Life at 100Mhz: Living with Technology

2001 19 Day Outback adventure in Western Australia

What is Life at 100Mhz: Living with Technology?

Living Life in the Digital Age - Living Life with Technology past, present and future. Find me at https://www.lifeat100Mhz.com - Produced by Dave Bunyard - earthdrifter@gmail.com Cover Photo: Charles Sharp Crawford in a Cole car at the Indianapolis speedway in 1910.

Dave Bunyard:

This is Dave Bunyard. And in this episode of Life at 100 Megahertz, we are on a deep dive into a nineteen day Outback overland adventure in Western Australia from Perth to Darwin. You can find this 250 page travelogue with many photos in a downloadable PDF from etsy.com. Just search for Earth Drifting Australia. I hope you enjoy it.

Delilah:

Imagine waking up. Right? You're zipped into this heavy canvas bag on the bare earth.

Sam:

Yes. Swag.

Delilah:

Exactly. A swag. And you look up at the night sky, and you get this sudden, just dizzying realization that the constellation Orion, you know, the hunter with the belt, is completely upside down.

Sam:

Right, because Betelgeuse, that bright red giant star, is suddenly on the bottom right instead of the top left.

Delilah:

Yeah. And that disorientation is just the perfect starting line.

Sam:

Welcome back to another deep dive, especially tailored just for you. Today we are diving into a really detailed, deeply personal travelogue from August 2001.

Delilah:

It's an incredible source. We're tracking a rugged nineteen day four wheel drive bus tour cutting from Perth all the way up to Darwin.

Sam:

Right. Straight across the remote, utterly unforgiving Western Australian Outback.

Delilah:

And we're talking about riding in this massive green bus where, the tires are so huge, the first step to get inside is over two feet off the ground.

Sam:

Wow.

Delilah:

Yeah. And you aren't retreating to a hotel at night. You are zipping yourself into that heavy canvas swag to literally sleep in the dirt. Okay. Let's unpack this.

Delilah:

Because our mission for this deep dive isn't just to, you know, map out a travel itinerary. We are using this specific journey through the outback to explore massive themes.

Sam:

Right.

Delilah:

We're talking deep time, architecture of survival, and the incredibly delicate, sometimes really messy balance between humanity and the wild in one of the harshest landscapes on Earth.

Sam:

I love that. And, you know, the tour guide on this trip, a guy named Bill, actually used the stars, specifically the Southern Cross, to teach the group how to tell time in the dark.

Delilah:

Wait, really? Just using the stars?

Sam:

Yeah. It's his elegant ancient survival skill. But honestly, the real contrast isn't the sky above, it's the ground they were sleeping on. They weren't just driving across dirt.

Delilah:

Right.

Sam:

They were physically driving across deep geological time.

Delilah:

I wanna pause on that actually because the author's reaction to some of this deep time is pretty funny.

Sam:

Oh, yeah.

Delilah:

Early on they visit the stromatolites and the author basically says they just look like ugly lumpy rocks sitting in the shallow water.

Sam:

That's a pretty common reaction honestly. Yes.

Delilah:

Right. Because I know there's more going on here but I just look at a lumpy rock and well I see a lumpy rock. What is actually happening bi biologically?

Sam:

So the visual banality is totally deceptive. Stromatolites aren't just rocks.

Delilah:

Okay.

Sam:

They are living fossilized structures built by cyanobacteria which is also known as blue green algae.

Delilah:

Wait, so the rocks are alive?

Sam:

Well, you are looking at colonies of microbes that basically bind sedimentary particles together over thousands of years. But more importantly, you trace evolutionary biology back to its roots, these are our oldest living ancestors.

Delilah:

About

Sam:

three and a half billion years ago, these exact types of cyanobacteria were the organisms that first began photosynthesizing. They effectively breathed oxygen into Earth's atmosphere, making all subsequent complex life possible.

Delilah:

So we owe our entire existence to, like, breathing rocks.

Sam:

Pretty much.

Delilah:

That completely reorients how you look at a landscape. And the Outback keeps playing these visual tricks on Look at the pinnacles.

Sam:

Oh, the pinnacles are fascinating.

Delilah:

Right. The travelogue mentions 16 hundreds Dutch explorers sailing past the Western Australian coast, looking through their primitive telescopes, and literally mistaking the pinnacles for a ruined city.

Sam:

And honestly, it's an understandable mistake.

