"(THEME MUSIC)" "Three fingers." "I can just fit three fingers between the bottom of the sun and the horizon." "That's a bit of a rough method to tell me that I've got roughly about 45 minutes left of daylight before that sun sets." "That being the case, I'd better hit the track." "Oh, one day I might even buy a watch." "I'm heading off into one of the most rugged and remote parts of Australia... the Kimberley region of Western Australia." "It's an area that I keep coming back to because of its isolation and its pure and natural beauty." "What many people don't realise is that the Kimberleys are bigger than both Victoria and Tasmania put together." "And it's mostly uninhabited." "So as a visitor, you've got to be able to look after yourself." "Only two fingers to go." "That's about half an hour." "I've got a campsite down here." "I'd like to make it tonight." "But I don't know whether I will or not." "It's a fair way away." "Well, the sun won that one." "I ran out of fingers in the end." "Doesn't matter, though." "This is the place I wanted to come to." "I'll just put a swag camp up for tonight and tomorrow morning put up a proper camp then." "That will do." "The best time to visit this part of the world is just after the wet season." "All the rivers and the lagoons have all been topped up and the bush tracks have dried out enough to let you get into the heart of the country." "Of course, up here in the Kimberleys, your poor old motor car can only take you so far." "I find it best to put up a bit of a base camp like that and then walk out each day, radiating out on a daily basis." "That way you can have a real good look around the place." "There's no doubt about it, a lot of places in the Kimberleys that are absolutely beautiful, but you gotta make the effort to get there." "The place over there..." "That's a little rock shelter." "Not a little one." "It's a big one, by the look of it." "Trouble is, it's over that side of the river and I'm over here." "That's what I want." "It's a thing called supplejack." "It's like a bush string or rope." "Aboriginal people used it for all sorts of things... making up fish baskets and canoes and all sorts of things that you'd use string or rope for." "Pretty tough." "A couple of feet, I'm not going to make a canoe, but it'll help me get across the river down here when I get to it." "Now, there's that supplejack." "I've ripped a few of the leaves off there." "It's called supplejack because it's very supple." "Just like this." "I'll tie a bit of a knot." "Hopefully this will turn out to be waterproof." "I'm in trouble if it's not." "There aren't too many rivers in northern Australia where you can swim and not be worried about crocodiles." "But this is one of them." "Or at least it is here, anyway, because this spot is about 800ft above sea level." "And between me and the ocean where the salties live, there are a whole bunch of waterfalls that they can't climb up." "So things are pretty safe round here." "To call this place interesting is a real understatement because it's absolutely amazing." "This whole rocky wall extends right the way up there and it's all an art gallery, one big art gallery, with all these paintings and these wandginas here." "These wandginas are the spirit people that the Kimberley Aboriginal people constantly painted, and still do, throughout the Kimberleys, over in the west and back over in the east." "So they're very, very important paintings." "And I doubt whether too many people actually have been here on the ground to look at this gallery." "I wonder how long it's been since somebody stood here, and looked around the place, because it's so remote." "What a terrific old paperbark this tree is." "A great big giant of a thing." "Been here for hundreds of years, I suppose." "I don't know." "If you look up there in the branches, you can see that it's all in flower at the moment." "It's got this smell to it that's... well, it's absolutely super rich and it really loads the air." "That's where the native bees get their honey from." "It's also got a lot of other uses as well." "And Aboriginal people used to quite often take away bits of the bark from the trunk and use them back in the camp." "I'll show you." "This bark's pretty thick, actually." "Like padding." "Yeah, just cut it down there." "You can use it on the campfire like sort of alfoil or something like that." "Wrap your food up and cook it away." "Lots of uses for this stuff." "There we go." "I made myself a bit of a bark coolamon from that tree down there." "But what I'm looking for around here are the underground tubers that these lilies produce in the mud." "You feel around, you can sometimes..." "I've found three there so far." "You can sometimes find them." "You feel all the way in the mud round the area." "Here's one." "Ooh, two." "Ah, there we go." "Bake them up on the hot coals, those things." "Actually, the waterlily is a very, very versatile bit of stuff because you can eat just about everything off it." "You can eat the seed pod, you can eat the flowers themselves." "The whole works." "Very versatile thing." "When you can't find the bulbs, what you can do is chew that." "Don't eat too much, though." "It tends to give you diarrhoea." "One of the great things about the Kimberleys is the fact that so few people live here." "As you walk around the place, you tend to feel like an early explorer." "Of course, the Aboriginal people once lived all over this country and if you looked around the caves and under the rock overhangs, there are lots of things you can find." "Plenty of rock art here." "It's not the stuff I'm after, though." "This stuff is fairly recent." "Probably in the last 50 years or so." "That's more the style of thing I want." "That's not a very good example, though." "We'll see if we can get a better one." "Yeah." "That's a better example up there." "There's some fairly modern stuff, but it's these dark ones here, that's the art that I'm really interested in." "That's called Bradshaw figures or Bradshaw