One of the most striking and unique natural landforms in the world

A place that’s been around for over 350 million years and protected by its Aboriginal custodians for at least 40,000 years, but was a secret from the outside world until just forty years ago.

Just a quick note before we start for those destination historians of Aboriginal descent, that names of deceased persons may be mentioned in this episode.

What is it?

Going by either the Bungle Bungle Range or the Bungle Bungles, you’ll find the place in Purnululu National Park, and it’s considered one of Australia's most famous natural landforms. You’ll find them in the northern corner of Western Australia within the Kimberley Region. The Bungles themselves are just left of the border with the Northern Territory and a good 150 km north-east of Halls Creek. But don’t be thinking it’s a day trip from anywhere really. Purnululu National Park is about 240 000 hectares, which is the equivalent to three Englands. So a sizeable piece of land.

The Bungle Bungle Range is made up of about a hundred sandstone dome towers. The rocks are naturally striped, with distinct horizontal layers of orange and dark grey or black. The maze of rocks is often likened to giant beehives, and has become a much-loved attraction for tourists and nature lovers. The Bungle Bungles are representative of a dramatic natural landscape, with the sculptured rocks rising 250 metres above the semi-arid grasslands that make up practically the entire region. From above, which is the best way to see the Range, the domes look like the turrets of ancient castles or even miniature pyramids.

If you want to get an idea of what the Bungle Bungles look like without travelling all the way to the middle of nowhere, then Google Earth is probably your best bet. They have some great imagery that allows you to zoom decently far into the site and you can get a pretty good feel for the remote geography of the National Park. Google Earth is based on satellite images and if you have a play around with the camera you can get a good feel for the remoteness of the whole location as well as the topography of the rock formations. Check out the Bungle Bungles on Google Earth.

And if you want even more images, then the Atlantic newspaper is where you want to be. They have a pretty awesome collection of photos of the National Park, with a range of aerial photography and photos taken by those who went on foot. You can even see images of canyons, gullies, chasms and the odd gorge or two. Check out the images here.

And don’t forget that we have a collection of images on the Destination History website along with other resources for each and every episode.

World Heritage listing and criteria

In 2003 Purnululu National Park was given World Heritage status. Sites that are nominated for World Heritage listing are inscribed on the list only after they have been carefully assessed as representing the best examples of the world's cultural and/or natural heritage. Australia currently has 20 locations on the World Heritage List. Not a bad effort if I do say so myself.

The National Park was added because it was considered to be an area of incredible natural beauty with outstanding geological value.

Part of the reason for the World Heritage listing was to protect the vast range of unique flora and fauna that is native to the area. But as we already know, the main attraction of the site are the geological formations of the Bungle Bungles. Here’s what UNESCO has to say about the formation of the Bungle Bungles:

The Bungle Bungle range is renowned for its striking banded domes. They are made of sandstone deposited about 360 million years ago. Erosion by creek, rivers and weathering in the past 20 million years has carved out these domes, along with spectacular chasms and gorges creating a surreal landscape.

The domes’ striking orange and grey bands are caused by the presence of cyanobacteria, which grows on layers of sandstone where moisture accumulates. The orange bands are oxidised iron compounds that have dried out too quickly for the cyanobacteria to grow.

So it seems that quite a unique landscape would have been needed for the Bungle Bungles to form in the first place. Well unique landscapes is something we’re not short of down here in Australia.

UNESCO also reckons that:

The dramatically sculptured structures, unrivalled in their scale, extent, grandeur and diversity of form anywhere in the world, undergo remarkable daily and seasonal variation in appearance, including striking colour transition following rain and with the positioning of the sun ... the soaring cliffs up to 250 metres high are cut by seasonal waterfalls and pools, creating the major tourist attractions in the park with evocative names such as Echidna Chasm, Piccaninny and Cathedral Gorges.

Some evocative language from UNESCO.

But what are the domes made from? When the European geologist, Edward Hardman, first wandered among the Bungle Bungle Range in 1885, he noted this down:

The prevailing nature of the rock […] is that of a yellow or reddish freestone, very soft in places, and susceptible to ‘weathering’, owing to which the rock-masses often assume strange and fantastic forms.

The reason the stone is ‘very soft in places’ is that the Bungle Bungles are composed mainly of sandstone that is soft and fragile. It mostly lacks a natural cement to hold the grains of sand together. Instead, the grains are interlocked. Scientists tell us that the presence of the cyanobacteria in the moist dark stripes of the rocks help keep the dome towers together, perhaps that could be a great starting off point for a Destination: Science podcast. If anyone’s interested, get in touch.

Dreamtime story

So, I hear you ask, what is the importance of Purnululu and the Bungle Bungles to Australia’s indigenous peoples?

