Wheels Across Australia

[Music] this picture shows me Arman Dennis and my wife Mya back in Australia after our bird of paradise expedition to Central New Guinea we plan another ambitious journey across Australia from Adelaide on the southern coast through the central desert to Darwin on the tropical coast of the north the equipment Dodge of course a good truck with its three ton load of tents camping gear Food Supplies cameras and film a power wagon the best vehicle for desert and jungle and a standard sedan for Speed and comfort all veterans of our journey to Cape York and of our film land of the kangaroo soon we are on our way through the present suburbs of Adelaide Southern Australia has gracious ways of living beautiful homes lovely Gardens the gorgeous Blooms of the Christmas Bush the many shades of gum blossoms are new to us even while we photograph these beautiful flowers the honey eater appears and we get our first bird pictures in a brief 30 minutes how could we show you more than a few aspects of Australia we shall skip the great busy cities The Smiling Countryside the rich farmlands of the South let us make our first stop at a roadside Pond one of thousands swarming with unfamiliar Wildlife for ours is to be a naturalist journey through a country which is a naturalist's paradise with 20-in lenses we photograph the shy Lily Hoppers these Lively birds feed on the insects and the many forms of life which cling to the stems and leaves of the water lies they have very large feet out of all proportion to their size to enable them to run saf ly on the surface of the leaves [Music] Australia has immensely rich and buied bird life birds of all sizes shapes and colors I can only give you a glimpse of a few among them some of the most beautiful finches and the richest collection in the world of parakeet lauret and parrots from the commonest and plainest to the rarest and gaudiest [Music] a billabong the typical water hole of the Outback territories swarm with [Applause] Wildlife the air above us is never empty it is filled with the flight of birds of many species and colors White Sulfur crested cockos and corellas nowhere except in Australia do you see by the thousands exotic birds a single specimen of which would be in this country a high-priced rarity [Music] another exceedingly common and yet beautiful parrot the pink and greay gar sometimes seen in flocks of [Music] hundreds but here is the rarest of sites the largest and most spectacular of the katus the Australian [Music] black we have caught a glimpse of a Blue Mountain parrot Mya's sharp eyes have seen a baby bird fallen from the nest and helpless one more addition to our growing collection of [Music] pet more than once from our hide we have seen emu the Australian counterpart of the African ostrich he has the same malevolent baleful eyes but quite different vestigial Wings useless for flight of course and three toes on each foot instead of the ostrich's two [Music] another find I thought it was a porcupine digging in at the foot of a stump but it turned out to be one of Australia's most exotic and celebrated freaks an Aida a living fossil a mammal which suckles its young as a mammal should but which lays eggs the akna is also called a spiny antier spiny you can see why for its defense it just rolls [Music] up an eater yes its long pointed snout and fantastically elongated and agile tongue are for chasing ants in anthills but we must introduce you to the most lovable of our Australian pets a baby kangaroo much too young to be left without a mother we found him shivering and lost after a torrential rainstorm he took red to Mika as a foster mother and in a few days was weaned and learning to feed himself Australians call baby kangaroos and baby wallabies Joys we had photographed many wild Kangaroos and we knew that a joey spends most of his time in his mother's pouch and this for many months our problem was to supply our little pet with a substitute for his mother's pouch we imagined an apron with a big pocket in front the little Joey learned to answer to his name jumpy jumpy to run or rather jump to his foster mother and to climb into his pocket [Music] home coily curled up in his pocket he was no very heavy burden to carry about and no trouble [Music] at first he would not climb into the pocket unless Mya was actually wearing the apron later he recognized the apron as his home he dived in head first and curled up on his back in the exact way in which Joy curl up in their mother's pouch the central country increasingly parched and desolate often for many miles cursed with dust we drive in choking clouds of fine abrasive powder it penetrates our baggage our clothes even the mechanism of our precious cameras and sound recorders daily the temperature exceeds 110° and the extreme dryness of the air causes a most painful irritation of the [Music] throat we are entering the gibber country a flat Wilderness of red sand gravel and stone this is the [Music] desert near the water holes long ago dried up we pass many gaunt carcasses of the victims of thirst there is no surface water left only occasional salt pans the FAA has become that typical of the desert a skink a lizard unchanged since 50 million years this is a relic of Australia's ancient past truly a living fossil two male frilled lizards so wholly absorbed in mutual Defiance and combat that our arrival at first is not even noticed my shadow disturbs them one runs off skipping on two legs the characteristic gate of these frilled lizards the other is unafraid and full of fight but even the courage of a frilled lizard has its [Music] limits no it's not a snake it is the Australian long neck turtle another of the local freaks [Music] at last the long desert Crossing is behind us we reach green trees and living things the Fantastic Landscapes I have longed to see since first I read of the early explorers of the McDonald range and of Simpsons Gap there are the huge monolithic domes the highest mount alga towering 1800 ft above the [Music] plains within hours now we must arrive at the most spectacular Wonder of Australia air as rock and most of the hardships of the Transcontinental Journey will be behind us the first involuntary stop of our journey is within sight of our long for objective Air's Rock a bushel of seeds and dry grass clogging up the radiator with today's temperature of 116 in the shade it has been temporarily too months much for the cooling system what a tremendous impression Air's Rock makes a single lump of solid Stone over 2 mil long containing 4 billion tons of rock in the center of one of the most inaccessible areas on the earth its walls Rising sheer out of the Plains 1100 unclimbable feet into the sky we worked for several weeks in Australia with the wild Aborigines the very primitive people said by anthropologists to be the most primitive people left on Earth who still inhabit remote areas of the [Music] Interior two [ __ ] hun ERS as they would be called in Australia led us running ahead of the Power Wagon much too afraid of it to accept a ride we followed them for the better part of a day to where their