Mega-spiders, crocs and a wild bull. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea

Our pilot lowered his chopper tentatively between red cliffs, settled it on a shelf at the confluence of two rivers, jumped out and started filming. Though he’d flown for years in the Kimberley, he’d never been to this most stupendous version of nowhere. At the last, he swung his camera and filmed us, and I recalled that grainy footage of Robert Falcon Scott in the howling white, waving at a photographer before disappearing entirely. Then he flew away, taking the world we knew.

Carrying heavy packs, four of us set off downriver. I was whistling, I think.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

Along the rivers, we scrambled over bus-sized boulders, and when these cleared we were tangled in head-high cane grass and sliced by pandanus palms that rained hand-sized spiders. Because of crocodiles we couldn’t swim through the deep pools, so we had to climb out of the gorges to the escarpment, up vicious hierarchies of rock while entwined in vines and rained on by green ants, sidestepping serpents.

On the plateau we walked over broken stone covered with spinifex – placing each foot was an act of faith. We had many falls, each time feeling for breaks and sprains, and extolling our luck with repetitious vulgarities.

Miscalculating the difficulty of the climb up from the Moran River, across the top and down to the Roe River, we had to camp on the plateau without water. We couldn’t go further. We were used up.

At dusk, as we lay spent in the sand, a wild bull broke from the scrub, tossing its head, snorting, prancing combatively towards us. Gus took up his 30-06 and shot it between the eyes and it dropped hard and then stood up and shook its head and wandered into the bush. He handed me the rifle. “You’ll have to fix this. My knee’s buggered.”

I hadn’t fired a gun since I was a teenager, when (call me “anachronism”) I was the shooting captain at school. Suddenly I was a press-ganged Hemingway, stalking a wounded bull with a high-powered rifle. Its caramel hide appeared and vanished piecemeal through the pandanus, circling me at 60 metres. I looked for any tree I might climb when it came for me, but I’m no longer that monkey. I was loud through the dry fronds and it turned to me, starting to advance, and I hit it behind the ear and it collapsed like a sabotaged bridge, leaving me to empty a bucket of adrenaline with my thimble of profanity.

That night, when I slept, I dreamt of water, dying for want of it, absorbed by thirst. At midday the next day we reached the bank of the Roe and dropped to our knees and sucked at that river like cavalry horses.

Indigenous art decorates the gorges. Some never seen by white folk, I guess. Men in headdresses dancing. Gwion Gwion art painted over by later Wandjina people. At the end of the last ice age, the sea rose 140 metres and the people who lived on what is now the north-west shelf were pushed hundreds of kilometres south towards the Kimberley, entering the territory of the tribes that lived there.

The rock art from that period becomes more warlike – new mobs pressing in, old mobs hanging on, the paintings edge towards propaganda: this is our land and we are fierce beyond measure, stay away.

If you want to see yourself, you need isolation as a mirror.

Some people theorise that the Gwion Gwion paintings were done by a people that preceded Indigenous Australians and disappeared with their arrival. That theory, if nothing else, is a reminder that civilisations fall.

It was the hardest walking any of us had ever done. We’d abandoned normality, our easy lives – pizza delivery, songs on devices, beds and hot water, cop shows and cafes – to visit this country that neither roads nor modern Australia have reached. But if you want to see yourself, you need isolation as a mirror.

We all lost skin. We were bitten and burnt and fatigued beyond safe measure and shed kilos pushing blindly through a variety of beautiful nowheres.

We were too old to do it – and did it. And I’d be there again if I could, sitting on a stone mantel overlooking a clear stream, whisky in hand, watching fish hang languid atop their shadows and freshwater crocs poised in runnels like fountain statuary. And painted on the rock, as if on Keats’ Grecian urn, Gwions dressed to the nines and dancing to unheard melodies, foster children of silence and slow time.