Ninghan Station

The closest possible place, and really the only place for many miles around, we could stay was the station (Ninghan) just north of the station where we were working (Mt. Gibson). Based on the boundaries I could find on a map of the area this station is more than twice the size of Whitewells (250 square miles). Fortunately the station homestead was only a half hour ride from us. Staying there was an experience I will never forget but, for many reasons, is not something I would be eager to do again.

I think the idea was the station was a better option than camping out. From my perspective it was way worse.

Driving north from the Mt Gibson range on the Great Northern Highway, you arrive at a pull off to the Ninghan homestead and then drive down a gravel road about 4 miles. The closer you get to the settlement the worse the grazing degradation. The landscape is a classic example of overgrazing and how it can alter the vegetation and the landscape. The soils here are all red and by the time you arrive at the homestead the red earth is almost all that remains. The landscape looked like the earth had been scoured and it effectively has been - presumably through a centuries worth of grazing by many, many sheep.

Our accommodations were in a small house. There were a few bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a washroom (sink and shower). All the rooms were quite small. The dunnie (aka the outhouse) was a small shack out back. Interestingly enough it contained a flush toilet. The house and dunnie was surrounded by a wire fence, presumably creating a yard, but our yard was the same as what was all around us - red dusty dirt. The house was situated in the midst of a compound with numerous buildings. Across from our front door, a few hundred feet away, was another larger house that was presently occupied by a group of people that were contracted by the mining company to collect seed, for the mine restoration work, from Extension Hill. To the left of this were trailers that were divided into small single rooms that I presume consist of little more than a bed. Some off these were currently occupied by sheep shearers that were working at gathering the wool from the sheep that you could see wandering around. To the other side of us, set off a little further than the other buildings, was the owners living area. It was just beyond a windmill and an area of relatively lush trees that formed an odd grove of palms, eucalypts, and a giant fig tree. Somewhere beyond the often squeaky windmill and veil of greenery, which appeared as a veritable oasis in the desert, was the owner's actual home.

This is all interesting and exotic - how exciting to be at a sheep farm, in the middle of know where, in the Australian outback, during sheep shearing time. And I am normally just the fellow for seeing and enjoying such things. The shine came off the apple pretty quick when it came down to practical matters concerning why we were staying at this place. We were out all day (I left the Caravan Park at 8 AM the first day I was at Extension Hill) and needed a place to sleep, eat dinner, prepare for going out in the field for a full day, and a place to sort biological samples and sort out field notes. A shower would be a bonus but in the past I have been out fighting forest fires for over a week without a shower, so I can easily deal without that. This was a good thing because the only towel we were provided with was a dish towel. The other fellows used some shirts for drying after taking a shower, I just didn't take one during my stay.

The first thing that Ben did when we arrived was to prop open the front and back door and to crank open some of the windows. The windows consisted of glass louvers with no screens. It was early evening and it was beginning to get blustery. The wind blowing freely through the house cooled things down nicely. I brought some of my things in and began to get settled into my bedroom. There were two single beds and, taking Ben's advice, I pulled one of the flimsily mattresses off its wire frame and put it on the floor. No sheets, just a cotton cover on the mattress. Once we found some matches to light the gas burners on the stove we could begin cooking. It was starting to get dark and this of course meant putting the lights on. Being there was a new moon, our lights served as a beacon for insects near and far. As a myrmecologist I naturally have a curiosity about insects, so of course most people would think this would be a great opportunity for me. And it was. The only problem is it is difficult at best to try to prepare a meal, or enjoy it, or work at a table when there are so many critters around. Things were flying in your face, landing on your neck, and of course make the requisite buzzing sounds as they traveled from around the light, to around your head, and back to the light again. I have encountered and dealt with such a problem before in other places but never like this. One would think the wise thing to do to solve this problem would be to close the doors and windows. Unfortunately this was not a good solution as the doors and windows were not able to be shut even near tightly. There were plenty of gaps that were inches wide.

Someone left our the gate into our yard open and during dinner a kangaroo came into the house. It was about three feet tall, sniffing at everything in sight, and clearly looking for handouts. Shortly after a large spider scampered in across the floor. Chris was not fond of spiders, and the kangaroo was annoying, so we were soon trying to steer our accumulating wildlife out the doors. Once we got the kangaroo out of the house, he was not willing to leave our yard, so we had to continue to leave the gate open. The only vegetation around was some very small patches of gray plant material that looked like the barest remnants of some dead herbaceous plant. There was a bit of it in our yard and some beyond our fence boundary. Apparently our yard plants were in better shape than the plants that were not fenced in. The kangaroo proceeded to graze in our compound, you could hear him tearing bits of plant from the ground - it sounded like rope being pulled apart. It has to be a tough life being a grazer in this place.