tribe was temporarily hunting and living we made friends with them through the children as we always do with primitive peoples they were very shy at first and I made little progress but Mika has a great gift very valuable to me of ingratiating herself with children and their mothers she soon found herself invited to a turtle Feast yes the piesta resistance was to be one of the long neck turtles a frequent item of aborigin fair Mika found the going hard and the conversation stilted handicapped by the fact that she and her hostesses had not a word of language in common as to the cooking of the turtle it was dressed in a complicated manner before being covered with hot ashes and baked Mika wrote it all down in her diary the appetizing odors grab gradually loosened tongues and conversation became General before the turtle was fairly I watched one of our Hunters patiently shaping a boomerang a slow job of wearing away the hard wood scraping off little shavings with the edge of a shell which did not seem to be any too sharp mystery how the [ __ ] knows the exact shape which will make for the most efficient throw and cause the weapon to return to the thrower [Music] Mika is watching an old lady make some sort of a bag or a net she makes the twine by Rolling fibers together on her skinny old leg and she forms stitches quite skillfully and evenly without a guiding tool of any sort this bag was the most complicated object we ever saw the abow make one old man is having his Shaggy mop of hair trimmed by singing with a glowing bamboo coal he also gets a shave notice no brush no soap and no [Music] anesthetic most of the younger men are away hunting the younger women collecting food only the less active older people are here talking telling stories of the past in the only written language they have the language of pictures drawn in ashes or the sand the only tools the abos have are of stone crude rocks fastened with rosin to a wooden handle almost the only material they use is the soft bark of the dazzling white paper bark trees which they use as dishes and as trays some of the boys have gone hunting on their own and are now beginning to return this one with a speared River crocodile almost as big as himself two proud little kids with a wonderful bag each a flying fox the big fruit eating bats are prized among the abos as great Delicacies and the little boys have done well soon a third flying fox is brought in the older boys grab them and start a merry around full of High Spirits but it's not long before the bats also are roasting in the ashes [Music] the kids have lost their shyness now they turn out to be quiet Pleasant and with instinctive good [Music] manners a party of older boys is practicing spear throwing already showing considerable skill and ACC accuracy they have a WABE on the fire which one of them is speared the WABE game this boy is the wabby the others play the part of the beaters and the hunters many of the boys games are reenactments of hunting [Applause] [Music] scenes but for their favorite game the boys work hard constructing a slide of slippery blue clay down the bank of the bbong oh [Music] the next day I accompany the men on a WABE hunt the men are cutting new Trail but there is no hesitancy we go some seven miles then the hunters scatter some build crude blinds of branches Wes appear indeed to be plentiful [Music] [Applause] [Music] four wbes is the bag of the party I have followed others have gone spear fishing but have not been very successful still others have gone after balgas we see them return Laden with the heavy Birds a small stick on a bed of dry wabby dung finely powdered another stick pointed the point in a tiny dent now with great effort and pressure the upright stick is revolved rapidly I am seeing fire made native Australian [Music] fashion for a long time nothing seems to happen but the operator is visibly getting very hot at last a little smoke is seen the wood has blackened a spark is there the spark is blown to a glowe to a flame [Music] I go back to join Mika she has gone with the young girls and the children to a clear deep bong the kids are having a wonderful time [Music] the girls are all good swimmers and full of fun they want Mika to join them but Mika wants them to show me a sort of rhythmic splashing they do a sort of dance in the water beating regular time oh [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the Aborigines of Australia may be the most primitive people left on Earth we found them intelligent quick full of humor and most Pleasant to get along with in most of Australia of course they have become civilized and progress greatly under painstaking government guidance and assistance but the most primitive of those we met were not the least [Applause] likable watch these girls playing the game of cat's cradles a game by the way which seems to be known and to be played in amazing similar fashion by all the Primitive peoples on Earth from the eskimos of the far north to the bantos of central Africa or the abos of Australia see these eager serious faces intent sensitive deeply human we felt no sense of foreignness at all with these people we greatly enjoyed the abos and we greatly liked them we hated to leave them and I like to think that they also remember kindly their visitors from the outside world quite a few months have passed and our little jumpy is becoming a problem child [Music] jumpy has a devouring curiosity about everybody's breakfast [Music] but jumpy sneaks back to the table after everybody has left no that is not Jumpy's conscience giving him the reproachful look jumpy and dingo are inseparable [Music] Playmates from our camp we looked over an impenetrable Mangrove swamp far out a colony of thousands of the big flying foxes but our most powerful lenses could not give us the close pictures of them which I wanted via and I decided to make the attempt to Cross the Swamp I remember this experience as one of the worst in my life the thick kneee slimy mud alive with leeches and insects the bruising Tangled Roots seeming to reach out from all sides unyielded building and over each one of which we had painfully to struggle the stifling heat heavy steamy like a hot house the Swarms of mosquitoes and sandflies and the stench the stench of rotting vegetation mixed with the inable musky stench of the thousands of the giant [Music] bats when at last we reached a clearing where the camera could be set up we were near exhaustion but there were our bats climbing fluttering squabbling turning upon us their intelligent black eyes scratching their membranous wings and their furry yellow mantles with their uncanny claws back from Australia seeing for the first time the pictures made during the trip as I watched our Australian Adventure unfold again before us on the screen I kept waiting for these pictures of the flying foxes they would have to be good to make me forget that Eerie Mangrove swamp well here they are and I shall leave you to be the judge 2 Days Later almost unexpectedly we came to a road and around the bend the sea we had completed our trans Australian Journey la [Music]