Stone Country - an overnight bushwalking adventure in Gundabooka National Park, NSW

This story is a reminder to never underestimate the small walks. The shortest off-track sortie can reap great rewards (I've said this before, haven't I). Our night on the red cliffs of Gunderbooka, dazzled by the earth's curvature, awoken by the strange visitations of water birds and humbled by the smallness of our place in nature, taught this to me again.

There is a walking track up Mt Gunderbooka. It is 5.7km return and climbs rocky terrain via the ranges north-west spur, to the summit which sits 500m above sea level and about 300m above the surrounding plains. The track leaves from Bennetts Gorge picnic area, within Gundabooka National Park.

Half a kilometre from the carpark, Caz is walking behind me, taking photos, and I turn around to see how far behind he is. We have climbed just enough to be above the height of the mulga trees that dominate the landscape. But, here, the ground is covered in a low, lime-coloured shrub. The view, from this tiniest of rises, takes me by surprise. I can suddenly see for miles – hundreds of them it seems. A vast forest of mulga is laid out before me. It is ridiculously flat and it stretches away beyind my imagination.  

This astounding woodland is filled with wonderful birds – red-capped robins, hooded robins, mulga parrots, mallee ringnecks, rufous whistlers, variegated wrens, wedgetail eagles, white-plumed honeyeaters. All of which I have seen in the short time it took me to have breakfast and prepare for our walk. In fact, at breakfast, there was little else but birds and mulga to see. The flatness of the plains, the canopy of trees, all work to bring the horizon, at ground level, to just a few metres. The disorientating effect of this closed-in, sameness of scenery, sparks something in my memory. Frank Moorhouse, the esteemed Australian author, here, in this forest: heat stressed, confused, in serious trouble and, for the first time in his long off-track walking life, setting off his EPIRB without realising he was but 50m from the road. 

The story of his doomed walk appeared in the literary journal Griffith Review. He writes: "I noted that I felt 'death impending' – I actually wrote these words down...it was as if the emergency mind was saying this is what happens next, beginning a preview. It didn't say prepare yourself to die – what is there to prepare?"

It's a great read, and a lucky escape. But, we are not following Moorehouse's route, although Caz and I, at separate moments, come to the same conclusion. His walk from Dry Tank Camping Area, out and onto the Gunderbooka Range, would be an admirable multi-day adventure. Provided you could find water, which Moorhouse did, it could be done as a through walk with a car shuttle, or as a loop walk, or as an out-and-back exploration with a base camp. Navigating on the mountain is easy. The hills are open and visibility good. It is the only high point for many kilometres. Every early Australian explorer that passed this way climbed Gunderbooka to get their bearings. 

It is not a big range, about thirty-five kilometres end to end, with a curving rim along its northern circumference. However, the mystery of this mountain, and the difficulty in walking through this landscape, is the vast plains that surround us. 

On the long drive to the car park to begin this walk, you barely catch a glimpse of the mountain. From down in the forest you cannot see the peak.  The flatness, the mulga, is all encompassing. Only at the very foot of the mountain does the Gunderbooka Range reveal itself. 

It is a steady climb to the top, steep in parts, but short. There is also the scent of callitris (cypress pine) in the air as we take a short zig-zag through a rocky band to the top of the ridge. Views to the south and west show the mulga forest, flat and unbroken, is equally vast in all directions. We are on a ship of rock in a sea of green. 

As we continue walking towards the summit, a tiny squeaking sound gets louder and closer. I think maybe it is a type of quail-thrush or more likely, a cricket. It is really close and so I stop, turn to Caz to comment and am eye to eye with a delicate dome nest made of grass and spider webs, wedged in the upper branches of a small cypress pine. In the nest are two tiny chicks, with spiked hairdos and yellow hungry mouths squeaking and begging for food. 

