Thirteen reasons why you should do the Carnarvon Great Walk and also hope

1. The dead animals on the road on the way in (which might not, at first glance, fit under hope as a title; bear with me). You tell yourself the kangaroos and possums are not as sad as the wombat and echidna. You are prioritising by species. There’s a fox, hard to prioritise, and a cow, same, and dark blood on the tarmac in places. You can’t afford to be self-righteous, however much you might like to. You killed a wallaby last year, driving to a national park at night because it suited your schedule.

2. Ranger Sheridan Lawton and Uncle Fred Conway, who show you how to be a better human by being better humans, offering, on the morning you are setting out, a smoking ceremony to mark the start of NAIDOC week for which the theme is heal country, heal our nation. The ceremony can cleanse away bad spirits, Uncle Fred says. Someone asks why the Bidjara and Karingbal peoples who own the land are not prominently named near the park entry as they might be in southern states. Uncle Fred grew up at Woorabinda Aboriginal Reserve, he says softly. ‘If I put my arm around a woman,’ he says, coming over and putting his arm around you, ‘I’d be locked up for two years.’ He wasn’t allowed to speak his own language. ‘I would like very much to have my language, but I don’t,’ he says. As for ownership of the gorge, Uncle Fred says, a special place, ‘I hope one day…’ You wonder how he can hope at all, given what he’s put up with. The sandalwood smoke is sweet.

3. The walk that first day through the gorge, which takes you into itself, stencil art handprints that are older than the Pyramids and ten times older than Jesus.

4. Two children you meet at the first campsite at Big Bend, twelve-year-old Jarrah humming the riff of a Star Wars theme, later blending it into the ancient cycad forest seamlessly, and nine-year-old Merrin, full of wry humour, who get up every morning to walk with their parents Jodi and Josh with not one complaint, not in your hearing anyway, a total eighty-five up-and-down kilometres over six days.

5. The trail for humans—not the one for feral pigs and kangaroos—through long grass and burned forest, marked by occasional orange arrows, of which there are just enough to help you decide you are so skilled with map and compass you could lead Bear Grylls out of trouble. You are grateful for head ranger Lindie Pasma who decided where to put the orange arrows and was teary at the smoking ceremony.

6. The forest on the Consuelo tableland, those giant mahogany trees—Eucalyptus laevopenia— coming to you as the old friends trees sometimes are. You sit with them a while and make tea.

7. The walking, one foot after the other, the walking, which makes sense when nothing else does, the walking, for which you may not require hope but which may slowly build hope back.

8. The sleeps, from first dark to first light in the freezing cold, and the shooting star at the moment you put your head out of the tent one midnight.

9. The last campsite, on top of the entire world, a sunset one day and sunrise the next, as if life could always be lived.

10. A wedge-tailed eagle, a king parrot, a pale-faced rosella, a currawong and kookaburras, a greater glider you hear chattering but do not see, and the calls of owls, a powerful, a barking and a boobook, for whom a mouse plague is not all bad.

11. Another boobook, this one’s eyes pecked out by noisy miner birds (perhaps the second worst species) that Uncle Fred picks up and puts under a tree near the visitor centre. ‘If he’s still there tomorrow, I’ll take him home,’ Uncle Fred says.  

12. The platypus you see before dawn on the last day, which duck-dives, surely a post-hope move, that duck dive, the sort of move Buddha might have made, after the bodhi tree, enlightened.

13. Gurrumul’s Djarimirri Child of the Rainbow playing on the car stereo on the road out, the first rays of sun on the gorge, the cows chewing and the kangaroos bounding over yellow grass, an eagle guarding something dead on the side of the road, and you driving slowly enough to keep it all alive for as long as you can.