Moments In Time

Boodjamulla National Park, in north-western Queensland, has a vibrant present and a past that stretches back into deep time.

- Hannah James

A JOURNEY INTO THE past can take a lifetime – or a heartbeat.

We’re walking into the unknown, up a hill no-one has walked for perhaps decades, perhaps centuries. As we skirt tussocks of spinifex and clusters of eucalypts, acacias and figs, aiming for a soaring red cliff, Jarrod Slater, an Indigenous ranger at Boodjamulla National Park, in north-western Queensland, is optimistic we’ll find fragments of the past we’re looking for.

“Life wasn’t that different back then – still had to eat, still had to drink water,” he says of his ancestors, traces of whose presence we’re searching for in this remote section of the park. “Instinctively, I’d go to that valley – there’s shelter, a load of food and water. We aren’t that different from the old people.” The place we’re heading for appears to have the essential elements for life – and more: “If you were camping up there, you’d feel pretty safe with an 80 or 90m cliff behind you. It’s a good lookout, too.”

We’re seeking evidence of Australia’s First People in an area of Boodjamulla where features are unnamed, except in the unofficial rangers’ argot (Gaffer’s Knob, the Great Wall of China). Our highest hope is to find art on the towering rock walls.

Bush-bashing into the wilderness, I feel like stout Cortez in the Keats poem, staring out “with a wild surmise” to find potential new realms of gold. But reality keeps intruding on the poetic ideal. Spinifex, as its name suggests, is very spiky. As we crash through clumps of the stuff, it’s this quality that most impresses itself painfully upon me, despite my guide’s enthusiasm for its other notable properties.