There is a final, short steep section to the Gunderbooka summit cairn where we barely stop. We continue walking east along the top of the mountain. We spend the afternoon exploring the peak, taking in views south to Mt Grenfell and east to Mt Oxley and in between is just flat, flat mulga forest. There is no sign of any town, or roads, or rivers. It is like a reverse of the morning. From the roads you cannot see the peak. From the peak, you cannot see the roads. I cannot even discern the mighty Darling River, which lies to the west. There is one white building visible below and that's it. We watch vehicles arriving into the national park and can only track their progress by their dust plumes, which rise like a smoke signal through the forest. 

Eventually we drop over the north facing cliff lines and find a shady cypress pine with a rock veranda flat enough for us to eat lunch and while away the afternoon heat. The expanse of plains is so uniform, we can discern the subtle curvature of the earth and after sunset the shaded colours of the landscape create a disconcerting optical effect. The plains turn a deep purple and the western horizon is burnt orange which lightens to a soft yellow north and south. It feels as if the darkest centre of the plains is rising up to engulf us like a violet wave. 

On the cliffs below, Peregrine Falcons are roosting for the night; bickering to each other. All afternoon they have been rocketing back and forwards along the escarpment. As we also settle down to sleep, the lights of Bourke finally provide a point of reference across that mind-bending space. We are literally, Back o' Bourke, that fabled place considered the edge of the Australia's settled land. The gateway to the "outback". 

In 1892 a young Henry Lawson was sent to Bourke by Bulletin editor J.F. Archibald to get a taste of outback life and to try to curb his heavy drinking. In the Lawson biography by Robyn Lee Burrow and Alan Barton, A Stranger on the Darling, the authors recall Lawson's own words "I got £5 and a railway ticket from the Bulletin and went to Bourke. Painted, picked up in a shearing shed and swagged it for six months". The experience was to have a profound effect on the 25-year-old. His encounter with the harsh realities of bush life inspired much of his subsequent work. Lawson would later write "if you know Bourke you know Australia". 

Moorehouse uses this very expression as the title for his own extraordinary experiences at Gundabooka. And, he opens his story with this brilliant piece from Lawson:

'When the heavy sand is yielding backward from your blistered feet,

And across the distant timber you can see the flowing heat;

When your head is hot and aching, and the shadeless plain is wide,

And it's fifteen miles to water in the scrub the other side –

Don't give up, don't be down-hearted, to a man's strong heart be true!

Take the air in through your nostrils, set your lips and see it through...'

Our experiences of Gundabooka National Park were at the opposite end of the spectrum to Lawson's and Moorehouse. If I were to write a poem it would say something more gentle and emphasise the humility one feels in such a naturally reclaimed landscape. I am trying this for a first draft: "putting words on the page itself is a long walk but first and always and afterwards something linear appears like footprints, gibber rocks dislodged, birds flushed from the trees, the telltale signs of a land's passage through your soul."

But, lastly, a word about nature's quirky mysteries. As we settle down to sleep on Gunderbooka, I am intrigued by sounds of a large bird as it flaps into the cypress tree to roost. The night is pitch black; the moon, a pencil line of silver on the far western horizon. The stars are luminous, thick and sparkling but distant. I flick my head torch on and search but see nothing. Twice more in the night I hear the bird. In the morning, as we prepare to leave, it finally wakes, flutters about and takes flight. It is a Little Black Cormorant. Miles from water, high above the arid zone; having arrived from somewhere, now going somewhere else. 

Like us. We walk off Gunderbooka back to the car, picking our way down through bands of rock, past sticky hop bush and the shady hiding spots of euros. Nothing goes wrong for us, the walking is slow, rocky underfoot, but pleasant.

We enter the mulga forest of the plains and, like a magicians trick, the mountain disappears.

Gundabooka National Park is 63,903ha. It is rich in Aboriginal and European heritage and stretches from the banks of the Darling River, across the plains and over Mount Gunderbooka. The park is of great significance to the local Ngemba Aboriginal people. Be sure to take Mulgowan (Yappa) Aboriginal Art Site walking track to see some ancient Aboriginal rock art up close. The park is karulkiyalu ngurrampaa, Stone Country.

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