"(THEME MUSIC)" "This is Australia's most spectacular desert... the Simpson." "It's a harsh and arid environment and it's got these parallel sand-dunes that run for hundreds of miles." "The best time to see them is right now, at dawn." "It's got to be the coldest dawn I've spent for a long time, but I guess you've got to expect it because this is the desert country and right in the middle of winter." "Desert country in winter, it's a bit like that." "I think tomorrow night I might get myself a fire." "Right now, I'm right on the western edge of the Simpson Desert." "And I'm gonna travel from here right through Central Australia up the Tanami, and finish up at Wave Hill." "The only reason I'm doing this trip is 'cause a mad mate of mine up at Wave Hill asked me to come." "He wrote me this letter." "He belongs to the Wave Hill Cricket Club and so do I." "In fact, he's the captain." "He asked me to come up to play a game of cricket." "Here's what he says." ""The gentlemen selectors" ""of the ancient and noble Royal Wave Hill Cricket Club..."" "Crikey." ""...request and require the attendance in whites of the Bush Tucker Man" ""to meet upon this sacred turf the champions of the Tanami Desert," ""the Hooker Creek Bush Turkey Cricket Club."" "It's gotta be on the 16th." "That's a few days down the track." "I reckon I'll make it." "There's a bit more in Frank's letter too." "PS." "He wants some seagulls." "You see, up there in Central Australia where Wave Hill is, they don't have any seagulls." "And everyone knows that any cricket ground worth its salt has got its fair share of seagulls." "So after a lot of trouble, I got him a dozen seagulls." "They're in here." "We'll take them for a ride up to Wave Hill on the way." "Tell you what, the things you do for your mates, I don't know." "They'll be right." "If you're going to make a trip like this halfway across Australia, you might as well make it an interesting one and have a bit of a look at a few things along the way." "And at this time of year, when the desert gets its annual rainfall, things really begin to happen." "Once you do start to get a bit of rainfall in the desert country, the reaction around the countryside is almost immediate because what begins to happen is you get all this new grass growth." "The spinifex change colour." "You get a whole wash of greenery right throughout the sand-dunes." "One of the very, very early indicators that you've got rainfall is the emergence of paddymelons and they grow on the sides of the road, the gutters, where the water collects." "There's quite a few of them." "There's a patch up there, another over there." "This mob here." "Pretty prolific at this time of year." "These things are related to the watermelons, but unlike watermelons, you can't eat them." "In fact, they're quite poisonous." "Aboriginal people use them as a bush medicine." "They heat them up like that over the fire, cut a hole in them, then squeeze the juice out to fix up ringworm and scabies and those sort of things." "But like that, no go." "I remember one old Aboriginal bloke, one time I asked him about these things." "I said, "Can you eat them?" And he said, "No, rubbish food."" ""Camel tucker", he said." "I'll show you the inside." "There it is there, all those seeds in it." "Looks a bit like a melon." "It smells like one too." "But deceptive because it's poisonous." "Leave them for the camels." "The camel, a horse designed by a committee, was first introduced into Australia in the mid-1800s by our early explorers and settlers." "These days, they've multiplied to over 30,000 in the Northern Territory alone." "But even so, they've never been a problem." "Well, there's one animal that really has adapted to the Australian desert country." "They really have fitted in quite well." "If we could do the same, we'd have no trouble at all." "Heading west, the sand-dunes begin to disappear." "And gradually you find yourself amongst the MacDonnell Ranges and finally, Alice Springs itself." "The Alice is a beaut spot." "Only trouble is, there are too many motor cars and a whole bunch of traffic lights." "Gosse Bluff is only 100 miles west of Alice." "Even though it's not an environmental reserve, it is a scientific reserve because it's pretty special in its own way." "The people who reckon they know about this sort of thing, the geologists and the seismologists and all those other ologists, tell us that it was caused by a solid lump of gas." "Something like carbon dioxide, the same as dry ice." "When it hit the earth, the reverberation went all the way around the world all the way as far as England." "Well, that's a decent thump in my books." "You look down there at that vegetation, which is pretty sparse." "There's a lot of spinifex down there, an awful lot of it, in fact, a few gum trees, a few acacias and that's about it." "Over there, there's a bit of a track winding in." "Vehicle track." "Reckon it might be worth driving down there." "When you drive through the middle of something like this, you can't help but feel just how old this country of ours is." "See that there?" "That's a lump of spinifex resin." "Had a leak in this jerry can." "That'd be about two years ago now." "I guess if I bought something out of a shop at the time, put that on, probably would have fallen to bits by now." "This spinifex produces a resin, the same stuff that I used to fix up the jerry can back there." "And that resin's flammable." "So that when you light it, it burns with a great intensity of heat which is pretty good for lighting the billy, particularly when you haven't got much firewood round the place." "Spinifex itself, in the way it evolves and lives and dies and things like