Searching for the First Australians

It's been rough - this quest for Australian Aboriginal cultural encounters.  3.5 weeks later, and I've seen hardly hide nor hair of them. It's even hard to locate souvenir shops that sell hand-made indigenous crafts.  What a contrast to the thousands upon thousands of shops in the U.S. where one can so easily find a Native American dream-catcher, native-style drum, moccasins, or papoose doll!

I think I headed the wrong direction in this quest, for one thing:  I drove kilometers and kilometers and kilometers west into the Outback,  rather than north along the coast toward Torres Straight (a major "reservation" of sorts in the northeast corner of Queensland). The Outback I experienced was much like Old West, America - ranging cattle, O Pioneers! windmills, even tumbleweeds, and the obligatory outlaws frequenting the hotel pubs (Australian for "saloon").  (I even encountered a REALLY shady character in in an outpost town called Longreach - so dodgy, I cut my time in the Outback to an absolute minimum and immediately headed back toward the more familiar coast!) The Aboriginals were herded from of the Outback years and years ago, so the "whitefellas" could begin destroying the land with their mining practices, cattle, sheep, rabbits, camels! (domestic and feral), wild pigs, cane toads, cats and other imported pests and get-rich-quick schemes.  ("Fun" facts - Australia's feral camels, first brought in from Asia to settle and develop the Outback, now number more than 1 million, with pop. growing 10% each year - they are out-competing the domestic cattle! Backfire!)  This sitch-e-a-shun sound familiar, Americans?

4000 road kilometers (2400 miles) into Australia, and I have barely scratched the surface of this massive, largely uncharted continent; not to mention discovered much of its immense amounts of unique and ancient human cultures, flora and fauna. It is actually quite overwhelming to be here with so little time to explore it all. 

Let’s roll out some fun number facts, boys and girls (says Nerdy (and proud of it!) Ness):  

The Continental United States and Australia are about the same size in land mass (the lower 48 being 178,000 square miles larger – subtract California from the land mass equation). 

However, the population of Australia is only 23 million.  The state of New York alone has about as many citizens.  (California has 1.7 times more residents than the entire population of the entire country of Australia!)  And ALMOST ALL of these AU residents live in 5 major cities (with pop. greater than 1 million) - all but one (Perth) are on the East Coast, where almost all the rain falls. Like right now in Brisbane - it is absolutely raining AND HAILING [feral] cats and dingos at this very moment ... I get the picture now why these cities flood as they do!  See figure below:

(The pop. stats of this figure are off, but the pop. density is my point here. All the people are in a few isolated little pockets of a huge country.)

Compare trying to get a decent feel for this large, mostly impenetrable-via-a-tiny-rental-car country (with its fair share of dangerous creatures - e.g. outlaws) in only 3.5 weeks (and not much spare change in my pockets); to a long 3 months in NZ, a country almost exactly the same size - and population - of Colorado. Get my drift about feeling overwhelmed?

But hey, I met some kangaroos, kookaburras, a few awesome Ozzies, dingos, emus, my first monotreme (an echidna), camels, an Ozzie outlaw, didgeridoos, Aboriginal rock art, a Captain Cook impersonator and a replica of his Endeavour, the Great Barrier Reef, etc..... 

Perhaps a future trip to this land Down Under to specifically seek these anthropological experiences with the Aboriginals (who have been here for 60,000 years) shall go on my bucket list. Certainly my time here has inspired me to read much, much more about the First Australians.  In the meanwhile, I'll 35th birthday party it up with Brisbane bud Sunny & crew on my 2nd-to-last night in Oz!

This week's photos:  HERE THEY ARE!