The Mighty River at Fitzroy Crossing

This morning, Jen spots a bird of prey majestically swooping past our camp site and then perching in a tree. The bird is a black kite. Although he is more brown than black, the Black Kite is revered by the Aboriginals as the fire stick bird, Girrganyi.

Winythali... The Story Of Fire
Long ago Bunuba people didn’t have fire and so they ate raw meat. At the west wall the old crocodile Gayi greedily kept the fire sticks for himself. One day the animals plotted to steal the fire sticks from Gayi but no one was brave enough except the bird of prey, Girrganyi.

Girrganyi dives down into the murky depths where Gayi lives and stole the sticks from him. Girrganyi then changed into his bird form and set the bush alight to produce fires for cooking.

Today Girrganyi can be seen wherever there are fires, maintaining the fires for everyone else.

So we’re back on the Fitzroy River, having already canoed & swum in it a few hundred kilometres away at Mornington. Now though we’re at Fitzroy Crossing which was settled in the 1880s by Solomon Emanuel to serve the surrounding pastoralists. Really it was simply a good place to cross the Fitzroy River. For its first 20 years it didn’t even make it on to a map; that first happened in 1903. Talk about being “off grid”. Even then, the town was not gazetted until 1975.

The Fitzroy Valley is now home to over 40 Aboriginal communities who speak 5 different languages - Bunuba, Gooniyandi, Nyikina, Wangkatjunka and Walmajarri.

The river itself is one of the longest in Australia with a catchment area of over 90,000 square kilometres. When in full flow (23,000 cubic metres per second), it could fill Sydney Harbour in 6 hours! With this year’s dry wet season, it’s more a disconnected series of puddles. Wonder where the crocs are? Well I think they’ve moved up to Windjana Gorge

Before the building of the high clearance bridge in 1974, the old concrete crossing could be closed for months at a time during the wet season. So how might you get across? Tinny? No - flying fox of course!!

It’s definitely clothes washing and clean up day. Apparently Fitzroy River Lodge is usually lush with green grass but it’s currently a dust bowl with sprinklers trying to get the grass seeds to germinate. Regardless, we have a good shady powered site and the resort facilities are close by.

After a morning hanging out in the resort restaurant with wifi, we walk across to the swimming pool and jump in. It’s 35 degrees in Fitzroy Crossing today so how come the resort pool is freezing. We don’t mind one bit and lazy lizard finds a sun lounge to sit on.

We basically limit any activity today to laundry wifi, swimming pool, bar and fish n chips from the bar as even cooking our scotch fillet steak seems a chore too far. It’s an exhausting day I know.

There are lots of folk in the pub all scrambling for chairs to sit on for dinner from the bar. We’ve been here so long today that the tourists think we are locals doing important work on our laptops.

The fish n chips were a winner and we retire to “the Lim” for another night’s rest before a Geike Gorge River Cruise in the morning.Baca lagi