paintings." "They got that name because the first white bloke to actually see these things up in the Kimberleys was a bloke called Bradshaw." "He was looking for land about 100 years ago." "I find the most fascinating point about these paintings is the fact that the local Kimberley Aboriginal people totally disown them." "They call them rubbish paintings." "Not theirs." "Don't know who did them." "They paint over the top of them too." "Let's see if we can find a better example of the Bradshaws over here." "That's what I'm after." "That's one of your Bradshaws." "It's a good one too." "I'll just get this pack off." "These things really make me excited every time I see one." "Look at the detail in them, the headdress there and the arm things around those elbows there and the skirts and all the rest of it..." "the whole lot's there." "There's plenty of Bradshaws around the Kimberleys, but the Aboriginal people, they reckon they didn't do it, which only poses the question, who did?" "I don't know, every time I look at Bradshaws around the place," "I can't help but feel Africa." "That just reminds me of African art style." "The only other thing round this part of the world that reminds me of Africa is a particular tree." "It's a really magnificent old tree, this one." "The proper flash name's Adansonia gregorii, but to you and I it's just a baobab tree." "There's one of the nuts." "I'll talk about that in a minute." "But I reckon if this tree could talk, it'd have a really interesting story to tell because there are only a few countries in the world that actually have this tree growing naturally." "One of them's Madagascar, another one's South Africa," "I think India as well, and we've got it here in the Kimberleys in Australia." "I look at it and again I think Africa." "But interestingly enough, the distribution of this tree is almost identical to the distribution of the Bradshaw paintings." "They almost overlap like that." "Where you find one, you tend to find the other." "Throughout the year it produces this nut." "Hear it rattle away inside there." "Which you can eat." "The really interesting thing about it though is that it keeps for ages and ages providing you don't crack it or break it or something like that." "It's a bit like a food time capsule." "Not just for weeks, but for months and months you can go on eating this thing." "And it's an ideal thing to take with you if you're going to go on a journey or a voyage or something like that." "Once upon a time, years and years ago, they had a trading route from Madagascar all the way up through the Indonesian archipelago, ending up in China." "Now, it sort of..." "It wouldn't surprise me if way back in those days they used to stock up with these nuts." "They'd be terrific for that sort of journey." "And maybe they'd picked up the odd deckhand in Madagascar at the time." "But what happens if one of those boats crashes on the shore here in the Kimberley country?" "'Cause it's a pretty rugged shoreline." "Well, maybe that's how we got the baobab tree and the Bradshaws as well." "One other thing too." "An old Aboriginal bloke years and years ago told me the Dreamtime legend for this tree." "He reckoned that once upon a time, it was so proud and arrogant because it reckoned it had the best foliage and the best flowers, it was the best tree on the landscape." "Well, the Dreamtime spirits fixed that right up." "They came along and they grabbed it, reefed it out of the ground and dumped it back in upside down." "Those branches you see up there, well, originally they were the roots." "Interesting story." "More interesting than that, though, they've got the same yarn over in Madagascar." "Whether Madagascan people actually did come to the Kimberleys is a bit difficult to prove these days." "But what we do know is that the Malayan and the Dutch and the French and the English ships all sailed these waters and most of them charted this coastline." "But it's the more recent visitors that interest me in particular." "Not many Australians realise this, but during WWII, a party of Japanese soldiers actually landed on Australian soil." "It happened at a place called York Sound." "That was in January, 1944." "Their job was to find out if this region was guarded and if it could support some sort of Japanese invasion." "They also wanted to find out about an airfield that was supposedly being built somewhere in the Kimberleys." "The Japanese soldiers split up into three groups and they began to search this whole area." "But climbing around here in the middle of summer wouldn't have been too much fun." "They would've been really hot and uncomfortable." "It's terribly pretty to look at, but let me tell you, it's horrible country to walk around." "The whole area for miles and miles is made up of all this sort of rock formation and the gullies in between are filled up with spinifex that no matter which step you take in what direction, you get spiked." "I find it amazing that the Japanese came to this spot in Australia looking for an allied airfield." "They'd heard it was being built so they came to look for it and do a reconnaissance." "Well, of course they didn't find one." "But for two days they walked all around this area." "Only trouble was, they were about two months too early and they were about 100 miles in the wrong direction." "This is what the Japanese were looking for..." "Truscott Air Base, just up near Kalumburu in the northern Kimberley." "It took three months to build in 1944 and this air field allowed the Australian aircraft to fly long-range missions against the Japanese in the islands up to the north." "Looking at these wartime relics really makes you think about the 500-odd people who lived up at Truscott during the final year of the war." "It must have seemed like some sort of hell on earth up here." "So flat and dry and totally isolated." "At that time, there were no roads into Truscott and all this gear had to come in by sea." "These days, Truscott sits like a giant museum, abandoned to the Australian