Date of Adventure 7 December 2024
This starts a while back when I visited the Walkabout Creek Hotel, i.e., from Crocodile Dundee. While in the pub, several other people came in for an afternoon beer. Among them, a couple who were in the process of moving to a small town a few hours from Alice Springs. We got along really well and continued to text and email back and forth. Turns out that they had just quit their “normal’ jobs to take jobs in the village of Papunya. Papunya is an indigenous town in an area of land that is controlled by the indigenous people. They had taken jobs with a non-profit, mostly run by an Australian indigenous board. The company is meant to help a few local communities in any way possible. My friends had taken jobs to work at helping the local people find jobs and hold the jobs. So they are sort of employment counselors and aides. And they were just starting.
After some planning, I decided to visit them and see what the indigenous communities are like in this part of Australia. In Alice Springs I went to the Land Office to talk to them about getting a permit to visit Papunya. It turns out that most of the indigenous land, at least around here, is tightly controlled. You can drive on some of the roads, but not all, and you can visit some places but you can’t just stop and camp or wander off those few allowed roads. Well, the nice lady at the land office informed me that in order to get a permit I’d have to fill out online forms and it would take at least 2 weeks. There are a couple of roads (if you want to call them that) into Papunya that are allowed for non-permitted or indigenous people to travel. So I could drive in and visit with them but not camp overnight as we had originally planned.
So I decided to camp in the West McDonnell National Park close to where one of those roads starts. My plan was to get going pretty early and drive into Papunya, spend a few hours, and then drive down to Kings Canyon to camp and do some hiking. That didn’t work out. When I got to the dirt road, I stopped and dropped my tire pressures to 25 psi all around and put it into 4WD high range. I followed a couple of tracks, so someone had been in since the rain last night. But at about 30 km down the road the tracks disappeared so it’s pretty sure that someone started and turned around…that’s why 2 tracks. Any way the road was wet and really muddy with huge puddles, some of them hundreds of meters long. The problem is that you can’t tell how deep those puddles are so I had to stay towards the edges. And even so, there were times when the water was up to the bottom of the door frame. And very slippery. Here’s a short video of a section close to Papunya. This part of the road was much better and people had driven it. You can see some of the tracks.
This may not look like that much (it sure wasn’t the worst of all of the mud puddles). But If I’d stopped in those areas that look dry, I’d have had to start very carefully because they were kinda slick. And if you look at the tracks in the mud, it’s not too obvious but they are 7-10 cm deep. I’ve got good all terrain tires and had dropped my tire pressure way down but still was slippin’ and slidin’.
The first 60-80 km on the Namatjira Kintore Link was a lot worse and there were really no tracks and no people anywhere. There were times when the Troopy was sliding sideways and the wheels were straining for traction. It was completely white knuckle for a long while. A trip that I thought would take about an hour and a half ended up taking more than 3 hours. But I made it.
We sat around and talked and I learned a lot about the indigenous culture and the issues in these small indigenous towns. This one, has about 450 residents and is 94% indigenous. There are a few white people providing some services like my friends. We spent close to an hour just walking around the town. I didn’t take any photos. Maybe I should have taken a few but I felt a bit self conscious about it. All of the houses are government built. These people were purely nomadic before the white man. They didn’t even have homes, just very temporary lean-tos. The main thing that I noted was the level of poverty. I was told that they receive funds from the Australian Government and it might be enough to live on. But most of the cars were pretty wrecked and there is junk and trash all over. Just general poverty! It’s pretty clear that there is a real divide between the subsistence way that these tribes, groups, (whatever is the appropriate thing to call them) used to live and the way that they are now, sort of halfway touching on modern white society. And, of course, there is the e problem of alcohol and drugs that comes with these kind of poor and out of place people. I didn’t feel threatened or fearful but there is a huge gap between those indigenous Australians and me.
The weather was threatening and I had decided not to try to take the same route back. I took the long way back to Alice Springs.
Flashing back to my drive into Papunya. In outback Australia the government will often close roads due to bad road conditions (don’t forget, these are pretty primitive dirt roads) or even due to extreme heat as in the Simpson Desert. There are pretty serious fines for driving a closed road. There is a sign, close to where I was camped, that indicated that the Namajira Kintore Link was open. And, I’d talked to a couple of Rangers the afternoon before who told me that it would be “squishy” but open. Well, when I was in Papunya we looked it up online and that road was closed. So I couldn’t take the same route back anyway. And maybe I’d driven it when it was supposed to be closed. There’s no cell signal in the area and I didn’t set up Starlink just to check.
The longer route is supposed to be better. Well, I’m not so sure. It was muddy and there were places where the puddles in the road were at least a half a kilometer long. When I finally hit the tarmac it was just getting dark. Good thing I didn’t have to drive any of that mud in the dark. I had to stop and air up the tires and drive on. I still had about 180 km to Alice Springs. And the “paved” road wasn’t that great. A fairly rough surface and it is mostly one lane with very wide dirt shoulders. When I’d meet an oncoming vehicle I had to slow way down and pull off to the side. In daylight it would have just been inconvenient. In pitch dark it was a bit nerve wracking. But eventually I made it to the Stuart Highway and it was well after 10 PM so I went to a rest area on the Stuart Highway and just spent the night there. Not the best campsite but the rest areas do work in a pinch.
And here’s what my Troopy looked like in the morning. Yeah, it took over 2 hours to clean all of that mud off.
So, in the end: I’d have loved to spend the night camped in Papunya. Maybe I should have taken a few photos to pass on to y’all. But that was a fantastic trip. I now feel a lot more confident that I can drive gnarly conditions. That’s probably the worst drive I’ve ever done. Not only was it tough but it went on for hours and hours. I knew that the Troopy is well set up for bad conditions but you’ve got to do it to really know. And just the opportunity to visit a small, indigenous community was outstanding. It’s not something that I would have done, just because I wouldn’t have thought about doing it. But meeting the right people at the right time can make a big difference. It’s got to be one of the high points of the trip.
Maybe next I’ll show the area heading into where I camped the night before. It’s spectacularly beautiful.