Meet the artwork: Up the Birdsville Track

Published 24 April 2020

Photograph by Colin Beard, Australian Geographic. Featured in A Portrait of Australia: Stories through the lens of Australian Geographic exhibition at Bribie Island Seaside Museum.

For 30 years Australian Geographic journalists have captured the rich diversity of our nation, from schoolyards to parliament and the outback to the ocean. They have reported on Australia and Australians, both ordinary and extraordinary, going about their daily lives. Captured in the photographs are the diversity of our landscapes and the people with their struggles, passions, livelihoods, skills and the changing times through which they have lived.

Each extraordinary picture has an extraordinary story. The featured image Up the Birdsville Track by Colin Beard is a perfect example. The most unlikely character dressed smartly in a red felt hat and fully kitted with a swag walking down one of the most remote looking roads in the desert seems to be incongruous, if somewhat staged. The truth is, this is how this young man was discovered. Here is an excerpt from the story by Paul Mann from the Australian Geographic publication, A Portrait of Australia:

The police were not amused: someone was walking the Birdsville Track, alone and in summer. They had a plane at Leigh Creek, in South Australia, ready to fly up and get him but had heard an Australian Geographic team was on the track and asked us to intercept and deliver the stranger to the Birdsville Station…

We found the man in the red hat about 50km north of Mungerannie: a lone, skinny figure in riding boots, blue jeans and a white T-shirt; carrying a sack with food and water and a swag wrapped in blue plastic.

We pulled up and offered him a lift to Birdsville; he looked us up and down as his face broke into a friendly grin and he climbed on board, slinging his swag on the back. His name was Graham Childs. Originally from Cessnock, NSW, and aged just 26, he’d spent the past eight years in WA working on Kimberley cattle stations and he was headed back there now after holidaying at home. He looked embarrassed when I told him the stir he’d caused.

“I walked down the Tanami track on my own last summer,” he said, referring to the NT’s desert region. “I may not be the best bushman around, but I can get by.” And that was the secret of the man in the red hat. The Birdsville Track’s character has altered so much that the locals didn’t know a dinkum Aussie bushie when they saw one. In his swag were flour, potatoes, onions, canned corn beef and water he replenished from bores along the way. If food ran short, he’d hunt around for birds’ eggs. He knew where to find yams, witchetty grubs and wild peas and had even learnt to tolerate paddymelon.

He could snare rabbits and goannas and, if really desperate, would kill and eat a snake. “I’ve trained myself to live off the land and eat just about anything,” Graham said, explaining that he’d admired and learnt the ways of the blackfellas and old bushies who knew how to live off this country….

As we shook hands before parting I asked him where he got that hat. “Turkey Creek roadhouse, Western Australia,” he said, before adding with an embarrassed grin, “cost me 50 bucks.”

“But, why that colour?” He caught the undertone in my voice, as though I was insinuating no self-respecting bushie would wear such an attention-grabbing hue, and looked at me as though I was simple. “Because it was the only one that fit!” he said. 

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