Cosmic Dreaming

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We cannot date the Jaru myth, but we can date the discovery of its factual underpinning very precisely, to 1947. Geologist Frank Reeves, then working for the Vacuum Oil Company, was conducting an aerial survey of the Canning Basin when he spotted the crater near Wolfe Creek. "He thought it was volcanic at first," says his daughter Peggy Reeves Sanday, "but was later able to confirm it was of meteoric origin." Sanday, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, grew up with stories about the crater but didn't visit it until 1999, when she learned tribal tales that were an anthropologist's treasure trove. Since then she has been back almost every year, collecting dozens of Aboriginal paintings and recording their stories. Her university's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will mount an exhibition, "Track of the Rainbow Serpent," in October, and Sanday is currently finishing a book about the crater. Her late father's find was extraordinarily rare. Although an estimated 3,000 metric tons of meteoric dust falls to Earth each year, only about 100 meteorites of any substance make it through the atmosphere. Typically, only five of these will be made of iron and therefore "less prone to break up," says Alex Bevan, Curator of Mineralogy and Meteoritics at the Western Australian Museum. More than half shoot harmlessly into the sea; individuals large enough to gouge a Wolfe Creek arrive - fortunately for us - about once every 50,000 years. The Earth's surface has "fewer than 20 craters associated with remnants of the projectile that formed them," says Bevan. "There are craters on the sea bed, but Wolfe Creek is (after the Barringer "Meteor Crater" in Arizona) the second largest associated with meteorite material on land." Its relative youth - scientists, among them the famed Eugene Shoemaker, have dated it with great confidence at 300,000 years - means it has not experienced the eons of erosion that have blurred or effaced its predecessors.

The trip to the crater is hard and hot: 150 km of corrugated red dirt road from Halls Creek, through a flat expanse of spinifex and low scrub. This Tanami Track, if you had a couple of days to spare, would lead you to Alice Springs, near the center of the continent, but instead the amateur crater hunter turns left into the desert. Twenty km on, the rim comes into view. Its 35-m slopes seem high after a few hours of traveling in only two dimensions, but a brief scramble over the rocks puts you on the lip. A wedge-tailed eagle, glossy black against the sunburnt sky, patrols the circumference in majestic sweeping curves. Chunks of broken sandstone glow a warm pale orange; welded under and around them are balls of rust-colored shale, their surfaces pitted and folded - oxidized remnants of the meteorite. New nickel-bearing minerals were found here, one named reevesite after the crater's discoverer.

Early morning and the temperature is already creeping into the 30s. A brisk breeze coming off the plains feels like a fan-forced oven. But there's no wind 60 m below, where the flat bowl of the crater is still and stifling, almost steamy from the moisture trapped in the sinkholes and fractures beneath the sand. The inside face is steeper. The rocks slip and clatter, startling ring-tailed dragon lizards that jut their jaws at the intruder in seeming defiance. A balancing hand placed carelessly into the spinifex needles is rewarded with a dozen tiny dots of blood; peripheral vision catches the thick brown tail of a snake gliding face-high a meter away. This is not the place to suffer even a minor injury.

At the bottom of the slope, a path worn by unseen animals leads to a perfectly circular stand of trees sucking water out of the salty white gypsum. There are wattles, paperbark and bloodwood eucalypts; among them pink Major Mitchell cockatoos shatter the oppressive silence with their raucous screams as they feed. Fairy wrens dart between flowering shrubs, and from the knee-high sedges and grasses comes the whisper of tiny life.

It would be easy to turn mystical in such a place. Its scale is at once intimate and overwhelming, and standing back on the rim, the shimmering earth spreads endless all around. It is tempting, for a moment, to imagine you are touched by the emotion the crater must have inspired in those who first walked into it, and feel you share that connection with those who have cherished it as a sacred place for more than 40,000 years.

Tempting, but foolish. Marvel at the emptiness of the desert plain, but remember, Barbara Sturt and her people can find waterholes and billabongs here in a landscape that could kill the rest of us in hours. That kind of knowledge, you suspect, takes more than one lifetime to acquire.