bush." "This log's a real find." "I was over there looking for a bit of firewood, picked this one up, fell out of a tree, had a look in the end there." "It's filled up with honey and wax and that sort of thing." "In other words, it's a native bee's hive." "We'll just break it open on the rock here and have a look inside." "If you look very, very closely at the log, you can see the small native bees crawling round the place." "The interesting thing about them is that they've got no sting." "In other words, you can raid their hives and that sort of thing and not get bitten by them." "This whole beehive is called sugarbag by the Aboriginal people." "There we go." "Terrific stuff." "Mmm." "For some reason, bush honey is just so much sweeter and stronger in flavour than the stuff you buy out of the shop." "Maybe because it's got all the wax with it or something or it's pure and concentrated." "That's the wax that you're left with." "And that's the sort of thing that Aboriginal people used to use to make woomeras and spearheads and things like that." "They used it like a glue and a resin." "One of the interesting things about honey here in the Kimberleys is the fact that it's very, very common." "All over the place." "More common here in the Kimberleys than they'll find in Cape York or Arnhem Land or anywhere else." "And as a survival resource, it's got a lot going for it." "Because it's so easily obtained, it's something you should look for if you have to survive here." "To look at it, the Kimberley coastline appears to be a daunting sort of a place, but like anywhere where the land and the ocean meet, there are lots of survival resources." "Two blokes who had to come to grips with this situation were a couple of German aviators by the name of Bertram and Klausman, who in 1932 tried to fly from Timor across to Darwin." "They got a bit lost along the way and ended up being forced down on the North Kimberley coast." "That's about 300 miles off-course." "From the minute they first arrived here the odds were stacked against them." "As you can see, it's a pretty wild and woolly coastline." "It's also one of the most isolated areas on the Australian mainland." "Because they were Germans, they had no idea of what the Australian environment was all about." "Mind you, there's a whole bunch of Australians don't know much either." "But when you get down and look at it closely enough, it's surprising what you can find." "Walking around this coastline," "I can't help but wonder how the two of them must have felt about their predicament." "Here they were, hopelessly lost, and in a strange and hostile land." "For weeks they tried to reach civilisation." "But each time, they were turned back by the harsh country." "However, the one thing they did find was shelter." "And for nearly six weeks, they ended up living in this cave at Cape Boonia." "Here they were safe and dry." "They collected driftwood for a fire and they drank the rainwater that was caught in the rock holes." "But slowly, they were dying of starvation." "What they didn't realise was that within a couple of hundred metres of the cave, there were bush foods that could save them." "They could have eaten the young leaves of this native hibiscus." "Or the shoots of this supplejack." "The fruit of this morinda was also in season." "And the wild passionfruit can always be found around the place." "And another good standby is the sea purslane." "Looks a bit like a pigweed but it's not." "No relation at all." "You find this stuff growing all the way beside the ocean around this part of the world." "You can eat it raw or you can cook it up just like a spinach." "It's got a bit of a salty taste to it but... that's OK." "Bertram and Klausman didn't use any of the plant life around this area." "You couldn't really expect them to because they had no knowledge about bush tucker." "But they did make use of some of the local shellfish and they found these in the rock pools just outside the cave." "Those two Germans were actually living in this cave for something like 40 days." "Even found a bit of a nickname for it." "They called it the cathedral cave." "I guess after that period of time they knew it pretty well." "But the problem was that they'd expended all their energy trying to get out of here." "The coastal voyage and the trips inland and all the rest of it." "They had just about had it." "Even these shellfish here couldn't help them all that much." "Mind you, I reckon they're probably some of the best bush tucker you can get." "There we go." "They're just like a snail inside." "Oh, beauty!" "They got to the stage where they decided they were about to die." "They built themselves in here a couple of beds made out of grass and lay down, virtually accepting death as being inevitable." "But it wasn't." "Because what happened was the fact that some Aboriginals came along, and they actually came down a hole in the back of the cave here and spied the two Germans." "Well, the Aboriginals went and got them some food." "They got them some yams and a bit of fish, and a bit of sugarbag and they also got them some kangaroo meat." "Unfortunately, though, the Germans couldn't chew the stuff because they were too weak." "So the Aboriginals did it for them and then gave it to them." "For nearly two weeks, the Aboriginals continued to look after the Germans." "Once the news got out that the men had been found, a launch was sent to rescue them." "Those two pilots had survived nearly seven weeks in one of Australia's most isolated regions." "It's almost 60 years since Bertram and Klausman were in the Kimberleys but nothing has changed." "The country is just as spectacular and rugged and majestic as it's always been." "And the rules that go with this country will never change either, be it 60 or 600 years." "If you want to come into the Kimberleys and enjoy the place, to experience that unique feeling that goes with it, you have to be properly prepared." "There are no short cuts." "You simply can't afford to take the country lightly."