#northernterritories

[pieterpretorius]

The Lost City is a series of large sandstone outcrops that evoke the remains of an ancient civilisation. A spectacular sight, this landmark is located in a remote and hard to access area in Litchfield National Park

[everythingremembered]

on the road

[nando161mando]

The government green-lit fracking in the Northern Territory based on a CSIRO report found to have “systematically underestimated” emissions and offsets by up to 84%. @juliabergin1 reports.

[ccohanlon]

into the outback

The track to Palm Valley is an unlikely route for a tour bus. It begins just beyond the Hermannsburg aboriginal mission, 72 miles west of Alice Springs, in the arid, red-dirt emptiness of Australia’s Northern Territory. A large, weather-beaten white sign warns, No conventional vehicles to proceed beyond this point. For 12 miles, the rough-hewn track winds around the dry bed of the Finke River, over angular steps of solid rock littered with sharp chippings and soft patches of alluvial sand, to a deep gorge where rare species of palms, including prehistoric cycads, inexplicably flourish.

It’s hard work even for a four-wheel-drive truck. Not surprisingly, the chrome-plated coaches running daily between the Alice, as Alice Springs is known, and Ayers Rock do not include Palm Valley on their itineraries.

There are a lot of lonely places in the Territory. As the local license plates boast, this is outback Australia, the heartland of popular imagination, where fewer than 150,000 people occupy over half a million square miles of land, half of it a vast semidesert, the Red Center of the tourist brochures, and the other half, the tropical ‘top end’, a little-explored tangle of rough bush and rain forest and mangrove swamps growing into the Arafura Sea. The maps show only a handful of long roads through it all. The majority of water features on this map do not contain permanent water, travelers are cautioned. For anyone depending on conventional vehicles, much of the country is inaccessible.

The tour operators realise this and a few have adapted the fine Aussie pastime of bush bashing, pushing rugged four-wheel-drives across the rough, spinifex plains of the outback, to the benefit of the Territory’s booming tourist industry. Nowadays, depending on how long one wants to go bush and how much discomfort — heat, dust, mosquitoes, flies (especially the flies!), poisonous reptiles — one can take, there are a number of well-organized, adventurous and downright unusual safaris reaching even the most isolated stretches of the Territory.

Bill King’s Australian Adventure Tours is perhaps the best-known of them. Mr. King pioneered commercial four-wheel-drive expeditions not only throughout the Territory, from Ayers Rock to Bathurst and Melville islands, but nearly all of Australia’s seemingly endless wilderness, including the wild, jungle-like country of Cape York in Queensland and the hot, desolate ranges of the Kimberlys in northwest Australia. His company now offers 104 tours. The shortest is a three-hour bus ride around Alice Springs; the longest, a 30-day trek across the Northern Frontier: north to the Kimberlys from Alice Springs via the Tanami Desert, west to the pearling port of Broome, on the Indian Ocean, east to Darwin, Bathurst and Melville islands and the Kakadu National Park, south through aboriginal lands to the Gulf of Carpentaria, then back down to Alice Springs.

But outback itineraries would be less practical, and not nearly as much fun, without reliable off-road transportation. Bill King has, among other vehicles, the Unimog or, more properly, the Mercedes-Benz UL1700L, a desert cruiser powered by a 5.7-liter direct injection 6-cylinder turbo-charged diesel with eight forward and eight reverse gears, which can carry 21 people in air-conditioned comfort. Its slab-sided body, painted battleship-gray, and raised high off the road on big, heavy-tread tires, encloses a walk-in pantry, tool shop, a field kitchen, an ice box and plenty of storage space for the tents, bedrolls and other items necessary to survive, let alone have a good time, in the outback.

Alice Springs is a convenient base for Australian Adventure Tours, as it is for dozens of other tour companies in this part of the Territory. Each year, thousands of visitors crowd this pleasant and thriving near-city — no longer the ramshackle outback town of Neville Shute’s novel (but still in the middle of nowhere) — from where, they can get to the spectacular, orange-colored gorges cut by ancient flood waters in the steep, quartzite walls of the surrounding Macdonnell Ranges or — farther away — to the Olgas and the Territory’s main attraction, Ayers Rock.

A powerful fascination with this “immense pebble rising abruptly from the plain” (as the explorer W. C. Gosse described it in 1873) is one of the few things white Australians, let alone other tourists, share feelingly with the continent’s indigenous peoples. Solid and inspiringly strange, the Rock - the aborigines call it Uluru - embodies the Dreamtime, the ancestral legends of aboriginal prehistory. Despite the deeply felt objections of aboriginal elders, tourists climb to its summit in the quiet, cool hours before dawn and watch the rising sun illuminate the domed heads of the Olgas, Katatjuta, 20 miles to the west —one of the Territory’s most compelling sights.

