The exquisite Ningaloo Coast.
The flour-white sand is littered with tiny shells of intense complexity and colour that softly crunch as they give way to your feet. The translucent, invigorating salt water swirls softly in the bays, with Dotted Darts and Blue Snapper lazily swimming in a few feet of water beside the shore. The crashing waves on the outer reef form a jagged white-blue horizon in the foreground, in front of the distant deep azure of the sky meeting the sapphire ocean beyond. And of course the reef and coral, the schools of tropical fish that regard you with a quick glance and a subtle movement of the tail as we plunge our heads into their world, our eyes bulging in wonder behind plastic goggles.
But perhaps the most surprising element of Ningaloo is the stark contrast this ocean panorama creates against the land on which its tides creep up and down. The country is hard and arid, desert-like with windblown wiry spinifex, scrubby and grey against darker sandy soil that runs into rocky outcrops.
The sun bakes, the salty wind punishes and the country bears the scars.
With this come animals – kangaroos, dingos, lizards and possibly most jarring, emus that slowly amble metres from sand dunes. It’s difficult to reconcile these two domains, one with so much water and the other caked in dust.
This dichotomy was given a vivid focus one morning as Sandi and I are having a coffee before the kids awaken.
Two kangaroos, one small the other larger, bound past our table. They are only a few metres away and moving at reasonable haste, however not in a way that creates any more interest than a regular sighting of these macropods. But they were close.
Everything changes instantly when only seconds later, at a loping gallop comes a healthy, straw-coloured dingo. His eyes are focused on the roos, but as he turns the corner around the back of our table, he looks up into the distance for a split-second. It’s a cold, scheming and utterly thrilling instant.
It all happens in seconds, but time moves slowly as I realise for the first time in my life, I am witness to a live hunt, watching an apex predator in action. An involuntary ‘holy shiiiit’ spills from my mouth, proving once again that in times of extreme surprise, my vocabulary reduces to basic vulgarity.
The kangaroos disappear for a second along the back section of the campsite, only to reappear across the other side, however now there is only one, the smaller. I wonder if the dingo has split them intentionally? The kangaroo bounds up a sand dune, is about halfway up, when the dingo appears at the base and suddenly accelerates. You can see faint explosions of sand from his back feet. He speeds up the dune and is gaining on the roo, who senses the distance closing and increases its effort, springing over the top of the dune with the dingo only metres behind. He tops the dune and disappears and the scene ends.
Sandi and I look at each other in astonishment and I realise that I’m feeling utterly exhilarated.
Later, we are driving out of the site and we see several smaller, weedier dingos milling around not far from where the hunting dingo may have caught his quarry. They are darker, skeletal and mangy in contrast with the vigorous, smooth hunter we had seen earlier.
We head to the aptly named Turquoise Bay, gaze at the azure blues and bleached whites, the fish and the foam, the endless splendour. But despite this glorious brilliance, it will be that vivid calculating instant when the dingo paused time, angled his head and glanced into the distance… this will be the image that remains carved into my mind.
Big Country 