I reckon it took just a few minutes for the river to change, from a small trickle to a roaring, raging, hundred-metre-wide torrent. Timber, riverbed detritus, and a dead sheep all swept past, the water seething, pent up, raw energy spectacularly displayed, thirty metres from where I was seated.
It was in 1977, late summer, and I was working in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, based out of their Alice Springs office. For reasons lost to my ageing memory, I needed to talk with the community leaders at Utopia Station.
I turned off the Sandover Highway for a short fifteen-kilometre drive along the gravel track. I got to the Sandover River crossing, a dry, stony causeway. It was fifty metres wide, and on the eastern bank, I was surprised to see one of the teachers from the Utopia school, seated on a chair in the shade of a gum tree. His car was parked well back off the crossing.
“You OK”, I asked, thinking a breakdown as the likely explanation for his circumstance. “Yer, I’m fine. I’m just waiting here for the Sandover floodwaters to arrive.” I looked at the riverbed, along the barren, dry expanse. I looked up into the blueness above. “When do you expect them?” I queried and was told, “Anytime now.”
As there hadn’t been any rain in the area for quite a while, I briefly wondered about his sanity. I did briefly consider my capacity to return to Alice, should his local knowledge and riverine expectations prove correct. “OK. See ya later”, as I drove off. It was a further eight kilometres upriver, to the township.
Utopia sat on a slight, gentle rise, three metres above the river banks. It was still a dry water course and I mentally decided the teacher possibly needed a medical check-up.
I sat down with the elders to discuss matters of some import. We had been talking for about an hour, and discussions were concluding. I looked down towards the river and noted a small trickle of water creeping along the deepest, middle channel. Ten minutes later, it had turned into a 100-metre-wide, raging, broiling torrent.
I leapt into the car, wondering about how many days I was going to be cut off. I reached the crossing, the teacher was still there, the riverbed – still a wide expanse of sand. I updated my assessment of his mental faculties; I also updated him on the state of play upriver, of the imminent arrival of the flood. I bade him adieu, and made a hasty crossing.
I parked on the western bank. I waved back to him and waited, expectantly. Ten minutes: nothing! 15 minutes: nothing. 30 minutes and I was about to call it quits when I noted that same, tell-tale trickle of water appearing in the middle of the riverbed. Another ten minutes and all hell had broken loose.
That insignificant snout of water changed. It wasn’t so much a ‘wall’ of water, but rather a wave, breaking constantly onto the sand, then disappearing, sucked into the sandy gravel in front of itself. It grew, widened, and matured into a fully-fledged flood, all within the space of minutes. Fifty metres in front of this spectacle was still a parched dryness, until the water, unhurriedly arrived, saturating all in its path, and transformed the watercourse into a foaming behemoth.
It was spell-binding. Vast amounts of angry, ochre-coloured water, being sucked into the sand, then drenching itself, being repeatedly regurgitated, before swallowing the next, and then the next section of the river bed, moving inexorably downstream, filling the space between bed and banks to capacity.
As the wave passed, the sounds of the flood demanded my attention. Three-toned – a deeply powerful, pulsing roar – a thousand horse’s hooves, close by. Then there was a higher-pitched, urgent burbling, as the flood moved up and around barriers in its path. Finally, you became aware of an underpinning, a series of thuds and scrapes as stones were grinding along the river bed.
It was time to retreat back to the surety of the bitumen and Alice, my mind buzzing, questions posed, with an excited soliloquy about what I had just witnessed. Nature, such a force; regal; frightening; inspiring, and ever-ready to demonstrate the folly of humanity’s occasional interventions. As I drove, I was on an emotional high, an eagerness to share the experience back in town that evening.
I did check out the weather data over the previous weeks. Bushy Park and Alcoota Stations, both well to the south, but within the Sandover Catchment, had reported big dumps the previous week – in the order of two to three inches, each. But since then, nothing.
I had briefly wondered how the teacher had known of the flood’s timing. I chuckled as I realised the simple reality: he would have been briefed by the Anmatyerre Senior Forecasters. Tens of thousands of years of weather observations would have refined forecasting pretty neatly! The young kids would have been sternly warned off playing in the riverbed. Life went on.