Roughing it is an essential part of the outback adventure. On a Bill King tour, life is reasonably easy with a cook, as well as an experienced bush driver and guide, on hand at their campsites. On the Red Center itineraries, standard coaches and a choice of motel accommodation are provided for those inclined to travel less rigorously.

For those with an insatiable streak of masochism, going bush and roughing it can be taken a step further. Rod Steinert, a well-known local guide and tour operator, organises bush survival programs of up to three days in the harsh semi-desert south of Alice Springs. The approach is simple enough: for $75 each a day, a small group is led across the badlands by aborigines who will instruct in the crafts of the nomadic hunter-gatherer. Sleeping outdoors with poisonous snakes and rodent marsupials understandably might make one nervous, so creature comforts — camp beds, swags, conventional food and water — are carried if required.

Mr. Steinert also offers less drastic itineraries, including wild-life safaris in which, with any luck, one can try roping a wild camel or dogging fast moving hordes of wallabies, as well as day trips to cattle stations and aboriginal missions.

Rod Steinert is himself a student of aboriginal lore and I first met him at Ewaninga, an aboriginal ceremonial site on the Old South Road to the Alice. A talented raconteur, he was carefully explaining the complex rock carvings at the site to an elderly couple from South Australia. Despite the heat, which quickly sucked the moisture from our skin, and the annoying persistence of the flies, he managed to convey the awe of ‘the duck Dreaming’ and its very real relationship to the blistered surface of a nearby clay pan. “The tribal elders didn’t read these carved lines,” he said as he traced them with his fingers. “They’d look away and then recite the legend from memory; some of these lines were simply reminders.”

Aboriginal culture permeates the Territory and rock paintings. Carvings and other artifacts can be found practically everywhere. Later, while drinking black billy tea together and munching spotted dog, a kind of raisin pudding laden with syrup, Mr. Steinert told us, “Don’t believe it when you hear that the significance of these and other markings are long forgotten. There are elders, very much alive, who understand them. They could explain them if they wanted to - but they don’t want to.” Mr. Steinert is sometimes recommended as a guide to visiting anthropologists by the aborigines’ Central Land Council, which administers the land rights of central Australia’s huge aboriginal reserves.

For the scores of small, four-wheel-drive operators advertising unusual overnight camping tours from the Alice, the routes now extend as far east as the old Arltunga gold mine and ghost town on the edge of the Simpson Desert, as far west as Palm Valley and the Finke River National Park (or, in Mr. Steinert’s case, the Yuendumu aboriginal reserve), and as far south as Ayers Rock and the Olgas. In the north, the 'top end’, the rain forests, fast running rivers, deep gorges, hot springs and even the wildlife, particularly east of Katherine and in the Kakadu NationalPark, are perhaps even more beautiful — if commonly unreachable at certain times of year because of monsoonal floods.

However, there are alternatives to a four wheel-drive for traveling in the outback: camels, for instance.

Noel Fullerton and camels are seemingly inseparable. Among a plethora of colorful characters in the Territory, Noel Fullerton is one of the more sober and enduring. You can even find him on postcards: a squat, barrel-chested fellow with a mane of long white hair and a sunburned, bearded face not unlike an Afghan trader’s, he is commonly pictured atop a dromedary in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. He started the infamous annual Camel Cup Race down the sandy bed of the Todd River and won it five years in a row. He rode a camel up the steps of the Federal Parliament building in Canberra to protest the delay in extending the Ghan, the railway between Alice Springs and Port Augusta, South Australia, to Darwin. And now he operates safaris on camel-back from his ranch south of the Alice.

Throughout the year, with the exception of January, Mr. Fullerton and another guide lead caravans of up to 10 camels on one of three routes, depending on the time of year, usually in a series of daily treks from a base camp in the Rainbow Valley. The most interesting of these is probably through the Finke River National Park to Palm Valley, following as it does the path of the earliest explorer, Ernest Giles. Like others in the outback travel business, Mr. Fullerton is prepared to tailor an itinerary to suit individual urges — one customer, a young American woman, reportedly spent three months just wandering with one of his guides through the Krischauf, James and Macdonnell ranges and the hard plains between.

The outback is not a place in which to take chances. Unless one is experienced, an outback safari of one sort or another led by a competent guide is the best way to get into the rugged scenery, the unusual flora and fauna and just the silent, endless space of it all. Even if one is prepared, there is always an element of risk.

I recently went bush with a couple of friends in a Japanese-built four- wheel-drive truck. Loaded with camping equipment, food and a .44 magnum rifle (which nobody used), we went looking for a track to Mount Conner in the twisted scrub 20 miles south of the newly-laid Lasseter Highway to Ayers Rock. We could see the mountain from the highway, a long flat ridge of crumbling purple rock standing alone in an expanse of yellow spinifex, but the track was harder to find. We followed a few disused drovers’ routes into dead ends before coming across an unlikely looking turnoff covered in fine red bull-dust and sand.

