a part of the world that's fascinated me for years and years." "And I keep coming back here because every time I do, I find something different." "It's a great place to explore around here because it goes for miles and miles around the place." "You get a boat in the water and go all the way down there." "You gotta be careful where you put your camp around here because there's so many crocodiles." "There's barramundi down there too." "Where you get barra, you tend to end up getting crocodiles as well." "I'll put my camp right up high on the bank here, well away from the water, so they don't get too friendly." "Should be a good spot." "Up here, I find the best tent is simply a tarpaulin, strung up underneath the shade of the trees." "That way, there's lots of shade and plenty of fresh air." "Usually, it takes about a day to set up camp properly." "I've got a routine and I can't afford to relax till everything is sorted out." "You know, to my mind, having a good shower at the end of the day is almost as important as having a good camp site." "The two sort of go together a bit." "After a long, hard day in that vehicle of mine, well, it gets pretty dirty, I can tell ya." "It really tops it off well to have a good, hot shower." "When you've got a camp set up like this one here, well, you can do a decent shower point." "Built it up properly." "Sometimes, it's just chucked over the top of a branch on a tree, but this is pretty flash, this will do." "When you're out here, you quickly find that your whole life, like everything around you, is basically ruled by the sun." "At the end of the day, I love to sit down and watch the change in the bush as the sun begins to set." "Around these waterways," "I quite often get the feeling that I'm exploring the river for the very first time." "I keep my eyes wide open for crocodiles." "They tend not to give you a second chance if you get too close." "(LOUD SCREECHING)" "I've been having a bit of a look around the shoreline here of this river, along the banks, looking for a particular vine." "There's plenty of the vines, but there's none of the fruit I wanted." "I wanted to show you something that was very, very special, and I reckon the reason is..." "because of that noise." "Those fruit bats." "I reckon they've eaten it all." "Never mind." "I'm not here for fruit bats." "I'm just here to get a bit of bamboo." "I've seen a couple of awful big crocodiles out there too." "I won't muck around." "Get in and get out." "(BATS SCREECH)" "Now you can get this bamboo growing all over the Top End up here." "It's very, very prolific." "People have been arguing for years as to whether it's introduced or whether it's native or whatever." "I don't know." "One thing's for sure." "It's spread all over the place." "And just about everywhere you find it, you tend to get fruit bats as well." "You gotta be careful with them too because... a bit smelly around here." "They hang up there and they do all sorts of things from up there." "Don't wanna go looking up." "Another good reason for having a big hat, though." "Fruit bat colonies like this once provided a tremendous source of bush tucker for Aboriginal people." "They captured them by chucking throwing sticks at them and knocking them out of the sky." "With clouds of them like this, that would have been a pretty simple thing to do." "Now, this bamboo is really versatile stuff." "You can make all sorts of things out of it, including tables." "I'm using a bit of string here, a bit of twine, but I guess if I didn't have that," "I probably have to go out and make some bush string." "Around here, the best material to make that from is a thing called the banyan tree." "There's a couple of them growing just down the way here." "I'll show you what they're like." "This is it... the banyan tree." "Magnificent big specimen, this one." "It's hard to believe that this actually started off life as a strangler fig." "Once upon a time in the middle here somewhere, there would have been another tree and that would have been the host tree to the original seed." "They're deciduous." "And you can see all the leaves lying all the way around." "Terrific camping spots these things make." "But the really interesting fact is the aerial roots behind me." "Here's one of them here and these things here supplied all the bush string for Aboriginal people for thousands and thousands of years." "They used other things as well, but up in this part of the world, this was one of the main suppliers of bush string." "I'll just cut it down and give you a look, how the whole thing works." "Just strip away the outer bark here like this." "Runs right below down there." "And what you're after is the inner bark." "It's the pink stuff in here." "When it's dried out and plaited up it's extremely strong stuff." "Right." "We now shred that away a bit." "Like that." "Let it dry in the air for a little bit." "Next comes the painful part, and it's painful for me because I've got hairy legs." "Aboriginal women didn't have much trouble with it." "Because of that, they could do double twists and all sorts of things." "I can only do the one twist." "It hurts too much to do a double twist." "Just twine it round like that." "Round and round." "That's it." "Look at that." "That's just as tough as the string I got back in the camp there." "It's taken me years and years to build up all my information on bush tucker." "But it all started with this tree here, and that was when I was a kid way back in Cairns." "I might have been 7 or 8 or something." "An