On you flight down to the Bungles for your guided walk you will be able to witness some amazing parts of the Kimberley. During your flight with Aviair you will look down upon some spectacular and historic parts of the region.
Bow River Alluvial Diamond Mine over the course of thousands of years all the sediment and minerals wash down and sit in the lower lying areas. Where the Bow River and Ord River meet there is a backwash in the flow, creating limestone creek, where they extract sediment to be processed for diamonds. From there the left over sediment gets held in 3 tailing ponds. This mine has since closed due to low yield and native rights issues around the land. Out of this mine there was only 18% gem quality, so not very successful. What the bow river mine was making in a whole year, the argyle diamond mine makes in just one week.
Lissadell Station covers approximately 400,000 Acres with 20,000 head of cattle. Which means Lissadell has only one cow for every 20 acres of land. This station is relatively small in size, with 1million acres being average size in the Kimberly and can even get up to 2-3 million acres with 60-70,000 head of cattle. There are generally two types of cattle found in WA, Brahman and shorthorns (English breed). Brahman type cattle are able to tolerant the extreme heat and ticks up here in the tropics whilst the shorthorns were brought to the area with the Durack's.
Durak family were pioneering cattle farmers who moved 7000 head of cattle and 200 horses from the east, travelling 5000km in 2.5 years to find these lands, which were more suitable for their cattle. They lost about half of the cattle and also a lot of workers to the elements. Never the less they made it and with enough cattle to start their station known as Argyle Downs, one of the first cattle empires in the Kimberly.
Texas Downs gets its name simply from its boundary resembling Texas state in America. If you look around, you will notice that the terrain is a lot more mountainous and rugged compared to Lissadell station. Due to terrain, most cattle mustering is done by helicopter, driving cattle into Cattle creek, and then north towards Lissadell station, where cattle are loaded onto road trains and driven to Wyndham and from there sent as live export, to countries such as Indonesia and Vietman. During the off season there is only a few workers maybe 2 or 3 on these stations who work on maintaining the station and cattle, but once mustering season starts in the dry season they'll have a team of about 12-16 who work massive days on motorbikes, 4WD, horses or aircraft/helicopters to muster the cattle.
Osmund Ranges – Waves or ski jumps. Estimated 1700-1900 million years old, used to stand around 30,000 feet tall back then (height of Mt Everest) and over time with tectonic movement and erosion they now stand at just over 1000ft. Named after the Osmund's who were another cattle pioneering family.
These are just some of the major attractions that can be seen on your journey down to do one of the most unique world heritage listed places in Australia. Bungle Bungle tours offer an amazing experience of Purnululu National park. You can also partake in Bungle Bungle tours from Turkey Creek in a HeliSpirit helicopter.
Martin Wynn
Nguyen An Tra My