Delilah:

Really?

Sam:

Yeah. The pinnacles are these massive limestone formations jetting out of the yellow sand. They formed from seashell rich sands that blew inland over, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. Okay. And those sands were then compacted by rain, bound by plant roots, and eventually exposed again as the surrounding softer sand just blew away.

Delilah:

Oh, I see.

Sam:

So from a distance, they genuinely look like crumbled towers and ancient streets left by some lost civilization.

Delilah:

But the craziest geological mind bender for me is Wenjana Gorge. Because when I think of a gorge, I picture a river carving through a mountain range over millions of years like the Grand Canyon.

Sam:

Right. Standard erosion.

Delilah:

Yeah. But Wenjana isn't a mountain of stone pushed up by tectonic plates.

Sam:

No, it is an ancient dried up Devonian coral reef.

Delilah:

A coral reef in the middle of the desert.

Sam:

Exactly. Roughly three fifty million years ago, that entire region was completely underwater. The traveler describes walking through this massive gorge, looking closely at the towering walls. And right there, just embedded in the rock, are fossils of trilobites and extinct marine creatures.

Delilah:

Mean, just imagine walking through an emptied out fossilized aquarium.

Sam:

That's a great way to put it.

Delilah:

Right. You're in the middle of the scorching, dusty outback, dodging spiders, and sharp spine effects grass, which by the way, the source says is this spiky, drought resistant grass that literally feels like needles against your legs.

Sam:

Oh, it does. It's brutal.

Delilah:

But you are walking on the bottom of a prehistoric ocean. I always viewed the Outback as this static, dead desert, but it's not. It's a perfectly preserved graveyard of ancient marine life.

Sam:

If we connect this to the bigger picture, these geological features challenge our whole human perception of time.

Delilah:

How so?

Sam:

Well think about your own lifespan, maybe eighty, ninety years if you're lucky.

Delilah:

Yeah, sure.

Sam:

Here, you are confronting a planetary canvas that has violently reinvented itself. An ocean becomes a desert, a reef becomes a mountain range.

Delilah:

It forces

Sam:

you to realize the Earth is incredibly dynamic just on a timescale our brains are barely equipped to comprehend.

Delilah:

But that raises a massive biological problem, doesn't it?

Sam:

How do you mean?

Delilah:

Well, if this land is so ancient and it transitioned from a lush ocean to an extreme environment with like baking heat, sudden floods, and absolute dryness. How does anything living currently survive there? Nature had to pivot hard.

Sam:

Oh it did. And nature in the Outback is nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic.

Delilah:

Pragmatic is a good word for it.

Sam:

That transition from the deep architecture of the land to the living architecture of survival is where we see some incredible evolutionary engineering. The flora and fauna don't just endure the environment, they weaponize it.

Delilah:

The boab trees are a perfect example of that.

Sam:

Yes.

Delilah:

The traveler describes them as looking like upside down trees, as if someone ripped them out of the ground and shoved them back in leaves first leaving the root like branches sticking up into the air.

Sam:

They have a very distinct look.

Delilah:

But they have these massively swollen trunks. Is it true they act like living water towers? I mean how do they actually pull that off without just rotting from the inside?

Sam:

So they do function as water reservoirs but it's not like a hollow pool of water sloshing around inside.

Delilah:

Oh okay.

Sam:

The wood of a boab tree is remarkably spongy and fibrous. During the brief wet season, the tree rapidly absorbs massive quantities of water, sometimes thousands of liters.

Delilah:

Thousands of liters, wow.

Sam:

And it sores it within this fibrous tissue. Then, as the brutal dry season sets in, the tree drops its leaves to prevent moisture loss through transpiration and it slowly draws on its internal reserves.

Delilah:

So if you took an axe to one, you wouldn't get a gushing fountain, you'd just get drenched by this incredibly saturated pulpy wood.

Sam:

Precisely. Though the sheer size of those trunks intersects with some sobering history of the region too.

Delilah:

Right. The travelogue mentions the group visiting the Boab Prison tree near Derby.

Sam:

Yeah. Because the trunks can grow so wide and older trees naturally hollow out in the center over time, colonial police in the 1890s actually used a massive boab as a temporary holding cell.

Delilah:

That's just wow.

Sam:

They locked up to 20 aboriginal prisoners inside the tree at once while transporting them to town.

