"(THEME MUSIC)" "In all the years I've lived in North Queensland," "I've never seen the Barron Falls look so good." "Mind you, it takes an awful lot of rain to make them flow like this." "(THUNDER RUMBLES)" "All this rain makes things pretty uncomfortable in the bush." "To my mind, there's nothing worse than breaking a wet camp." "For a start, everything is absolutely saturated." "The other point about having wet gear up here, particularly in this climate, is the fact it's only a matter of days before the mildew sets in." "So what you've got to do is dry it all out hopefully before you have to use it again so that doesn't happen." "Well, I know a place just up the way here a bit." "I reckon I can do that there, even in this rain." "At least I hope I can." "(STARTS ENGINE)" "The place I've got in mind is right on the edge of the Atherton Tableland." "On this trip I'm heading west, round the Gulf country and across the Territory, to a really special place called Jasper Gorge." "Along the track, there are a few things worth having a bit of a look at." "Places like the lava tubes at Undara." "Just leave that there to dry for a bit." "While that's happening, I'll have a look around the place here." "Bit of an explore." "These enormous tubes were formed when the Undara volcano last erupted and that was about 190,000 years ago." "Way back then, the lava flowed out of the crater and along the old river beds." "And as the lava cooled, it formed these long tubes." "These days, you can walk through these tubes, but to get inside, you have to find a spot where the roof has collapsed." "These lava tubes are part of a huge network." "Pretty close to 100km long." "They're a bit like caves." "They've even got their own bats." "If you keep your eyes open, it's amazing what you can find." "Things that you don't often get to see." "This might look like a rusty old water pipe, but it's not." "It's a tree root." "A tree up there obviously sent its roots all the way down here looking for water." "Over there is another mob." "A whole bunch of them coming down." "If my guess is right, they're probably figs." "We'll soon find out, anyway." "Just cut a bit of that bark away." "Yeah." "That sticky, white sap tells me it's a fig up there somewhere." "Here's the culprit here." "This old fig tree is sending these roots right down into the ground." "You've got a couple of little young figs growing there." "They're not quite ripe." "They'll be ready shortly." "But really, the interesting thing up here that I saw a minute ago is this tree over here." "Because this is a very, very special tree to this particular area." "You know, out of all our early explorers we had in this country, there weren't too many of them who actually tried to eat some of the bush tuckers around the place." "But one bloke, a fellow called Leichhardt, he came through this part of the world here," "I think it was around about 1840 or something, around about then." "And he ate a fruit off this tree here." "He reckoned it tasted like German rye bread." "And these days, the common name for this tree is Leichhardt's breadfruit tree of the Lind." "There's a couple up here." "Let's get them." "That's what they look like." "You just peel them away and eat them." "I've never tried them before but I'll have a go at them." "Mind you, just because Leichhardt ate them doesn't mean much." "That fellow got so hungry at one stage, he even cut up his saddle bags, boiled them up and ate them." "He was pretty desperate." "I'm not that desperate, but I'll have a go at these." "I'll just peel the outside here a bit." "It's a bit furry." "There we go." "Get rid of that." "A bit mealy." "Very dry." "It does sort of have a bread, nutty sort of flavour to it, wholegrain bread." "Yeah." "It's not bad at all." "Tastes a bit like walnut." "Now, that's another interesting bush tucker." "It's a thing called the brachychiton." "And it's one of the few items actually used by the northern pioneers." "Here are some of those brachychiton seed pods around here." "Three... four..." "That's no good." "Some of them have still got the seeds inside." "That one's no good." "They've all fallen out." "Rubbish." "Borer's been in that one." "He's no good." "Now, this is exactly what I'm after, this bloke here with all the seeds in the pod." "Keep that one." "Keep that one too." "I'll be able to use both of them later on in the camp." "It's one of those old flour drums." "Don't get them too often." "They're a pretty useful item." "Out here, you make use of all the resources you can, right down to the hot water that comes out of the artesian bores." "You know, just because you live and work out in the bush doesn't mean to say you got to turn into a grub." "So the best thing to do is to keep on top of your washing." "Now, there's a couple of things you can do." "You