Australian Trip
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 8: Purnululu
Purnululu is our favourite place.
It used to be called the Bungle Bungles, which never made the slightest sense, and is now called Purnululu, which is its proper name and which I’ll take on faith makes more. What it actually is, is a large collection of extremely strange rocks — weird shapes, weird stripes, narrow channels running between them — out in the eastern Kimberley, in the hottest part of the country.
We camped at a free camp on the highway, out by the turnoff to the national park. And we were sitting at our fire in the evening when a French couple came over from their own camp with a request. They had a two-wheel-drive van, and they’d worked out — correctly — that a two-wheel-drive van was not getting into Purnululu, on account of the rivers and the bogs and the holes, and they wanted to know if they could ride in with us the next day. Of course they could.
So the next morning, after breakfast, there they were, ready and waiting, and we all headed in together.
Most of the road in is fine. It’s the river crossings, and the stream crossings, and the couple of genuine bogs and holes that sort the vehicles out — and confirm, several times over, that the French couple had made a wise decision about their van.
The first place we went was Cathedral Gorge, which is an enormous scooped-out hollow in the rock, shaped — by nothing but water and time — into very nearly perfect acoustics, so that sound rings and swells and hangs in the air. And when we arrived, there was a group of older teenage girls there, a school group, in full uniform, and two of them were standing in the exact acoustic centre of the place, singing. Singing “Imagine.” In perfect echoing harmony, in a stone cathedral carved by a creek, in the middle of the Kimberley. I have no notes. It was one of the more surreal things I have witnessed in a long life of witnessing things.
From there we walked to a lookout over the creek, where I found myself queuing behind roughly forty teenage girls in that same uniform. And one boy. One. In among the forty. So I asked the girl in front of me what the story was, and she laughed and explained: it was a co-ed high school, from the highlands of Tasmania — the coldest corner of the entire country — and the trip had been open to anyone who wanted to sign up, and exactly one boy, in the whole school, had. Make that make sense. I couldn’t, and neither, I suspect, could he.
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