A flight over the inland sea

FLYING creatures are drawn by an immense natural spectacle which happens only one or twice a generation — the gradual filling of Lake Eyre. Pictures are here

Some of those flying creatures, of course, are human. This year they have been attracted from all over Australia, indeed, the world, to William Creek on the Oodnadatta Track, either flying in over the lake in light aircraft or driving in and taking a commercial joy flight over it.

On the day we were there, the attraction was great enough even to draw representatives of the highest level on the avian food chain – inspectors from the Civil Aviation Authority ensuring all the light aircraft ring-ins were complying with all the regulations.

We were in a six-seater Cessna piloted by Canberra barrister Chris McKeown. We had no difficulties with the authorities.

From Canberra it is an instructive and spell-binding trip. With jet travel between capitals you are too high to see a great deal. In a light aircraft the change in the landscape as you go west is more telling – flatter, browner, sparser.

Day One was to White Cliffs. Day Two was the goods – from White Cliffs down Coopers Creek across Lake Eyre to William Creek. At lunchtime, we landed near the Dig Tree on Coopers Creek. This year’s rain brought the highest flood level for half a century, the locals tell us.

The floodwaters can take half a year or more to come from the edge of the basin in central Queensland to here.

The water seeps out across the Channel Country, almost randomly filling some depressions and missing others, on its inexorable journey to Lake Eyre. Imagine on a cloudless bright day being told that the ground you are standing on will flood in 20 days give or take a day or two. The flood is coming.

Now Coopers Creek and its many anabranches are still full and half a kilometre either side are bright Irish green where the flood had been.

But don’t be fooled. Burke and Wills died here. This green will not last long.

The water will still flow to Lake Eyre for weeks to come. The lake is almost full now.

But it is not the inland sea of the 19th century explorers’ belief, leaned by every Australian schoolchild.

It seemed the only way to explain the number of major rivers flowing inland with no commensurate outflow on what had been discovered on the west coast.

And when the rains come in south-east Queensland flowing into the Diamantina and Georgina Rivers and Coppers Creek (or the Cooper Creek, as some geographers would have it) there seems so much water that it must, like the water in other big rivers, flow into a sea.

But it is not enough to counter the area’s massive two metre evaporation rate

So most of the time Lake Eyre is a big bed of salt, 10,000 square kilometres big. It has filled just three times since Europeans first saw it 160 years ago, the first time in 1949. It makes it an ephemeral lake. Indeed, it is a largest ephemeral lake in the world. Other lakes are bigger, but they are either always salt, or they always have at least some water in them.

This is despite the fact that the basin draining into it comprising a sixth of Australia. It is a pretty arid basin. The western catchment – which contains the vivid Painted Hills – is the driest.

Still, an astonishing array of wildlife blossoms, flourishes, withers and dies here. I have never seen so many wedge-tailed eagles in one spot as at the Dig Tree.

Fish, frogs, insects have adapted to the ephemeral water. Eggs sit, waiting for years, then the water comes and they burst into life.

The inland sea still has resonance in Australia. Some patrons at the William Creek pub argued – perhaps fortified by the grandiloquence induced by fermented fluid – that a channel should be dug from the South Australian coast to Lake Eyre, so it could be flooded and be made a permanent the sea and cause extra rainfall throughout Australia.

Aside from the fact the canal would make Panama look like a kid’s beach digging, Lake Eyre is only 15 metres below sea level. The relentless two-metre evaporation rate would make the whole effort futile. Lake Eyre will remain an endorheic lake – a lake that has no exit to the sea. It is the fifth largest one on earth. Most have permanent water, but not Lake Eyre, despite the massive inflow.

There is an inland sea here. From a light aircraft it is obvious. It is a sea of rolling sand-dune waves. Do not be deceived here. The seemingly masses of water oozing their way from Queensland will evaporate.

This water is not the gentle, constant rain of the coast. It is as impermanent as it is intemperate. You can see it from the air. There is no blanket of green. The water touches only patches and lines. The rest remains relentlessly red.

Fred Williams got this landscape right. From the aircraft window, the scene a couple of hundred metres below is a huge Fred Williams canvas.

No people. Stillness. You can fly for a long time and not see so much as a dust plume from a moving car.

So – via Broken Hill — back to Canberra. We squeeze between the cloud cover and the tips of the Brindabellas. A fresh patch of snow hugged the shadow under Mount Coree.

The flying creatures had returned.
CRISPIN HULL
This article was first published in The Canberra Times on 10 July 2010