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Date: May 12 2012
Towards the end of Paul Lockyer's handsome, if somewhat prosaic, paean to Lake Eyre, he rewards us with a lovely first-person depiction of what it was like to be standing before one of the great tides of Australia's natural history. Cooper Creek, inching its way towards Lake Eyre four months after its floodwaters peaked at Innamincka in 2010, bears down on the Birdsville Track. When it crosses the track and cuts the road, it will be seven months before the road reopens. Lockyer and his crew - ABC helicopter pilot Gary Ticehurst and cameraman John Bean - land their chopper downstream and film the Cooper as it slices the track in two for the first time in 20 years.
''We were at the front of a river that stretched 1500 kilometres back through outback South Australia and Queensland,'' Lockyer says. ''But there was plenty of time to observe it all … It was a trickle rather than a flow, moving at no more than slow walking pace … about 70 metres wide, surging and gurgling across the pock-marked flood plain - in and out of every crevice and depression, soaking deep into the landscape before gathering the momentum to go on.''
Lockyer and his crew capture how all manner of life percolates up and out of the desert with the simple addition of one ingredient - water. And he ruminates on how different the exploration history of Australia might have been. ''Had the early explorers ventured out in a season like this, with water covering much of Lake Eyre, and seagulls overhead, they would have been forgiven for believing that they truly had discovered the inland sea.''
Lockyer and his crew - who perished last year while filming the third great inundation of Lake Eyre in succession - were themselves explorers, as the artist John Olsen points out in his foreword to Lake Eyre: A Journey through the Heart of the Continent. A fundamental dictum of good journalism is that you go to the scene - which happens less often these days unless there is a disaster, a celebrity or, better yet, both in the same frame. It is to the ABC's enduring credit that it allowed one of its best correspondents to go so far in search of some of the most life-affirming footage this country has ever seen - even if, in the end, disaster of the cruellest kind was to cut short the expedition, and with it their lives.
Lake Eyre is the book of the movie, and its most haunting image is its last - a picture of Bean leaning on his camera, Ticehurst and Lockyer standing beside him on the salt flats, a clear, blue sky behind them, men at work. Their job was to bring back pictures and stories of the drought that became the deluge that flooded the world's fifth-largest lake at the centre of the most arid inhabited continent on Earth.
There are breathtaking images here: gorgeous double-page aerials of Warburton Creek in flood; a sparkling white tableau of what could be taken for Arctic ice, but is the lake at its driest; soaring cloud formations refracting palettes of colours that defy our strongest mental images of what the dead heart is supposed to look like.
Like any good book on Australia's geography, this one has a couple of place names to die for: Lake Cadibarrawirracanna giving Cannuwalkalanna Creek a run for its money.
There are some good stories here, too, although not great ones. As ardently as one wants him to succeed, Lockyer doesn't quite match in prose what the pictures in Lake Eyre say for themselves. He had a singular talent, on air, for getting ordinary folk to tell extraordinary stories but the tales that land on the pages of this book are surprisingly two-dimensional. Also, he relies on professor Richard Kingsford for two chapters on river and species ecology, which add data in direct proportion to the extent that they weigh the book down.
It seems churlish, given how much Lockyer and his team gave of themselves to this project, to find fault with this book but the production quality is uneven, the photo editing at times sloppy. In one instance, a wonderful shot of plumed whistling ducks in flight is inexplicably cut in two with a misplaced margin; in another, a margin that should divide two photos is missing altogether.
That aside, Lake Eyre succeeds in taking Australians to the scene of a great bush drama. Olsen insists that ''to be a real Australian, you must see Lake Eyre''. If this is as close as most of us will ever get, it is a journey worth making.
ABC colleagues will read and show images from Lake Eyre at the Sydney Writers' Festival next Saturday at 2.30pm.
LAKE EYRE
Paul Lockyer
ABC Books, 239pp, $59.99
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