can hand wash if you want to." "Or you can make yourself a bit of a washing machine like this." "Get that tight." "All it is is a jam tin, cleaned out and screwed it onto a lump of wood." "Have to get it down very tight." "On the end of the jam tin it's got a little rubber washer at the end there." "It flops up and down as you push the thing up and down in the water." "As it goes up, it lets the water go that way, but it doesn't let it go back the other way." "That's how you get your agitator action." "Just put him over there." "Thump him up and down." "Works like a beauty." "You know, I know some blokes who when they're doing their washing they've got a cold beer to drink." "Well, due to a whole bunch of poor planning, all I've got's this book to read." "Never mind." "She'll be right." "Last century, when the explorer Leichhardt moved through this Gulf country, it took him months." "Nowadays, you can make the same trip in about three or four days." "A lot of people if they are driving round this country here probably reckon it was pretty boring." "That's not the case at all, though." "If some of these trees out here could talk, they'd tell a tale or two." "I'll show you what I mean." "This is the cycad tree." "At different times during the year, it produces a nut which you can eat, but it's very, very poisonous and it takes a lot of work to sort it all out." "Not in season at the moment, though." "But really I think the fascinating thing about these trees is their age." "They take around about 100 years to grow two metres." "So this one here would have to be just a little baby around about the time that we had Federation here in Australia." "And this bloke over here, he would have been brand-new about the time of the First Fleet." "And that old one in the background going all the way up to the top, he's about 500 years old." "And that means that basically he was a little tiny plant around about the same time that Columbus set off to sail around the world." "When you think about it, walking around this country with these trees here like this really does make you feel like a bit of a Johnny-come-lately." "That's the Leichhardt tree." "It's a tremendous big shade tree." "Sometimes it's even called the Leichhardt pine." "When you look up into the trunk of the whole thing, look at those branches sticking out there at right angles." "That's where it gets that name from." "This is the fruit off the tree." "To me, it looks a bit like a bit of a dirty old golf ball." "But you can see that the leaves around here are absolutely loaded down with fruit ready to drop down to the ground." "The whole floor around this area is all littered." "I'll just cut one of these open to give you a bit of a look inside." "There they go." "They remind me a little bit about those Kiwi fruit." "Don't taste anything like that though." "I'll just drag that bit out there." "Pretty bitter." "They make up for taste because of the bulk you get hanging round the place." "Aboriginal people also had other uses for this tree." "They'd use the bark for making canoes and canoe paddles." "And they'd use the root system as a fish poison." "It was also a bush medicine to cure things like coughs and colds and even diarrhoea." "I don't know, maybe they got the diarrhoea from the fruit." "Because the thing I like about it most is the big shade that it offers because you always get these trees growing right beside the waterways." "Creeks and rivers like this." "They're great." "Yeah, that's what I want." "Most Australian waterways here in the north have got yabbies." "Yabbies go for a bit of meat like this." "I haven't got my crab pot with me at the moment, so what I'm gonna do is just build this one." "Just tie that meat around like that." "I got this lot out of my freezer in the back of the truck." "Might get a change of diet tonight." "Drop the meat inside there." "Get a rock like that." "Put it in the end to block it off." "That should jam it up." "Now, another bit of string around here." "There." "That should hold it." "Put it in just down here somewhere." "This looks alright here." "Right in close to the bank." "That's what you want." "Tie it off here." "I'll leave that there until the morning." "Might get a yabby if I'm a bit lucky." "But looking up there, I've got a couple of hours of sunlight left and there's something over here that's really worth having a look at." "It's fascinating." "There's about three or four of these sort of places round the Northern Territory that I know." "There's a couple up there in Arnhem Land and another one over there towards Litchfield." "And there's this one here." "They've all got the name of ruined city or lost city or whatever." "And that's because all these structures here look like tumbled-down buildings and when you look at them from the top, you can see