Karlu Karlu
"I kept expecting the boulders to roll. They have been not-rolling for millions of years."
They appear on the left side of the Stuart Highway about 105 kilometres south of Tennant Creek, visible from the road before the sign tells you what they are. You could drive past Karlu Karlu and mistake it for a random geological curiosity — and in one sense it is exactly that, a field of rounded granite boulders deposited by the weathering of an ancient monolith, some of them balanced on each other in configurations that seem to violate common sense. But the Warumungu people, who have custodianship of this site, know Karlu Karlu as the eggs of the Rainbow Serpent. This is not folklore in the way Western travel writing usually treats Aboriginal stories — it is cosmological knowledge, a way of understanding how the world was made that has been operating here continuously for tens of thousands of years. The eggs of the Rainbow Serpent look like eggs. The people who noticed this first had not had geology to fall back on.
I arrived in the late afternoon, which is the correct time. The light in the hour before sunset does what the light at Uluru does, but differently — the granite boulders have a different iron content than sandstone, and they turn not orange but a deeper, more rusted red, with purple shadows filling the spaces between them. Some of the boulders are split cleanly in half, as if a geologist with a very large saw had demonstrated a point. This splitting happens over millions of years as water infiltrates the cracks in the granite and the thermal expansion and contraction of day and night slowly prise the rock apart.
There is a two-kilometre loop walk around the main boulder field that takes about 45 minutes at a normal pace and considerably longer if you keep stopping to look at things, which I did. The boulders are not all enormous — some are the size of a car, others the size of a house, and they are arranged in clusters that alternate between chaos and something that feels almost deliberate, the way a Japanese rock garden feels deliberate. I am aware this comparison involves a great deal of projection. I made it anyway.
The sound at Karlu Karlu in the late afternoon is worth attending to. Zebra finches move through the spinifex in large, twittering flocks. Butcherbirds call from somewhere inside the boulder field. The highway is a kilometre away but traffic is infrequent enough on the Stuart Highway that the silences between vehicles are long, and in those silences you can hear the desert at the volume it prefers: low, steady, full of insect and bird sound that requires stillness to detect.
The site was jointly managed by the Warumungu Traditional Owners and the Northern Territory government until 2008, when freehold title was returned to the Traditional Owners. The management plan preserves access for visitors while protecting the sacred dimensions of the site. There are areas you can see but not enter, marked by fencing and signs that state the cultural reasons briefly and clearly. I find this the most honest mode of sharing a site of this kind: not pretending everything is available, but not withholding the whole either.
I stayed until after sunset, until the boulders were grey and the sky was fully dark and the Milky Way came up as it does in places this far from city light — all at once, overwhelming, making the boulders below seem small in a way they had not seemed when the sun was on them.
When to go: The boulder field is accessible year-round and the walk is never particularly strenuous. The best light is at sunrise and sunset; the midday sun at any season flattens the shadows that give the boulders their most dramatic appearance. May through August are the most comfortable months for lingering. Summer temperatures on the Stuart Highway can reach 45°C — possible to visit but unpleasant to linger.