|
Home | Our History | 2009 Itinerary | Our Supporters | Contact & Links Home > 2007 & 2008 Expeditions > 2007 Expedition |
| Our inaugural
expedition, the 25-day Arid Rivers Research Expedition was conducted in June/July 2007,
traversing a major section of the Kallakoopah Creek in the southern Simpson Desert of
South Australia. The expedition was a resounding success, collecting over 400 plant
specimens, recording 45 bird species and discovering numerous megafauna fossils. A full
report of the expedition will be released shortly. Below are selected photographs from
this wonderful journey. |
"I though, together with a group of researchers, was on foot, walking beside a camel train, in a much less fashionable corner of the Simpson: the southern fringe, well below Poeppel Corner. This stretch of the desert has pale, whitish dunes and a subtle, shifting temperament. It is traversed by the wide, undulating sand bed of the Kallakoopah Creek and, when rain comes down from the channel country, it turns into an ephemeral saline wetland, full of birds and flowers. The night-time shadows of the coolibah trees, the sound of the grasswrens, the rasp of the sand on one's skin: how elusive they are and how much the sense of being in such places is bound up with the going, and the consciousness that one's time there is dying once it starts. I found walking, rather than driving at speed, and walking beside animals, transformed much about my sense of the country. It read differently, and walking in company, even if we were mostly silent, was, at times, a sharp intensifier of the experience of place. The Simpson feels, to those who pass through it, like a space of nature; it has not been wholly fire-changed. It is very much a maverick among Australian deserts: the dunes, with their metronomic north-northwest alignment, are bizarrely regular; it is less vegetation-covered than the great deserts of the west, it borders the adamantine plain of gibbers once known as Sturt's stony desert; and it has a different spirit." This is an extract from 'Mapping our imagination' by author & journalist Nicolas Rothwell who accompanied the expedition |
| 2007 Expedition Research Team Staff from the Biological Survey and Monitoring section, South Australia Department for Environment and Heritage
Dr Mike Smith,
Senior Research Fellow (Archaeology), click here to hear Dr Smith's audio blogs from the journey
|
Walking alongside the Kallakoopah Creek |
Labelling the mornings plant and dingo skull collection |
Archaeologist, Dr Mike Smith examines the fossilised teeth from the upper jaw of a Diprotodon |
Kallakoopah landscape |
Sunset colours on a small claypan |
Checking the traps |
Recent heavy rain had produced prolific plant growth and kept sections of the creek nearly full of (salty) water |
Ducks on the Kallakoopah Creek - a rare sight |
|
Dr Mike Smith inspecting fossilised bone fragments |
Home | Our History | 2009 Itinerary | Our Supporters | Contact & Links |