Well it goes without saying that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are the longest continuing cultures in the world. To Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, sacred ties to the Country or land of their ancestors, and custodianship, or traditional ownership of that land, is of vital importance.

Aboriginal people are thought to have lived in the region of Purnululu for more than 40,000 years, and the park holds rich, enduring traces of their life. The traditional owners are the Gija. The Gija continue to use resources in Purnululu that have sustained the lives of their people for thousands of years, and, importantly, today they co-manage the Park with the Western Australian government, which we should really see a lot more of throughout the country than we do.

Ancient rock art and burial sites can be found across Purnululu National Park and if you were to visit today, you could see some of the sites with a local Indigenous guide. Archaeological studies of the Bungle Bungle Range have recorded over two hundred separate sites with rock paintings. There’s heaps to look at, like crocodiles, turtles, fish, kangaroos and emus as well as human stick and snake-like figures. The predominance of aquatic species as graphic elements in the galleries recorded at the foot of the Bungle Bungle Range reinforce the significance of water resources in the lives of the local people.

The Gija maintain a strong connection to Purnululu’s ancient landscape. There is a continual connection and association from the Dreamtime through to now which is expressed through stories, songs, art and visits to country.

The Dreamtime

Let’s now have a very brief chat about The Dreamtime. The Dreamtime, or the Dreaming, is a commonly used term that describes important features of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and existence. Dreamtime is essentially the foundation of Aboriginal religion and culture. The Dreamtime is understood as a beginning that never ended. It is continuous through the past, present and future.

It is the story of events that have happened, how the universe came to be, how human beings were created and how their Creator intended for humans to function within the world as they knew it. The land and the people were created by the Spirits. The Spirits made the rivers, streams, water holes, land, hills, rocks, plants, animals, everything you could possibly imagine.

So, what do we know about the Dreamtime story of Purnululu and the Bungle Bungles? In 2020 a community group called the Sharing Stories Foundation produced a book called ‘The Frog and the Brolga’ with the Gija people. Senior custodian Shirley Drill generously shared the sacred Dreamtime creation story of Purnululu for a wider audience. The book, which is also available as an ebook that includes animated video clips, check out the link here, was written in both the local Gija language as well as English.

The tale of the Frog and the Brolga tells us that back in the Dreamtime there was a giant watering hole at Purnululu, and a range of ‘Creation Ancestors’, these are animals which can also appear in human-form, and they played a role in the creation of the landscape. A bird known as a Brolga tricked her Dreamtime companions into taking all the water from the watering hole for herself in a giant coolamon and flying away. For those not in the know, a coolamon is a traditional Aboriginal vessel made from wood that was used to carry water or food. 

Several animal-beings tried and failed to stop the Brolga, but finally a frog successfully threw a boomerang into the coolamon, which released all the water in this dramatic downpour. The rain transformed all the people and creatures into the landscape of Purnululu to what it looks today, with some becoming trees, and others rocks, animals, and people.

We’re extremely lucky as a wider, non-Indigenous audience to have access to such a creation myth. It really allows us an insight into how the Gija maintain a strong connection to the Bungle Bungles and surrounding lands.

Discovery by Europeans

As we know, Australia was colonised by the British in the late eighteenth-century. The east Kimberley was one of the last regions of Australia to experience colonisation. The story of the transformation of the region and life for the traditional custodians of the land is an all too familiar one in the history of Australia.

Historical accounts of the entry of non-Aboriginal people to the region begin in July 1879 when government surveyor Alexander Forrest and his party reached the Ord River, this is the main river flowing through the area today that we know as Purnululu National Park. Positive reports of the quality of potential farming area in the region created a land rush in the first half of the 1880s, and the Kimberley was divided into a series of large pastoral leases. Thousands more colonists swarmed the area upon the discovery of gold at Old Halls Creek in 1885, with almost all of them seeking their fortunes in gold mining. This profoundly changed the way in which the traditional owners were able to live their lives.

Oral history accounts describe numerous instances of violence against the local Aboriginal people. According to historians, the 30-year period following the discovery of gold was marked by lawlessness, atrocities against local Aboriginal people, spearing of cattle, and generally hostile relationships between the intruders and the local people. Not to mention the introduced diseases from the Europeans, such as measles, smallpox, leprosy and influenza, these all took a heavy toll on the Indigenous population. But this wasn’t just isolated to Northern Western Australia, this experience and poor treatment is pretty much mirrored all around the country. Though there were government measures to reduce the suffering of Aboriginal people in the east Kimberley, government intervention was limited in its success.

Traditional owners were taken off their land and their connection to Country was broken. Other factors contributed to help communities survive, including the fact that some pastoralists were sympathetic to the needs of Aboriginal people and ran their stations as refuges. However, the majority of Aboriginal people in the east Kimberley did not settle on pastoral stations until the early 1920s and some people remained in the bush long after that. Aboriginal knowledge and understanding of the land and their unpaid labour contributed to the economic viability of pastoralism.