old fellow down the road showed me this tree." "He said it was a fish poison." "You could mash it up, put it in the water and it'd kill the fish." "But he also told me something else you could use it for." "The trick with this tree is to crush the leaves up in the water and that way the sap is released." "It's called a soap tree." "I wonder why." "It does that because it contains saponin which is basically a rough sort of bush soap." "Lets you do the washing up too." "Very, very effective." "And very, very common up here in the Top End." "Get a few rough spots on the pan here, you can always get one of these to scour it away." "It's a sandpaper fig." "Tell you what about this stuff." "It even works in cold water." "These mosquitoes are a bit crook." "Might have to do something about that tomorrow." "Just have a look at this." "I reckon that's terrific." "I do it every time I come up here." "The water sort of races across the surface of the leaf just like a meniscus." "It's obviously got to be a waterproof leaf because it's a water plant." "A lot of people think that these things here, and they go for miles and miles, all the way right round the river systems and the wetlands, are waterlilies, but they're not really." "They are a thing called the lotus lily." "Proper name is, I think, nelumbo or something like that." "But it produces this flower over here which is absolutely beautiful." "Just have a look at that." "You see that yellow centre in there?" "That really is the sort of reproductive centre of the whole plant." "Because in there we've got the seeds and they sort of get bigger and bigger and bigger and eventually the leaves all fall away." "And that seed pod will come up and up and up, and the seeds get so heavy, that it then tips upside down." "And once it's done that, one by one, the seeds plop into the water." "End up looking like this one over here." "If you look at this old pod here, you can see already that the seeds have already fallen into the water." "There's probably half a dozen of them left there." "But that's all." "I'll just break it off and bring it in." "There we go." "It's those ones there." "And they're actually bush tucker." "I'll get some out and give you a bit of a look." "There it is." "You gotta use a pair of pliers or maybe a lump of rock or something because they've got a very hard casing on them." "That's the part you eat there, that white part in the centre." "They sort of taste a bit like dry wheat or something like that." "They're pretty good, actually." "In fact, the water buffalo reckon they're tremendous." "And a few years ago, all this lotus lily country was given a real hard time by water buffalo, but not so much today because there aren't too many water buffalo left around the place." "Which is probably just as well." "Originally, buffalos were introduced here by the British." "In days gone by, there were hundreds of thousands of them running wild throughout the Top End." "Nowadays, most of them have been culled." "But you can still find the odd mob running round the place." "You see this buffalo dung here?" "Well, the theory is, you put it on the fire and because it burns with a lot of smoke, it helps to keep the mosquitoes away." "I think it probably does a bit." "Might be a bit psychological too." "But that doesn't matter." "Good enough for me." "Great job, though, isn't it, picking up meadow cakes." "Tell you what, though, always give them a kick first." "That way you find out whether they're cooked enough." "Out around this wetland country, it's easy to think that the permanent water is everywhere." "But the wet season finished months ago, and you don't have to go far from the river to find the dry season is well under way." "(VEHICLE RATTLES)" "Oh, well, I guess that's what you can expect if you insist on driving down old fence lines." "That track that I've been coming down, it's not a track at all." "It's just an old fence line." "And I suppose this happens to me about once a year." "It's a bit of a nuisance." "That's it." "Keep that." "Might be able to use that later on." "One of the things I enjoy about living in the bush is improvising with what I can find." "This is not firewood I'm chopping." "I've got another use for this fork as soon as I get back to camp." "This is probably one of the simplest bits of bush furniture you can get." "All you need is a lump of A-frame log like I've got here, a bit of fencing wire and a potato sack." "Bind it up at the back there like that." "There." "That will fit good." "Put it down there." "Just run a pole through the bottom here across there." "There we go." "And you know what?" "It's really comfortable." "I guess you'd call it the original squatter's chair." "There's a whole bunch of variations like this." "But they're so simple and easy to knock up just to make your camp a bit more comfortable." "They're terrific." "I suppose some people feel that to go out and really enjoy the bush, they've gotta have a big swag of new, beaut gear." "That's not really the case at all." "Firstly, I work off the principle of KISS..." ""Keep it simple, stupid."" "It seems to do pretty well." "Once I get myself out there," "I put my effort into getting comfortable and set up and that way, I can really enjoy the bush." "What I'm making here, and I've just finished it, just about, is a flip toaster." "I made it out of that wire that I pulled out underneath the car along the fence line the other day." "I might have an early night tonight." "I've got a big day coming up tomorrow."