Monday (July 25th) was the day of the Bararranna Gorge walk.

We had walked the Bararraanna Gorge trail last year. We remembered the various waterholes, the Sturt Desert peas in the creek beds and the rock formations in the gorges. The bushwalking groups deem it to be moderately challenging (C+) and it is a popular walk.

It is about 8.4-km loop trail that starts near the old Monarch mine site then we walk along a ridge with Bararranna Hill in front of us, with a bluff face with ancient reef on the right side with fossils (850 million years ago). Then down a small, dry waterfall along a small gorge before connecting up with Arkaroola Creek and a large water hole where we had morning coffee.

We then walked along along Araroola Creek to the Bararranna water hole and explored the side gorge before we were blocked by a mass of water. What was very noticeable this time were all the young eucalyptus trees around the water holes.

It was on this section of the walk that a photographic project started to emerge:–one of abstractions of the deep geological time that is prior to the the region being inhabited by aboriginal peoples — the Adnyamathanha . It refers to a nonhuman world.

A world that is hard to get one’s head around or gain a perspective on from the present. It is a world of glaciers, ice ages (Snowball Earth) and sea. You can see the former in the conglomerate rock formations, or the tillitte formation that is formed directly by glacial ice deposition.  How can we humans possibly sense the natural history of hundreds of millions of years  of the great climatic epochs of the Pleistocene and Holocene.