the streets almost." "I reckon if we can get up there, we'll get a pretty good view." "Little devils." "Flogged my meat." "Never mind." "That's the best steak I had too." "I hope they enjoyed it." "I'm taking a back road to Jasper Gorge." "It's an old cattle route called the Murranji Track." "It was used by drovers last century as a sort of a short cut to and from the west." "But hardly anyone uses it these days." "Along the track, you find these government bores." "Originally, they were put in to supply water for the cattle." "One thing's for sure, I'm certainly not going to be the first overlander to make a camp here." "This is an attempt to make a bit of a rough cup of bush coffee." "Not my recipe though." "It's one of the ones that the old pioneers used to use." "Used to get these brachychiton seed pods." "This is the one I picked up in Undara way, way back." "I got the seeds out of there and crushed them up and roasted them up a bit, put them in the cup, add a bit of hot water and see how we go." "Some of those old pioneers they had a pretty hard time of it, you know." "This Murranji Track here, first white fella to come through here was a drover." "A bloke called Nat Buchanan." "He was moving a mob of cattle from Queensland right over to Wave Hill." "Well, as the years went by, more and more people came through." "But when he first came through here, they didn't have all these government bores." "What they had was about three waterholes." "If one of them was dry, well, the cattle and men, they did a bit of a perish." "In fact, I think there's about 12 drovers buried along the track somewhere." "Later on, when the gold fields over in WA at Halls Creek got on the go, there was a Welshman by the name of Llewellyn, I think his name was, and he moved across here with a wheelbarrow and an 8-gallon keg of water." "Well, he never made it." "And for years and years, his wheelbarrow hung up in a tree as a bit of a reminder of that trip." "It was hard times." "I think I might have a cup of tea next time." "Years ago, all this land was part of the biggest cattle station in the world..." "Victoria River Downs." "At that time, it was about half the size of Tasmania." "Since then, it's been carved up a bit, but it's still pretty impressive." "Just north of Victoria River Downs lies Jasper Gorge." "Well, this is the place I'm after." "And what I'm looking for should be up there in that high country there." "This is what I've come all this way to have a look at." "These things have been here for hundreds of years." "The first explorers that ever saw these things, people like Gregory and a few others, Baines, they came across these and they couldn't figure out what these were." "Little sort of houses, and that's what they described them as being, houses or somewhere where you can go and heal yourself or sacrificial altars." "They didn't have a clue." "It really confused them." "Really, they got a lot to do with bush tucker." "I'll show you." "These stone structures are quite ingenious." "They were built by Aboriginals to catch hawks." "Right, what I need now is a fire." "This is the seed pod of the native kapok." "And the cotton wool inside makes an excellent fire tinder." "All you need to set it off is a spark." "We don't just want any fire down here, you know." "We need a smoky one." "After I get this going, I'll get some green leaves and put them on the top of him." "That will make it smoke away." "All I need now is a bit of a decoy." "Aboriginal people used to use an old pigeon or dead bird and put it on the end of a stick here, twirl him round." "I'll make a rag bird." "Just tie it round there." "All it's got to do is look like a wounded bird down on the ground so when the hawk looks down, he swoops down to try and get it." "A couple of wings there." "That will work." "Yeah, that'll do." "It's pretty cramped in here." "Mind you, it's not a bad sort of position because these rock walls keep out the heat and yet they let the breeze come through, so it's not bad." "It's fairly cool with the roof over there." "You can look up and you can see all around the sky." "Hawks hover, hang around fires because that's how they get their feed." "And the Aboriginals, hiding in these things here which are quite unique to this part of Australia, used to reach up through here, grab the hawk and pull them down inside." "And some accounts tell you that on some days they were right up to their shoulders in hawks." "That's something I wouldn't particularly like to be, but anyway, we'll see how we go." "Tell you what, it's good to be out of there." "I haven't seen a hawk all day but that doesn't particularly worry me too much." "The idea of going home and having a feed of hawk, not real good." "I'd much rather a steak any day." "Hang on a minute." "The yabbies have got all the steaks."