Australian Trip
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 4: Carnarvon Gorge
Carnarvon Gorge is our favourite place. It is also, and I will apologise to nobody for this, gorgeous. A gorge that is gorgeous. I made that joke to my wife roughly every ninety minutes for three days, and she has still not entirely forgiven me.
It had been on my wife’s bucket list for years, which means it was on mine, because that’s how a long marriage works — her list becomes your list, and you find out why later. I genuinely did not know what Carnarvon Gorge was. I knew that she wanted to go. That was the entire briefing. So: here we are.
We got the van settled, and then I spent the first half hour of our visit on my back underneath it, hunting for the blockage in the sink outflow — which I located at the precise moment it discharged itself, in full, directly onto my face. There’s a glamour to this lifestyle that the brochures really undersell.
Then we walked down to the waterhole by the campground, and that’s where Carnarvon started being Carnarvon — because there was a platypus. Out in the open, in daylight, playing. You have to understand how unreasonable this is. Platypus are shy, and nocturnal, and mostly theoretical — people live beside these creeks for years and never see one. And here was this one, rolling and diving and surfacing in the middle of the afternoon, showing off, and a little crowd of us gathered on the bank and watched it for half an hour, none of us quite believing our luck. We do love our wildlife. Especially the kind that isn’t trying to take the basket out of your hands.
I went in after it — swimming, I mean, up the far end of the waterhole in a good deep spot. The water was fifteen degrees. I know it was exactly fifteen because I have an Apple Watch and a need to quantify my suffering, and fifteen degrees is the coldest water I found in all of Australia. I got in anyway. And there were more platypus down there — and I’m going to have to come back to the question of what the plural of platypus actually is, because I don’t know and I refuse to guess — so I got to swim with them, which is a ridiculous and wonderful thing, while everyone on the bank watched the idiot in the freezing water.
The bank included a young woman in a very small bikini, who had clearly come to be seen swimming rather than to swim, and who advanced confidently to the water’s edge, put in one toe, and reconsidered her entire plan.
Which is what I should have done.
That night we went to the campfire — the communal one, which is a whole institution, because it’s where the intelligence gets exchanged. Everyone around that fire is making their own way around or across the country, and the fire is where you trade what you know: which roads are open, which crossings are passable, which campgrounds are worth it, where the water is, where the trouble is. It’s a thousand-year-old thing dressed up in fold-out camp chairs. And it’s exactly the kind of fire, at some campground months before, where my wife had first heard about Carnarvon Gorge in the first place — which is how it got onto the list that got it onto mine. Good to come prepared, even second-hand.
Now. The gorge itself.
The idea is simple. You drive a couple of miles up to the national park, and then you walk — up the gorge, alongside the creek, with the side-tracks branching off to the highlights as you go. The full thing is twenty to twenty-five kilometres return, depending on how many of the side-tracks you take. We are grey nomads. We knew, setting out, that we were not going to do twenty-five kilometres. But we thought we’d see how far we got.
The morning was beautiful. It had been minus one overnight — cold enough that the caravan itself was cold, which is its own special misery — and the day was warming up slowly as we went. The track winds in and out across the creek, over stepping stones that are wet and slick, and the creek runs ankle-deep, so every few crossings you misjudge one and get a bootful. Above you the gorge walls go up and up, pale sandstone, genuinely imposing, and the whole place has a held, green, secret feeling as you follow the water in.
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