Delilah:

Just processing the idea of a 1,500 year old tree being repurposed as a holding cell, it's a stark reminder of the colonial footprint layered over this natural history.

Sam:

It really is.

Delilah:

But moving from botany to entomology, we have to talk about the termite mounds.

Sam:

Well, the termite mounds are incredible.

Delilah:

The tour drove past mounds that were five and a half meters high. That's an 18 foot tall skyscraper made of insect, spit, dirt, and dung.

Sam:

And they are tough.

Delilah:

Yeah. I know they're tough, like, totally fireproof and floodproof, but the magnetic termites in Litchfield National Park blew my mind.

Sam:

The magnetic termites are absolute marvels of passive climate control.

Delilah:

Okay, explain this to me, because they construct their mounds like giant flat tombstones, right?

Sam:

Yes, and they align the thin edges perfectly to face magnetic north and south.

Delilah:

See, I get building a structurally sound mound to survive a flood, but I don't understand the magnetic part. If you're a termite, what does a compass heading have to do with not baking to death in the sun?

Sam:

It is entirely about managing thermal mass. By facing the broadsides east and west, wide surfaces catch the gentle warmth of the rising sun in the morning and the setting sun in the evening.

Delilah:

Okay, which they need to stay active.

Sam:

Right. But during the absolute peak heat of midday, when the sun is directly overhead, only the razor thin top edge of the mound is exposed to the direct rays.

Delilah:

Furthermore,

Sam:

they build deep subterranean galleries to access ground moisture. That moisture evaporates and rises through the mound, creating a natural air conditioning system. If they build it off by even a few degrees, the solar radiation overwhelms the system, the hive overheats, and the colony dies.

Delilah:

Here's where it gets really interesting. Think about what your summer electric bill looks like when you run the AC all day.

Sam:

Oh, I know.

Delilah:

Now imagine achieving a perfectly stable internal temperature in a 110 degree desert using nothing spit, dirt, and earth's magnetic field.

Sam:

Gumbling, isn't it?

Delilah:

These tiny insects were operating as master Outback HVAC engineers millions of years before humans were drawing up blueprints for sustainable architecture.

Sam:

They really are master engineers. Yeah. But, you know, that perfection is incredibly fragile.

Delilah:

How so?

Sam:

Because the moment human intervention is introduced, even with the best intentions, it throws a massive wrench into these delicate, finely tuned systems.

Delilah:

Right. Look no further than Monkey Mia.

Sam:

Exactly.

Delilah:

The tour stops there on day three, and it's a classic example of loving nature to death.

Sam:

It really is a cautionary tale.

Delilah:

Decades ago, local fishermen started tossing fish to a wild dolphin in the shallow water. Dolphin The kept coming back, word spread, and suddenly a massive tourist industry was born. People came in droves to hand feed the dolphins.

Sam:

And the travelogue details the ecological fallout. It is a textbook case of destabilization. By providing a constant source of easy free food, the tourists fundamentally altered the dolphins' natural behaviors. The mothers spent all their time begging in the shallows and stopped teaching their calves how to forage. Mortality rates for the calves spiked And some female dolphins grew so unnaturally heavy from the constant nutrient dense handouts that they actually began beaching themselves because they couldn't physically navigate the shallow waters anymore.

Delilah:

That is heartbreaking. Not to mention the stress from the crowds. Exactly. So the Department of Conservation and Land Management, Calmham, had to step in to heavily regulate the area.

Sam:

Which was absolutely necessary.

Delilah:

Yeah. Now park rangers strictly control everything. Tourists aren't allowed to feed them randomly. The rangers only feed specific female dolphins to prevent aggressive male dominance behaviors.

Sam:

Right.

Delilah:

And they strictly limit the fish to only one third of the dolphins daily

Sam:

That one third metric is the critical piece here.

Delilah:

Why is that?

Sam:

It ensures the dolphins still experience hunger. It forces them to leave the shallows, return to the deeper ocean, and hunt naturally, retaining their survival skills and passing them on to their offspring.

Delilah:

It's a necessary fix, but I mean, is this intervention actually fixing the problem or are we just managing a zoo without walls?

Sam:

That's a really valid question.

Delilah:

We trained them to beg destroyed them, and now we are mathematically calculating how much we can feed them without completely ruining their wild instincts.

Sam:

It definitely forces us to examine how we manage wilderness. In modern Western contexts, we often view any destruction of nature as a tragedy to be prevented. We suppress fires, we feed starving animals.

