The Gulf Of Carpentaria

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32382, 22 August 1970, Page 4

The Gulf Of Carpentaria

The Incredible Gulf. By David Baird. Rigby. 196 pp. Illustrated with photographs. This book has everything—facts and figures, history and an assessment of the future, anecdotes and characters, an apparently fair judgment on both “the Aborigines” and “the American Investment” questions everything a traveller’s tale must have at least to get started, but it fails to propel the reader into the excitement and challenge of the revolution that is daily gaining momentum around the Gulf of Carpentaria. Plainly, David Baird is familiar with the Australian North, but he writes always as a visitor, without commitment. A dutiful journalist, he gathers information and regurgitates it, but his book is easily put down. Although so much is happening there right now and it is as close, geographically, as such an economic revolution is likely to be,' there is no compulsion to read on. It is more difficult to fire the imagination with the adventure of a planned company town than with the heroics of a gold rush, yet for anyone writing about the North today this is the stuff of romance: bauxite, uranium, pearl culture, buffalo meat for pet food, prawns, and farming that needs $500,000 as a starter even if the land is a gift. The ’ Chips Raffertys and the crocodile shooters are part of Australian history now, along with Flinders and Leichhardt. The Flying Doctor and the Original Australians remain, both updated, yet retaining something of their mystique. However, the Aborigines are being thrust forward pell-mell, for good or ill. Mr Baird reports that Government settlements and mission stations are struggling to teach them technical skills; that the Government will put cash from mineral royalties into a trust fund for the general benefit of Aborigines, but he questions what they

stand to gain. As yet, the American cattlemen and Comalco, the buffalo hunters and the prawn trawler-men are “outsiders in another people’s territory” but, finally coming to the end of Mr Baird’s book, one realises the reversal is not only inevitable but imminent. Everything is “x. 0.5. in the Gulf of Carpentaria: distances, property holdings, wages, investment, profit, and the emptiness of the land. Brunette Downs (one of the King,Ranch Pastoral Company properties) is 4730 square miles in area (it has been transformed in the 1960 s with American dollars, by the million). A prawn trawler can bring in a day’s catch worth $l5OO. A detour can involve 800 bone-jarring miles. At Weipa in 1968 Comalco’s Bauxite output soared to four million tons and seven millions became the immediate plan, yet as Mr Baird was told “we’ve hardly scratched what is here.” And a complete town, Mary Kathleen, is being kept on ice in anticipation of a second uranium boom. A country that does nothing unless to the extreme does not fit into a compact book of carefully garnered facts. David Baird gives the information his book would be a valuable guide for anyone considering emigrating to', the Gulf, but for stay-at-home connoisseurs of adventure it does not entirely live up to the title. An irritation is the map which, by contrast with the text, is singularly lacking in information. The author travelled a good deal by road, or at least by land, but the route is not marked. He refers to the 270-mile beef road, built at a cost of $7,700,000 between Julia Creek and Normantown, but it is not shown. Without roads, or tracks, and without many of the place-names, the map gives no . .idea of a distance between the major settlements that are mentioned in the text.