The Cape is a land that lies beyond knowledge, beyond our ability to every fully experience and understand it.
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Whatever evaluation we finally make of a stretch of land, however, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it inadequate. The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression – its weather and colours and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.
– Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
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The endlessness of Cape York’s coastline, the utter unknowability of it all, so much is cut off from human exploration even now. The Cape, to me, is a place of ineffable beauty protected by midges, mosquitoes, sharks, saltwater crocodiles (not to mention freshwater ones), stingers, malaria and the sheer danger of utter remoteness.
And yet, this land has a real identity, a personality that will flower if you let it. The beauty of it isn’t always there on the surface, you have to look, and wait, and it will come to you.
In 2014, I spent two months travelling and shooting the Cape for Hema Maps, helping to update their maps and, I hoped, to find a few new spots that weren’t quite ‘on the map’.
I’d been up the Tele Track a few times by then, and I was looking forward to exploring some of the places that never made it into the mags: Cape Melville, Bathurst Head, the wild country around the Pennefather River…wherever I could get to in my time, wherever there seemed to be nothing on the map except a few sparse markers.
This is my journal from that time, and a fine reminder of the beauty and utility of getting lost.
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THE END