Delilah:

Right. It's our instinct to save things.

Sam:

But what's fascinating here is how the Outback utilizes destruction as an essential mechanism for life.

Delilah:

Yeah, the bushfires.

Sam:

Exactly. Later in the trip, near the Mitchell Plateau, the author experiences a bushfire. He sleeps just 50 meters away from a glowing, smoldering fire line.

Delilah:

The 50 meters?

Sam:

Yeah, waking up to thick smoke and a charred blackened landscape.

Delilah:

Sleeping 50 meters from a bushfire sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. I would be terrified. Why are they just letting it burn?

Sam:

Because this specific ecosystem requires it. Aboriginal people have successfully used controlled burns for millennia as a form of land management.

Delilah:

So it's intentional.

Sam:

Completely. When the fire sweeps through, it clears out the choked dead underbrush. It reduces everything to a carbon rich ash layer.

Delilah:

Which fertilizes the soil, right?

Sam:

Yes, but more importantly, many native Australian plants like certain Banksias and Eucalyptus have serotinous seeds. Serotinous. Means they physically require the intense heat of a fire or the chemical compounds in the smoke to trigger germination.

Delilah:

Oh wow, so they can't reproduce without fire.

Sam:

Exactly, once that fire passes and the first rains arrive, the soil explodes with fresh nutrient dense green growth which then brings the herbivores and the entire food web rushing back. Fire isn't the end of the line, it is the biological reset button.

Delilah:

Destruction as regeneration. It's a harsh cycle but it works flawlessly.

Sam:

It does.

Delilah:

And humans navigating this cycle have had to adapt in some pretty wild ways themselves, particularly with food. The travelog dives into bush tucker and the chemistry of it is just wild.

Sam:

Yeah, green tree ants?

Delilah:

Yes. The green ant tea. They build their nests by weaving leaves together in the tree canopy using larval silk. Right?

Sam:

Right. And if you grab one and touch its abdomen to your tongue, you get this sharp citrusy jolt.

Delilah:

That sounds crazy.

Sam:

Or you can crush a handful of them into hot water to brew a really potent tea.

Delilah:

But it's not just for flavor, is it?

Sam:

No. They are incredibly rich in ascorbic acid vitamin c. It's indigenous medicine and hydration.

Delilah:

That makes sense. And then there's the kangaroo tail dinner. They don't have an oven out there. The guide literally shaves the fur off a kangaroo tail, wraps it in newspaper, and buries it directly into the hot coals of the campfire.

Sam:

It's brilliant.

Delilah:

The paper burns away, baking the meat inside its own skin until it turns into this tender, gelatinous meal. You eat what the land provides, exactly how it demands to be cooked.

Sam:

And that intimacy with the harshness of the land, whether you are foraging for ants or surviving a bushfire, it forges incredible narratives.

Delilah:

Yep.

Sam:

The landscape dictates the human story.

Delilah:

Definitely.

Sam:

We see this vividly at Tunnel Creek with the historical account of Jandamar.

Delilah:

Jandamar's story is so gripping. The text notes he was an aboriginal man who initially worked as a tracker for the colonial police in the 1890s. The colonial forces were completely out their depth in the outback. They didn't know the terrain, they didn't know the water sources, so they heavily relied on trackers like him.

Sam:

But there was a breaking point.

Delilah:

Right. After witnessing the treatment of his people, Jandamara turned his weapon on the police, became a fugitive, and led an armed resistance.

Sam:

And what makes his resistance so deeply tied to the Outback is how he utilized the landscape tactically.

Delilah:

The caves. Right.

Sam:

Exactly. He hid in the dark, subterranean, water filled crevasses of Tunnel Creek for over two years.

Delilah:

Over two years in a dark flooded cave.

Sam:

He survived there with a woman until in a complex turn of events, the woman's husband led the police to the hideout. He was wounded, escaped into the escarpments, but was eventually tracked down. Wow. The environment was his ultimate fortress until the very end.

Delilah:

Walking through that cave in waist deep water, the traveler talks about feeling the literal weight of that history pressing down.

Sam:

I can only imagine.

Delilah:

But the human footprint in the Kimberley region goes back so much further than the eighteen nineties. At the Mitchell Plateau, they hike to see the Bradshaw cave paintings, also known as Gwai'an Gwai'an.