that, is quite interesting because it starts off very small, then gets bigger and bigger and bigger." "And the clump ends up like this one here, about that big." "When it gets to that stage, it dies off starting in the middle and gradually the death area moves further and further out." "These little bits out here will finally break off and form separate clumps themselves." "The other interesting thing about this stuff is that it's fire tolerant." "In other words, you can set fire to it now, come back in a year or so's time and it's grown back up again because the roots under the ground survive the heat." "While the billy comes to the boil back there," "I'll show you something over here." "I saw these driving in." "There's a few of them around." "There's one just here." "Yeah." "Have a look at that." "That's a thing called a hairy caterpillar's nest." "It's also called the itchy caterpillar." "That casing there, that nest, is filled up with caterpillars, and you want to avoid them at all cost because if they drop on you or if you touch the casing, you'll get hives and itch and irritate, and they're terrible things." "I've bumped them a few times." "I can tell you, it's something you wouldn't enjoy." "But even that, Aboriginal people found a use for." "In times when food was very, very scarce and they were hard-up, they'd get those caterpillars, take them out, cook them up on the fly very quickly and then eat them." "If you think I'm gonna do that, you've got another thing coming." "With fires in winter time, it's not unusual that people do get burnt." "And the casing from that nest is also a bush medicine." "What they did was they'd get the casing and separate the inner part from the outer part and just get that middle bit in the middle and put it on the burnt area of the skin." "They'd used it pretty much the same way we'd use plastic skin." "But the real message is leave them alone." "Don't touch them." "Avoid them at all cost." "They're terrible things." "Might even be able to pick up a few hints out of here if I'm lucky." "You know, it's amazing when you think about it just how much water you go through out in the bush." "You've got your washing and your shaving, of course, if you shave, your cooking, and what you drink." "And out here in this desert country in the middle of summer, with a hard day's work, you go through five, six litres a day." "Now, if your body's using all that water up, you've gotta replace it." "And it makes you ask the question... how would you get on if you were stuck out here?" "Where would you find the water?" "(BIRD NOISES)" "Hear that?" "Hear that sound?" "That sound means water." "Might have to dig for it, but the water's got to be around here somewhere." "There they are." "Quite a few hundred finches over there." "Quite a few hundred, I'd guess." "Those finches are all grain eaters." "They eat the grass seed around the countryside here and because of that, they won't range out any more than about a kilometre out from water." "So wherever you find finches, you know that there's got to be water close by." "We'll go in and have a look." "Now, that's a good sign." "You get this sort of thing." "That one there, that looks like a kangaroo track to me." "You can see where he's dragged his tail along the ground." "You get this where you've got water because all the animals from around the country have got to come in and have a drink each day." "Over there, it looks like we've got emu tracks." "There we go." "That's emu." "One, two, three toes." "Another one over there, another one there." "He's heading straight over there to where all those finches are." "That's what they're after." "All that water there." "This is what you call a rock hole." "It's a natural hole in all this rocky country round here." "Because this is solid rock." "And during the rainfall, it drags the water together and runs down into a hole like this." "These can be quite deep." "I'll just show you." "There's the bottom down there." "So at the moment, the birds and the animals are fine." "But how would you get on if you came along here later on in the year in the middle of summer when this is dried out?" "What you've got to do is study the landscape." "Have a look at the areas where the water would run to off the edge of the shelf." "Well, this is the rocky edge, the lip of the whole thing." "And all the water that runs over the edge here, it's got to collect somewhere." "I look up there and it's a bit dry." "And same down that way." "But the greenest part is just around here." "And this is the place that I reckon there's got to be moisture under the ground." "It's a pretty healthy-Iooking depression here." "I can even see the moisture in the soil right on the surface." "So there's got to be water down there." "I'd reckon most of this depression has been dug over the years probably by the kangaroos and the animals and things like that because they can smell the water underneath the ground." "And they don't dig for nothing." "We'll have a go and see how we get on." "That's the moisture that the animals are digging for during the dry times." "Not too far down." "Only about a yard." "I guess if I left it there for a few hours, this hole would probably fill right up with water." "This is one of your narcotic plants." "This is an emu poison." "The Aboriginal people would get all that leaf structure there, crush it all up, wash it into a rock hole like that one I've just been to." "Then when the emus come along and drink the water, they fall down dead." "But the really interesting factor about it is that if you're going to poison water around the desert country, and it's so scarce, how do you avoid killing people?" "Well, to