Pain & pleasure at Empress Spring

RESCUE IN THE OUTBACK

A woman was rescued after spending 12 hours in a deep cave she’d fallen into in the Great Victoria Desert, 350km north-east of Laverton. The rescue was reported in The West Australian last Saturday.

The woman, 60, was rescued from the cave at Empress Spring, on the David Carnegie Road, just after 5.30am last Saturday, after spending 12 hours in the cave.

St John WA paramedics and police were alerted to her being injured after a fall. The cave has a 10m ladder.

The woman’s partner lowered first aid supplies, water and camp chairs into the cave, as they waited for vertical rescue equipment to arrive, a police spokeswoman said.

She was in the cave overnight, and the rescue was completed at 5.35am last Saturday.

She was taken to Laverton Hospital with injuries, not believed to be life-threatening.

Senior Sergeant Brendan Grogan, officer-in-charge of Laverton police, says: “It also reinforces the importance of being well prepared, as the woman and her partner were, and serves as a reminder of how quickly a perfect day outdoors, can shift into a potentially life-threatening emergency.”

EMPRESS SPRING REVISITED

On August 10, 1896, an Aboriginal man led David Carnegie and his party to a rock hole in the Great Victoria Desert.

They were just north of what is now the Great Central Road, way east of Laverton, desperate for water. Their camels could smell it, but it wasn’t immediately apparent.

There were three holes, not obvious in the desert, with a cave below.

Carnegie and Charles Stansmore, one of his companions, used a rope to get down into the cavern beneath the red, sandy landscape, but there was no water.

Then Stansmore found a narrow passage. He and Carnegie crawled down and along it, finding water at the end. They worked to get enough water for the party and to water nine camels twice.

Carnegie named the water hole Empress Spring, for Queen Victoria.

They stayed and rested and Carnegie writes “but for the flies, which never ceased to annoy us, we had enjoyed a real good rest, and were ready to march on the morning of the 16th”.

Then they were on their way again.

David Carnegie, who was born in London, the youngest child of the 9th Earl of Southesk and schooled at Charterhouse, was leading the exploring party from Coolgardie in the Goldfields to Halls Creek in the Kimberley on a round trip of 4800km which would take 13 months. He was 25 years old.

Carnegie had already spent time in the tea plantations of what is now Sri Lanka, but had quickly got bored and sailed with his friend Lord Percy Douglas to Albany, heading for the WA Goldfields, where he spent three years prospecting before returning to Scotland to regroup and return to pursue his idea of this journey through the Great Victoria and Gibson deserts.

Not only the journey, but Carnegie’s interpretations of the desert, are captured in his book Spinifex And Sand.

And Carnegie’s life and achievements are the subject of In The Hands Of Providence, a book by William J. Peasley, published by St George Books, a largely forgotten division of West Australian Newspapers, in 1995.

Peasley travelled through the deserts in Carnegie’s footsteps and did extensive research to produce an excellent classic. He says: “In the eyes of many, David Carnegie was a desert explorer of the highest order, a man who showed compassion towards the Aboriginal people, immense affection for the animals accompanying him on his travels, and who wrote about the desert and its inhabitants in the way that few had done before him.” Like Peasley, I wonder why he has been given such little recognition and his achievements are not better known.

There are the practicalities of those achievements, of course, but what has always interested me, and connected me to Carnegie, are the little insights in his writing: “There is a charm about the bush — the perfect peace in the ‘free air of God’ — that so takes hold of some men that they can never be happy anywhere else.

“Civilisation is a fine thing in its way, but the petty worries and annoyances, the bustle and excitement, the crowds of people, the ‘you can’t do this’, and ‘you must do that’, the necessity for dressing in most uncomfortable garments to be like other people, and a thousand other such matters, so distress a bushman, who, like a caged beast in a menagerie, wanders from corner to corner and cannot find where to rest, that he longs for the day that he will again be on the track, with all his worldly goods with him and the wide world before him.”

And so it is that, indeed, I am dressed in my comfortable bush garments, a beast broken out of a menagerie, on a track in the Great Victoria Desert, heading for Empress Spring.

Like Carnegie, of course, I am not alone.

Carnegie had Stansmore; “strong and hard” Joe Breaden (“such men as he make the backbone of the country, and of them Australia may well be proud”); Godfrey Massie (“who had carried his swag on his back from York to the Goldfields, a distance of nearly 300 miles); Central Australian Aboriginal Warri, from the McDonnell Ranges; and camels including Czar, Misery and Satan with him.

I have Virginia Ward (artist, wife), Grady Brand (a fine WA naturalist, beetle hunter and bush woodworker); Lesley Hammersley (botanical specialist, date-slice supremo); Grady’s Toyota HiLux and my old Toyota LandCruiser.

There’s plenty of banter, and yarns from our many previous journeys through Great Victoria Desert, to Uluru and on the Connie Sue and Anne Beadell Highways, which have been published in these pages. We’ve also been together in Madagascar and Ethiopia, Oman and India.