Sam:

Yes. Those are phenomenal.

Delilah:

And these aren't just stick figures. They are highly detailed elongated figures adorned with tassels and headdresses appearing to swim or fly across the rock face.

Sam:

The dating of these paintings is what truly staggers the mind. Utilizing advanced techniques like optically stimulated luminescence on the wasp nests built over the art, scientists have dated some of these figures to be over 17,000 years old.

Delilah:

17,000 years.

Sam:

Yes, the original artist used iron oxide pigments that essentially bonded with the rock at a molecular level. That's what allowed them to withstand 17 millennia of extreme monsoons, baking sun, and bushfires.

Delilah:

Just sitting there exposed to the elements and the travelogue beautifully pairs that ancient permanent art with a moment of totally ephemeral modern art.

Sam:

Oh, the campfire story.

Delilah:

Yeah. One night around the campfire, Eddie, the second bus driver, pulls out a digeridoo. He doesn't just play a rhythm. He tells a story the kangaroo hunt entirely through sound. No words.

Sam:

The acoustic mimicry there is extraordinary. Through circular breathing and vocalizations into the instrument, he replicates the distant howl of dingoes. The stealthy footsteps of the hunter in the brush, the sharp percussive thwack of the boomerang, the frantic thumping of the kangaroo scattering, and the final strike.

Delilah:

It's basically an auditory cinema played in the pitch black under those upside down stars.

Sam:

It creates this incredible sense of camaraderie.

Delilah:

Which, let's be honest, you desperately need out there because the Outback is going to test your logistics. The massive green bus was a constant anxiety inducing character in this story.

Sam:

Oh, for sure. It highlights the vulnerabilities of modern mechanics in an ancient landscape.

Delilah:

Definitely.

Sam:

The author details the moment in Carajini National Park when the rear differential, that's the gear mechanism that allows the wheels to rotate at different speeds when turning begins making a grinding fatal sound.

Delilah:

That is the last sound you want to hear out there.

Sam:

It forces the group to hike kilometers through the dust while the guide attempts a bush mechanic fix. And later a blown gasket causes a massive coolant leak.

Delilah:

Oh man, the coolant leak meaning they have to stop every hour to manually pour water into the radiator just to stop the engine block from melting.

Sam:

Exactly. But that mechanical failure is exactly what triggers Outback Karma.

Delilah:

Right. When that differential broke, it was two strangers, guys. The tour guide had randomly helped navigate a difficult gorge the day before who happened to drive past. They reached into their own gear, handed over a spare chain to rig the broken part, and just drove off.

Sam:

That single act of stranger to stranger reliance basically saved the nineteen day trip.

Delilah:

It really did. You can have the biggest, toughest four wheel drive on the continent, but out there you are still entirely at the mercy of the elements and the kindness of whoever comes down the dirt road behind you.

Sam:

Absolutely.

Delilah:

So what does this all mean? We've covered thousands of kilometers and millions of years of history. From the microscopic oxygen breathing stromatolites, to the precise magnetic architecture of the termites, to Aboriginal peoples leveraging fire to reset the biological clock.

Sam:

It means the Outback is the ultimate master class in adaptation. Everything that survives in that landscape does so because it has adapted perfectly to its limitations. It doesn't fight the environment, it works within the rigorous rules the environment sets. And for you, the listener, living in a modern world characterized by climate control, instant gratification, and digital overload, there is a profound lesson here.

Delilah:

Ancient house.

Sam:

The Outback teaches the absolute necessity of patience and resilience. It demands that we respect ecological and cultural systems that are vastly older and wiser than we are.

Delilah:

Which brings us to one final lingering thought for you to ponder.

Sam:

The aboriginal people left cave paintings using iron oxide that bonded with the rock, ensuring their deep sustainable connection to this landscape endured for seventeen thousand years.

Delilah:

Yeah.

Sam:

We've seen how perfectly the Outback preserves the past, whether it's fossilized Devonian coral reefs or ancient art, given our modern reliance on heavy machinery, paved highways, and constant environmental intervention.

Delilah:

Dirt?

Sam:

Exactly. And when explorers walk through that same landscape thousands of years from now digging through our fossils, what will they think of us?

Dave Bunyard:

You can get the two fifty page downloadable photo book on etsy.com. Just search for Earth Drifting Australia. This has been another episode from Life at 100MHz. This is Dave Bunyard. Thanks for listening.