fix that up, there's a very simple answer." "They left a calling card." "By throwing down one of the branches from the bush, the people who came up to the waterhole could tell instantly that that waterhole had been poisoned." "They can also tell by the condition of the branch how long ago it happened because as the weeks went by, the branch would begin to decay." "I think it's a pretty ingenious method myself." "See this country on the left here?" "That's a cattle property called Mongrel Downs." "That's what it used to be called." "I think the new owner, his missus didn't like that name, so they changed it to Tanami Downs." "Anyway, a couple of years ago, the manager ran an advert in the local paper in Alice Springs." ""Rain gauge for sale." ""Two years old, as is, where is, never been used."" "At this stage," "I'm about 200 miles short of Wave Hill." "And I've got to tell you," "I'm really looking forward to that cricket match." "Well, I haven't gone completely troppo, but presuming you've found enough water, the next thing you gotta find is direction." "There's a very, very simple little trick you can use to do that." "What you need's a straight stick." "Well, I've got a cricket stump." "That'll do me." "Bang it in the ground there, mark the end of the shadow, wait half an hour and then come back." "Well, it's been a bit more than half an hour, but you can see during that time how the shadow's moved right across the ground there." "It's a pretty rough sort of a guide but it's better than nothing at all." "What you've got to do is imagine a line going through those two rocks down there." "I'll just put my toes up against them." "That's gotta be east, that's west, and north's up there." "And if that's the case, Wave Hill would be over that way." "You know, this whole business of survival and bush tucker up here in the bush, it's not something you can play around with." "You've got to know your subject." "And to know your subject, you've got to know your country." "You can do yourself a real damage if you try experimenting round the place." "You take this bush here, for instance." "This thing down here." "That's a thing that's related to the deadly nightshade group." "It's called a desert tomato." "And believe it or not, you can eat it." "Well, that's sort of partly true." "You can eat part of it, not all of it." "Just cut it open." "That typifies what I'm talking about about knowing your subject." "See that there?" "You can eat all this outside bit but don't eat the seeds, they're poisonous." "You've got to spit them out." "I guess, you know, it would be really convenient and easy for everyone if we could make up a set of golden rules about this sort of thing, but you can't." "They just won't hold water." "I've heard some dreadful old wives' tales about what you can eat and what you can't eat and all the rest of it, but I haven't found one of them that's any good." "One time there I heard a bit of a yarn away back that you could eat the same sort of things that birds eat." "Well, that's not true." "Because I've seen birds eat some terrible things." "Hmm." "Those seagulls back there, I guess they've been eating dust for the last couple of thousand miles." "It's probably about time we got to Wave Hill, I reckon." "(ENGINE STARTS)" "Hey, Leslie." "Hi." "How are you, mate?" "Good." "Long trip?" "It's been a few weeks, anyway." "Where's me seagulls?" "In the trailer." "You want them?" "Yep." "Too right." "Alright." "I haven't seen them for a while." "We're down to our last seagull." "Are you?" "They might be knocked around a bit, but it doesn't matter." "Bit dusty for them in there." "They've been eating dust." "There you go." "Oh, good man." "How's that?" "We knew we could rely on you, Les." "What a bloke." "There you go." "There's one down here somewhere." "Oh, look at this bloke." "Having a scratch." "(LAUGHS) That's a beauty, mate." "You've done well again, Les." "(SIREN WAILS, HORN HONKS)" "Up the Turkeys!" "Gobble, gobble!" "Up the Turkeys!" "Gobble, gobble!" "The Australian bush by itself is interesting enough, but when you add to it the people who live here and the sense of humour they have, then that's really what makes it." "Thank you, Don." "How are you, mongrel?" "Wave Hill wimps." "We'll see after the game." "Gonna have a little wager on the game?" "Jeez, Frank, this is as hard as concrete, this thing." "Certainly is, mate." "I think some of these cracks could open up." "We'd better have a bat straight up." "Yeah." "Good idea." "Thank you, Donald." "Good luck." "Les, all the best." "Your call, Les." "Tails." "Well done." "MAN:" "And who won that toss?" "Hiddins, obviously, 'cause he's coming out to bat now with his partner Frank." "And a great reception from both sides." "Really anxious to see their players out there on the middle." "Now we have Hiddins in strike." "That's a lusty shot." "It should bring him two." "It's gone out towards the fieldsman and he'll take an easy two." "And we see the inevitable dog arriving on the scene." "But that's happening here." "(PEOPLE CALL OUT)" "The heat telling a story with the amber fluid flowing and a very enthusiastic crowd." "That's a bit lucky." "It went across the line of the ball, but it fell safely." "SPECTATORS:" "Boring!" "Boring!" "Dalton strikes." "And it's a Dougy Walters shot as he puts it away past mid-wicket." "And they've taken one." "Hiddins looking anxious to get down to that strike and he's turning now." "He's on his way for a third." "And he'll make it alright." "And that he does." "So three to Dalton." "Hiddins again." "And he's skied that one and it's gonna fall safely, I think, and it does." "And makes it." "He was a bit lucky there."