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National Geographic : 1973 Feb
Contents
NATIONAL February 1973 GEGR APHI1lC THE NATIONALGEOGRAPHICMAGAZINEVOL. 143, NO. 2 COPYRIGHT© 1973 BY NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY,WASHINGTON,D.C. INTERNATIONALCOPYRIGHTSECURED The TOP End of Down Under By KENNETH MACLEISH SENIOR ASSISTANT EDITOR Photographs by THOMAS NEBBIA HE BUFFALO came out of the swamp a little before noon. They ambled, graz ing, toward a paperbark thicket a quar ter of a mile away. Peter Thomsen, the buff catcher, mopped his face and slumped at ease behind the wheel of his stripped-down four-wheel-drive truck. "We'll wait," he said. "Cut 'em off when they get farther from the swamp." January's summer sun blazed in the haze heavy sky above Australia's tropic north. Clouds hatched by its heat roiled up over the land. On the floodplain where we waited in the shade of a pandanus patch, swamps sim mered in a ferment of renewed life. Before evening, thunderheads ten miles high would drift across country already greened by rain, drenching it with new downpours. Then the wide-spreading rivers would widen farther. Billabongs and lagoons would deepen in once-dry creek beds. A few more miles of bush track-back roads-would vanish beneath sheets of warm, slow-mov ing water. The Wet season was underway, the Wet with a capital "W." It deserves that terse and graphic label. The Top End, which is the northern part of the Northern Territory, is an all-or-nothing sort of country: rich or ruinous, beautiful or desolate, Wet or Dry. In the Dry, which lasts from May to Octo ber, it almost never rains. Then the Wet comes. Guaranteed. Thirty to 65 inches, de pending upon where you are north of 15 de grees south, which is about where the Top End begins (map, page 150). That guaran teed Wet is the reason people live there. "First we get storms, scattered ones, but enough to wet the ground and start the grass," Peter had told me. "It gets hot enough to boil your brains. Then the real rains come, the monsoon. No more storms, just a great gray sky and rain-sometimes days of it. "It's late this year. If it wasn't, we wouldn't 145
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