Carnegie wrote (and it seems appropriate to our little party): “There are few men more entertaining than diggers, when one can get them to talk; there is hardly a corner of the habitable globe to which they have not penetrated.

“Round a camp fire one will hear tales of Africa, New Guinea, New Zealand, Australia, America from Alaska to the Horn, Madagascar, and other strange countries that would be a mine of information to a writer of books of adventure — tales told in the main with truth and accuracy, and in the quiet, unostentatious manner of the habitual digger to whom poverty, riches, and hardships come all in their turn as a matter of course.”

Carnegie’s writing is interesting, and another measure of him is that he drew neat sketches of the landscape, its features, and the people around him.

He also made note of Aboriginal language — his own, brief translation dictionary.

Among the words, for the English smoke or fire, he wrote down the indigenous warru or wallu. For wood, taalpa; for water, gabbi; and for dog, pappa.

It’s not quite so much dogs as cats that seem to figure most in our thoughts of the landscape today. A tabby gone rogue stares back from the side of the track, there are hardly any little marsupial tracks around old spinifex plants grown to doughnuts and I’ve seen wildcats out here grown so big, their heads the size of buckets, that they seem morphed to mini tigers.

But last night at camp, in a weird, complete stillness, there were still a few bats sounding their sonar, and the silent passing of camels, their big, soft pads laid on top of the tyre tracks our vehicles made in the sand.

And then today we got a bit sidetracked, in every sense of the word, following an old, now not much used track, almost vanished in places. We moved gently, working our way, often at walking pace, through the desert.

We stopped to enjoy Eucalyptus youngiana in flower — up close, each bloom glorious, complex golden or red cosmos.

We walked on a red dune with native cypress trees.

We stopped for lunch in the shade, and enjoyed the silence and stillness.

I’d be embarrassed to tell some folk that we covered only 27km today but, to Carnegie, our 16 miles might be respectable, even given the change of circumstance.

For Carnegie understood “free air”. He understood being on a track with the wide world before us.

After our desert wandering we do, indeed, find our way to Empress Spring.

Carnegie wrote: “The entrance is in a low outcrop of magnesian limestone, surrounded by buckbush, a few low quondongs and a low, broom-like shrub; beyond this, mulga scrub.”

And, of course, it still is today. As Grady says, every time we return to the desert: “It’s just been ticking away out here.”

Its big ecosystems, intimate relationship between a beetle and a hakea tree, and between us, as simple humans in a deceptively complex landscape, are unchanged since Carnegie’s day.

But some things have changed, of course.

The track is called David Carnegie Road, has four-wheel-drive tyre-tread marks and a sign to Empress Spring.

Empress Spring is 60km north of Great Central Road but before that there’s a real treat at Breaden Bluff.

Twenty-five kilometres north, we turn off David Carnegie road towards the bluff. Just a few more kilometres up the two-wheel track, there’s a camping area to the left and the bluff itself to the right.

Breaden, named for Joe, of course, is a 465m bluff overlooking gravel and bonsai grevillea, and around the walls beneath, an extensive set of caves. Many are joined and have pillars — nature’s catacombs.

There’s evidence of the now extinct stick nest rat, and kangaroo and reptile life going on. Just ticking away.

It’s a rewarding place to visit and explore.

Empress Spring is just off the track, with a visitor’s book in a metal box on a pole, and a plaque dated 1996 commemorating a century since Carnegie’s achievement, and the track being named for him.

But, ignoring that, everything else is almost exactly as he describes it in Spinifex And Sand. There is the sand ridge, there’s the shrubland, and here are the holes in the landscape, which one imagines might have been easily missed but for indigenous help.

Where Carnegie and Stansmore used a rope, we use a steel chain ladder to climb the 9m down into the cavern, with its moist sandy bottom but no water.

There are other holes, one of which the two men shimmied down, now filled with boulders.

There is a real sense of history at Empress Spring. Between this and Breaden Bluff, the story of Carnegie’s party comes alive even more for me.

When we visit, we make one of the few entries in the visitor’s book.

In his book Spinifex And Sand, David Carnegie wrote after time in the desert: “What a joy that water was to us! What a luxury a wash was! And clean clothes! Really it’s worth while being half famished and wholly filthy for a few days, that one may so thoroughly enjoy such delights afterwards! I know few feelings of satisfaction that approach those which one experiences on such occasions.”

There are still few such feelings of satisfaction.

PS: David Carnegie returned to England in 1897. He wrote Spinifex And Sand there, it was published the following year and he was given the Gill medal by the Royal Geographic Society. In 1899 he went to Nigeria as an assistant resident and was killed the following year by a poisoned arrow in a skirmish with locals. He was buried in Lokoja, Nigeria, a memorial was placed at Brechin Cathedral in Scotland, and a replica of this was erected at St George’s Cathedral, Perth, in 1925.