“You’ve got to be bloody careful,” warned the proprietor of the Curtain Springs roadhouse, back at the highway. “It’s rough going, so don’t even try it without four-wheel-drive. And let me know before you set off. If you get into trouble, I’m the one who’ll have to fetch you out.”

He wasn’t kidding. It was a slow haul, scraping past the gnarled branches of trees blackened by bush fire and easing the wheels over the bleached-gray remains of corral fences. Finally, we stalled; the truck sank belly-deep into a sand dune. We deflated the tires and unchoked the wheels and tried to ignore the sine-wave tracings of snakes that were everywhere in the sand.

We wished we’d taken a tour round the Alice instead.

First published in The New York Times’ Travel & Leisure section (under the by-line, Chris West), USA, 1984.

[jobstaraustralia]

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[muddyriveragricultural]

Newcastle Water, NT with the Maestro 18 SV in a relaxing 45 degree heat 🌶️🥵🔥 Call #MuddyRiverAG for more details 07 4580 0825 Follow us on your favourite social media here https://linktr.ee/MuddyRiverAustralia

[equilibriumnatural]

Descubre Uluru, el icónico monolito de Australia. Conoce su historia sagrada y las impresionantes formaciones rocosas de Olgas cerca de Ayers Rock. #Australia

[aivesaustralia]

The Department of Home Affairs announced state and territory nomination allocations for the year 2023-24!

The department has outlined that the nomination allocations do not reflect the total number of visa applicants in these categories, leaving open the possibility for more allocation in the future.

Read the individual allocations for each state for this financial year below

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[transformgraphics]

Time to say goodbye #uluru #northernterritory #australia #seeuluru #redcentre #ulurukatatjutanationalpark (at Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqZWAhty2rf/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[pieterpretorius]

Some of the beautiful views one get on the East McDonnell Ranges walks

[nando161mando]

NT mayor defies calls to quit after video shows him pinning Aboriginal boy to ground @sarah_collard_

[admissionsmantra]

Australia has a strong and comprehensive education system that provides high-quality education at all levels. The education system is regulated by the Australian government, with each state and territory also having its own regulatory body responsible for overseeing education in their area #AdmissionMantra #Successkamantra #overseaseducation #StudyAbroad #Australia #Victoria #NewSouthWales #Queensland #SouthAustralia #WesternAustralia #Tasmania #NorthernTerritory #AustralianCapitalTerritory #Haryana #Hisar 𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐈𝐬 𝐓𝐨 𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐀𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 #𝐈𝐄𝐋𝐓𝐒𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐂𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤 #𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐂𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤 #𝐆𝐞𝐭𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐚 #𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐤𝐞𝐧𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 #𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐄𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 #𝐀𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐝𝐌𝐁𝐁 📢 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐲 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐚 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐍𝐨𝐰 ✔✔ 📢 𝐁𝐢𝐠 𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐎𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 📖 📢 𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐤 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐄𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐔𝐬 🔍 📢 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 ✔✔ 📢 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐒𝐎𝐏 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧✔✔ 📢 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 ✔✔ 📢 𝐍𝐨 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐬 💸 📢 𝐑𝐞𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 ✔✔ 📢 𝐖𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐑𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 📚📚 📢 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐎𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐞 - 𝐒𝐂𝐎 -𝟏𝟕𝟏 𝐑𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭, 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐫 - 𝟏𝟐𝟓𝟎𝟎𝟏 📢 𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭�� 𝐎𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐞 - 𝟒𝟎𝟏, 𝐁𝐡𝐨𝐠𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱, 𝐕𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐚𝐫 𝐁𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐤, 𝐍𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐍𝐢𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐕𝐢𝐡𝐚𝐫 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐨 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐚𝐫𝐩𝐮𝐫 (𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐃𝐞𝐥𝐡𝐢) - 𝟏𝟏𝟎𝟎𝟗𝟐 🏛 𝐆𝐞𝐭 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐚 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐍𝐨𝐰 📞 𝟗𝟑 𝟗𝟐 𝟗𝟏 𝟗𝟎 𝟐𝟎 📞 𝟗𝟑 𝟗𝟐 𝟗𝟏 𝟗𝟎 𝟑𝟎 https://www.instagram.com/p/CpwnM6UrHnz/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[jobstaraustralia]

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[muddyriveragricultural]

Horsch 8 HD Joker @ Maryfield Station, NT.

#MuddyRiverAG for more details 07 4580 0825

[equilibriumnatural]

Descubre Uluru, el icónico monolito de Australia. Conoce su historia sagrada y las impresionantes formaciones rocosas de Olgas cerca de Ayers Rock. #Australia