Aliens Yield

This is a strange paradise. The ephemeral and the permanent meet in a messy relationship of desert ecology and european habitation. Geometry and regularity are alien installations within a dominating amorphous landscape. 

Like every habitation on this planet, Lake Tandou and the town of Menindee, is controlled by water. The town grows with population and optimisms with the news of the big wet and desperation sets in when the river runs dry.  The seasonal floods from the north flow out of the mountains, along the Darling, and deep into the Australian desert. They pass through the Menindee lakes where a few hundred people live. These lakes are old depressions at the bottom of an ancient inland Cretaceous sea and 150 million years ago pilosaurs and other giant monsters swam the waters. Now, the geomorphic remnants of this sea floor are a chain of ephemeral salt pan lakes with the scars of a thousand billabongs along its edges.

Pilosaur

Like a little Nile, the river is a blue vein of life, and settlements extending along its length, drawing on water for irrigation. The water has also always brought ecology and biodiversity to intricate desert landscape. It is an oasis for migratory birds moving through to nesting grounds further south. But unlike the Nile this is a transient oasis, with a unpredictability abject to permanent inhabitants. Unlike the Nile these rivers, that disappear like ghosts into the desert, have never held a a sprawling powerful metropolis, there is no monumental architecture or lost treasured tombs. The greatest structures to be found are the pyramids of shellfish, the middens from old campsites along the edge of the old lakes where tribes once fished before the last ice age.

Continually farmed since the end of the Pleistocene; this landscape is littered with the history of the oldest civilisation on the planet. Aborigines have always had a dynamic relationship with Tandou. They are the only civilisation to see the climatic oscillations from the Late Pleistocene to the latest anthropogenic global warming. 43,000 years ago they came and hunted in a savannah landscape with fresh water and forest abound. 20,000 years ago at the height of glaciation aridity the people retreated, only a few were left living off a few natural springs. The Tandou man would have died at this oasis, fishing for yabbies and frogs.

15,000 year old skull found at lake Tandou next to a shellfish midden

In his paper, Islands in the Interior: A Model for the Colonization of Australia's Arid Zone, Peter Veth brings into question the continual Aboriginal settlement since the Late Pleistocene. Unlike other archaeologists, he proposes that there was large fluctuations in arid populations throughout the climatic oscillations of the past 40,000 years. Looking at Australia's history at this macro-chronological scale we see a civilisation that is not permanent, that retreats to 'refuges', ridge lines and gorge systems, during the driest times. We also see a civilisation that takes thousands of years to fashion the right human economy, tools, trading techniques and customs to adapt to arid climates. 

Compared to the slow maturation of aboriginal desert culture over the last 5000-3000 years the colonisation and cultural affinity of Europeans to the arid interior has been lightning pace. Taking Lake Tandou as evidence, the use of European farming practices, of yearly cyclical harvests creates a strange tension between the farmer's dream of regularity and the reality of nearly unpredictable antipodean weather events. Lake Tandou is neither desert nor permanent oasis. This is a river system with a cyclical ebbs and flows over decades.The stream may slow to a small trickle, infested with blue green algae and dried fish carcasses and then a few years later surge with a mighty flood capable espousing so much water that it can drop world sea levels and bring an explosion of life and optimism into small communities and bring a menagerie of animal life deep in the Australian desert.

Lake Tandou

Lake Tandou cotton irrigation

Irrigation channel, Menindee lakes

This is a place defined by impermanence. It is a soft place where memories of thousands of pelicans diving into a swarming inland sea of fish is just a story, told down the pub, or over the dying embers of a campfire. This is where geography and numerics bend, where GPS and satellites crack under the brevity and history of this ancient inland ocean.