By the late 1920s, ethnographers determined that the size of the local Aboriginal population had declined significantly. In the 40 years following the 1880s, when non-Aboriginal people first entered the East Kimberley, it was estimated that local indigenous populations had declined by about 50 percent. So they had halved, the Aboriginal population had literally halved.

In addition to this major loss of human life, the pastoral occupation of traditional lands, and the associated heavy stocking of areas around rivers and waterholes, and destruction of native plants and animals by the introduced stock and removal of habitat, had a radical impact on the ways local Aboriginal people were able to live their lives.

By the 1970s, senior traditional owners approached government authorities to help them return to their country and establish out-stations, which are basically camping sites for what remained of the Indigenous population, but on traditional country. This continued throughout the next decade.

Then in 1983, an airborne television crew filming a documentary called ‘Wonders of WA’ unearthed the spectacular striped rocks we know as the Bungle Bungles. At the time the Bungle Bungle Range was only known to local Indigenous people and some non-Aboriginal stockmen. The documentary sparked significant public and tourist interest and resulted in calls to open the area to tourism. By 1987, the area was declared a national park, and 15 years later it was inscribed on the UNESCO list for its

outstanding universal natural heritage values.

Today, Purnululu National Park World Heritage property is public land with secure legal protection and is managed on a day-to-day basis jointly by the Western Australian government via the Department of Environment and Conservation and the Gija and Jaru peoples as traditional owners.

So, while the connection between traditional owners and their country has been maintained under the impact of irreversible change, inscription on the World Heritage list has ensured that this outstanding example of traditional land-use is maintained for future generations of traditional owners and all humanity.

The name Bungle Bungle

Bungle Bungle is an interesting name for a landform, and while we’re unopposed to double names here in Australia, I’m looking at you Wagga Wagga, it’s important to understand the history behind the naming of some of our attractions.

Interestingly, Bundle bundle grass is common in the east Kimberley, named because it grows in a clump, or a bundle. Now how bundle bundle became Bungle Bungle is open to speculation, but according to an ABC - the Australian one - investigation, the European Australian name for the grass may have been borrowed by local Aboriginal people and changed to bungle bungle. Then European Australians borrowed the changed name back again, naming a pastoral lease Bungle Bungle Station, in the 1940s. And eventually this was extended to the Range of natural land formations nearby, giving us the Bungle Bungle Range.

Tourism

So now that you’re a pro on the history of the area, I bet you’re rearing to get over there yourself and have a good gander. Well my friend, it’s not that easy, and I’m talking in a pre-pandemic era.

Twenty years ago, about 2000 people visited the park each year. This has steadily risen since the World Heritage listing and now an average of over 40,000 people visit each year. As you can imagine, most of the people who visit Purnululu National Park go to primarily see the Bungle Bungles.

Remembering that the northern part of Australia is basically topical, the Purnululu National Park is open in the dry season only - usually April to November, and rangers live on site during this season. Temperatures push 30°C even in the coolest months, so make sure to pack light and bring plenty of sunscreen, and you’ll need that 50+ spf stuff, yeah it’s hot and the sun is harsh, but there’s also a weak ozone layer above us so let’s be smart people. Of the thousands of people who visit the park each year, nearly half see Purnululu only by air. They fly in from Kununurra, usually by helicopter or small plane, do a scenic circuit and fly off again. According to Purnululu’s long-term ranger, Lindsay Brown, the aerial sightseers are good environmental news for the park as they have a much lower impact on the park than people who visit by four-wheel-drive and then get out and wander around on foot.

Land-based access to and within the Park can be difficult because of the remoteness of the area and the Park’s position at the edge of Australia’s monsoonal region, both of which make access tricky. Visitors to the park by land can stay at eco-lodges at the park which offer 4WD tours, and there are also public camping grounds for people to stay at. For a brief look at the four main gorges, visitors would need to stay at least one full day, so ideally two nights. Visitors are always reminded not to climb at the park, especially the bungles, because the sandstone is extremely fragile and vulnerable to erosion, and you really don’t want to be that tourist who rocked up in a camry, got bogged, and then started climbing things and destroying natural landmarks.

Other tips visitors are often given include singing a song in Cathedral Gorge, where you would be surrounded by ancient red rock carved by water erosion through the ages. The acoustics are so amazing that even members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra have performed there. Adventurous visitors are encouraged to hike to Echidna Chasm for ‘golden hour’ when the sun streams in to highlight the striking colour variations within the narrow chasm. And finally, visitors who stay overnight are reminded to look up as darkness falls. With no light pollution you can really marvel at the bright intensity of the star-lit sky.

Don’t forget to head over to the website, to check out images of all these cool places.

CREDIT:
This episode was researched and written by Nick Alexander

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