Later I was sitting at the kitchen table, sorting samples, when I heard this deep, loud buzzing at the door. I turned, saw a very large wasp near the floor just in front of the door, and quickly jumped up to push the door closed. I did manage to shut it out, at least for that moment. I asked Ben, who was in the next room, if he heard the buzzing of the wasp I just saw. He said no and asked if it wasn't perhaps a large beetle, since wasps usually do not fly at night. I thought this was sensible and figured I was mistaken; maybe it was a beetle I saw. I was hoping I would not find out as there were plenty of places this thing could get in if it was persistent. Later that night I was lying in bed, reading, when I heard a short burst of the same buzzing at my bedroom window. I had no idea what my window even looked like as it was covered by a curtain. I dismissed the thought that the noise I heard was the same critter as before, despite the fact there were at least a hundred moths in my room. I assumed things were coming in my room via the bedroom door. It turned out the large buzzing critter did get in my window, it was a wasp, and it made its presence known by loudly circling my bedroom light. After a few minutes of trying to coax it out of my room by turning the light out in my room to draw it out to the adjacent living room, Ben was able to catch it between a colander and cutting board. He was going to release it but I suggested we keep it till morning; letting it go would only give it another chance to return.

I checked my bedroom window and discovered it was a porous as every other part of our house.

Our electricity was a little dicey too. When the living room light was off it would flicker about every 5 seconds. Sort of like a very slow strobe light. Ben went to try to turn the switch on and off to see if maybe the switch wasn't somehow responsible for this problem. In groping around in the semi twilight he first managed to grab a metal piece that was part of the front door doorframe (they door was wide open, after all) and got an electric shock. In the end, we took the lighbulb out of the socket. The next night my bedroom light was doing the same flickering routine.

My sleeping was restless the first night, in part because it got quite cool. There were no sheets or covers so I had to get up and put on more clothes. I also thought I got woken up a few times by mice running across me. There clearly were mice in the house, and I have been in a few similar rustic lodging situations where mice will run across and over you while you are asleep, but I wasn't sure if I had imagined it or not.

When I woke up there was a bunch of food stuffs piled on the table. Despite the fact we had put everything the mice could get into into the refrigerator, during the night they were incessantly scratching away at a box full of canned goods left on the counter. They made such a racket they woke Ben up and his only recourse was to move these things onto the table with the hope they would not be rediscovered.

Our first morning in our little house we ate breakfast, prepared our food we would eat in the field during the day, and left.

We got home even later the second night. Lucky for us Ben knew the seed collecting folks staying across from us. We actually crossed paths with them on Extension Hill a number of times. We had talked about the mine operation, the plants, and other things related to our work while we out working during the day. Their plans had changed during their visit and our second night there was their last night at the station. They had a lot of food that was going to be left over so they invited us over for tea (seemingly everything is called tea here - breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even just having tea). Ben was quite happy about this since much of the fresh food he was going to cook had frozen solid in the refrigerator. Our neighbors prepared a huge meal that we all enjoyed, except for the fellows working the barbeque. The gas ran out in the middle of cooking the meat (the barbeque and gas were part of the accommodations with their house). They had to shift food from a large full grill to a much smaller set of pans they could use on the stove. They went through many panfulls of food in order to get everything cooked. After we were done eating and having some pleasant conversation, I was talked into giving a presentation to everyone about the work Maria and I had done in North Eneabba. I had mentioned to someone that I had put together a powerpoint presentation that I gave to some folks the Caravan Park, so it was just a matter of taking out my computer and using the slides I had already prepared. After my talk it was time to return to our lovely house.

I did not think the insects could be worse than they were the night before. They were. It was like a constant barrage of them bouncing off your head, flying in your face, and landing on you. I easily had over a hundred moths in my bedroom by the time I went to sleep.

This night I roused from my sleep by the mice. I awoke to some strange scraping noise and after a foggy few seconds realized the noise I was hearing was not good. Something was in my stuff. I turned on the light and shortly after a mouse emerged from my bookbag, perched on top of it, looked around (I must admit it was awfully cute), spotted me, and decided it was time to run away. Unfortunately the scraping noise that woke me up was still going. It soon stopped and out of my field bag emerged another mouse. It repeated the performance of the first mouse: perch on top of the bag, look around, see me, and run
away. Looking in my bags revealed the mouse in my collecting bag had chewed the plastic top of a vial that was full of granola bar bits (my ant bait). That noise I heard was the mouse clawing in the vial, presumable trying to reach further down into it to grab the food. Somehow the half of the plastic top that was left was somehow thrown out of that bag and had fallen into my book bag. The first mouse I had seen must have been working at getting whatever little bits of granola were stuck to the plastic top. After I turned the light off and lay there for awhile I did feel a mouse run across me. Apparently I was in their way, considering they lived in the house and I was just visiting. I hazily remember shooing the mouse away from some other stuff, after I had of course put the treats they had gotten to earlier in a more secure place, later in the night. Even so I slept better that second night than I did the first night. It probably had something to do with a few long days and not having a very restful night's sleep the previous evening.

The next morning we ate breakfast, got our stuff out, and left the station. Ben and Chris were returning to Perth later that morning, after we spent some time together in the field. I could have stayed at the station for longer, on my own, if I wanted to work at Extension Hill longer. If I had a sleeping bag I would have slept somewhere at the mine site and stayed another night. I was not going to stay at the station again. In the end I decided it was good that we had found out all we did in the little bit of time we had spent working there. I left that night to go back to the Caravan Park in North Eneabba.