Saddler Springs

I should note that Saddler Springs happened the week before Heron Island, which Amanda discusses, below.



Getting There

We drove more than eleven hours in a coach bus to get to a remote outpost 400 miles northwest of Brisbane. From the outpost, we met several "ringers" outfitted with Landrovers. In two trips the forty of us made it seven kilometres (sic) east along the rough terrain to a camp with a solar panel that supplies a satellite phone in case of emergencies. It is four hours to the nearest hospital, which does not have a doctor. The last four to five hours of the trip were on dirt and sand roads that were one vehicle wide; this was never a problem, because we did not encounter any other cars, literally. This was the most remote place I've ever been. The ride was not terrible - I flipped through A Sunburnt Country, listened to iPod, and stared out the window. Some got wasted at 7:30 AM through the afternoon. Boxed wine and buses do not mix, in my opinion, so I abstained. The scenery was beautiful and largely unchanging. It oscillated from pastures with mountains and hills dotting the background to Eucalypt woodland. I remember one of my English Professors, Professor Bonnie MacDonald, telling me how clear the view in the Western United States is, how pristine the scenery is. I realized this is what she means (so long as the bus was moving fast enough to keep the dust at our back).

The Bus Driver

The bus driver, Peter, reminded me of the game warden in Jurassic Park. I think his name was Muldoon. Maybe not. He drove incredibly fast down the country roads and did not seem to blink when we destroyed a kangaroo that was slightly too slow. I think his driving was best characterized by Andrew - "He's driving like we're in a Honda Civic. I don't think he realizes there are forty people behind him." On the way there I heard a lot of criticism from the peanut gallery on the bus: "He drives too fast." "He doesn't know what he's doing." And when he got out of the bus to look at dilapidated wooden signs, people called him a rookie. Peter was no rookie. There are no maps of the area, he had no directions, and we spent the last hour and a half in darkness. If we were to get lost we had no contact person and no cell phone reception to make the call. Anyways, I think if we were to get lost, which was plausible, Peter would have been our savior. I'm pretty sure he could have hunted a kangaroo with his bare hands and made a fire with nothing but cactus, well, that was his aura, at least.

After talking to Peter a little bit, I found out he grew up in a rural part of New South Wales. His Father was a Church of England Minister, so Peter travelled into the Black Fella' territory quite often and seemed to have gained a tremendous respect for the culture. He knew quite a bit about the Aboriginal Culture and it fit into his outdoorsmen attitude.

Saddler Springs Region


Saddler Springs is 500 to 600 kilometres northwest of Brisbane in the Great Divide Mountain Range. To the west, is arid desert and largely uninhabitable (at least by most people) and to the East there is forest, including dry Eucalypt woodland and rainforest, bush land, up to the coast. The area has a very dry, desert appearance in some places, mostly because of the sandy forest floor. Millions of years ago, the land was lower than the sea and sand rushed into the Saddler Springs region. Professor Rodbell also speculated that it might cycle between the huge sandstone structures in some areas and the surrounding areas. The peak we climbed was about 1000 metres asl and the camp was somewhere around 750 metres asl. There is a large gorge that cuts through the area and the bottom of that gorge is likely around 300 - 400 metres asl.

From the camp we have four distinct landscapes: To the immediate north, there is the Great Divide Mountain Range. To the South is bush land. To the East is rain forest. And to the west is desert.

There is evidence of volcanic activity at one point, including a scattering of igneous rocks mixed with sedimentary rocks. This was likely from a hot spot (which is now somewhere off the coast of Tasmania). There are also a few "huge chunks of lithified sandstone" (Amanda's technical name for it), including Cathedral Rock. Cathedral Rock formed from fluvial (river) deposits. Large holes are burrowed into the rock from trees being buried in the sediment - these holes have been used by Aborigines to bury thousands of people. The rocks are also used, symbolically, in Aboriginal ceremony and important events.

On a Wilderness Ethic

My stay in Saddler Springs has really made me consider sustainability, wilderness ethic, and our relationship with Aboriginal people. Specifically, the hike on the first morning of the trip made me consider all of these interests. In this region, the Aboriginal people existed, scratch that, seemed to have flourished for thousands of years. Our guide told us that the people that lived in the Saddler Springs Area needed only two hours of work per day to survive. The herdsmen who work the ranches in the area work 60 hours, for perspective. Our guide also told us that he would probably only last a couple weeks before he succumbed to the cruel climate. During our stay it was in the mid to upper 20s (high 70s to low 80s), but in the summer it reaches 45 degrees centigrade (113 degrees Fahrenheit). Even in the woodland, the sun can be piercing.

The Aboriginal people in this region had enough time and resources to make an annual trip to southern Australia to pick up ochre for cave paintings. This trek, one way, was over 1000 kilometres. From there, the Aborigines made their way back, subsisting from the land, and made "cave art" that is still around (and has been dated back thousands of years). The cave art, though largely undecipherable, is known to have encoded meanings. It was not art for the sake of beauty (at least not entirely). Stories were enciphered into the sandstone that gave following generations clues as to how to deal with crises. Looking at the cave art it really hit me what a loss the World experienced when the Australians decimated the Aboriginal people.


Aborigines lived sustainably for 40,000 years (and recent evidence suggests 120,000 years). This way of life is not possible in Western Culture. I'm always careful at Union to say that we need to approach sustainability - I don't think our culture will ever actually be sustainable in the true sense of the word. Aboriginal people in this area have a very spatial (rather than temporal) outlook. These people belong to a land (rather than owning land). As a result, there is a very intimate relationship and an intense knowledge, understanding, and management of resources that allowed them to last for thousands of years. Unlike most major religions, the beginning of their people was very recent - on the order of several generations - rather than several thousand years ago. As a result, the Aboriginal people of Saddler Springs have a very intense sense of faith and culture. Aside from the ancient peoples of this land, there was another tribesmen, at North Stradbroke Island, that gave us a sense of how stories mean subsistence. His tribe used the sea eagle to find the mullet, dolphins are then used to "rally" the mullet into a single area where they can be speared. The tribe would then reward the dolphin with mullet, for its assistance. In recent years, dolphins, mullets, and sea eagles have all been disrupted, which means a shift in what was a finely tuned ecosystem. All of this information on how, where, and when to find the mullet was encoded into story, which was passed down from generation to generation (and in cave art).

What this all snowballs into, to me, is what a wilderness should look like. It is radical and I think society will choose to stay the course, rather than adapt to rapidly depleting resources. A wilderness needs to be local, spatial, rather than temporal. We tend to concentrate on how much time the world has left before oil ends, rather than the effect of oil to our neighborhood, for example. Imperialism and globalization don't work in sustainable societies. Wilderness needs to be understood on a local level and it should not be viewed in terms of ownership. In a sense, the Aboriginal tribes owned tracts of land, but never seemed to have control of it. We view and understand land as a possession, as something that we control and dictate use. The Aborigines viewed land as a relationship. They practiced forest management (ie burning land) and took what they needed, but no more. In this sense, we need to view Nature as a relationship, rather than a separate entity. Last, sustainability means communication. Communication, for us, often means destroying other people. Either by idly letting people die (rescinding food aid) or by actively killing people (genocide of Native Americans or, more recently, Iraq). Aboriginal people communicated with their neighboring people, despite having hundreds of language groups. They passed down knowledge via cave art to avoid repeating disaster. In all, wilderness ethic, means using local resources, where they can be monitored; having a relationship with Nature, so that we appreciate the resources we have; and communicating effectively with other people and the environment. To truly be sustainable these three factors would all need dramatic, radical change from the status quo. What does a wilderness ethic look like? Aboriginal culture.