After our salubrious stay in Darwin we’re now back in the rough & tough at Batchelor, Rum Jungle.

Rum Jungle has had a checkered uranium mining past & still appears to bear the fallout from the legacy of a lack of mine site rehabilitation. Rum Jungle was the site of Australia’s first Uranium mine (from 1953 – 1971) and the primary reason this whole area in the NT was developed by non indigenous people in the first place. The fallout & shirked responsibility for the cleanup of the mine waste (Uranium-238 tailings with a half life of 4.46 billion years) from the Rum Jungle Uranium mine continues to this day.

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It’s not a big surprise that there is little mention of Uranium in the glossy tourist brochures of today.

Yet still within the surrounds of a great tragedy exists a wealth of great natural beauty & today we spent many hours hiking & admiring this vast natural resource. The scale of this country continues to amaze us both.

The Buley Rockhole was a beautiful spot, but, as is so often the case with us homosapiens, it appears to be over utilised to within an inch of its natural resources. It reminded us of crowds at the Maitland Baths back in the 1970’s when we were kids. Too many people & not enough room for nature. Maybe Sunday is not the best time to visit this spot.

We picked a picnic lunch spot at the top of Florence falls near a babbling brook. Here the balance of nature was restored. Arrrrgh the serenity!

On the way back we stopped at the Magnetic Termite Mounds. They are not actually magnetic. It’s just a compass reference, as many of the larger mounds are aligned North-South so as to maximise the available shade & keep the huge mounds (over 5 metres) as cool as possible in the heat of the NT

In total we covered quite a few kilometres of hiking. A very good result. Jayne is still in considerable pain yet figures the exercise will do more good than harm. I suspect the pain from sore hiking muscles may distract her from sciatic pain in the next couple of days.

Later in the afternoon we had a little lie down… Yet another big day!

 

04 Jul This entry was published on 04/07/2016 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.