Paul Morris: Perseverance pays off in surveying the remote, rugged Kimberley

Paul Morris talks about the challenges and rewards of ambitious regolith sampling programs in the Kimberley region.

Transcript

00:01 Paul

I was sitting in the front seat of the helicopter and we’re flying along the coast and I looked down and I can see a couple of crocodiles on the mudflat, magnificent cliffs and I thought I can't believe that they're paying me to do this. 

00:14 Julie

Welcome to The Rocks Beneath Our Feet. In this series, five geologists talk about their years devoted to working for the Geological Survey of Western Australia. From understanding early life, to the tectonic processes that shaped our planet, and making the maps that unearth our understanding of Western Australia’s geology, they reveal their shared passion for discovering the stories in the rocks beneath our feet.

I’m Julie Hollis.

In this episode, Paul Morris talks about the challenges and rewards of ambitious regolith sampling programs in the Kimberley region.

00:49 Paul

In 2010, the end of 2010, we had another funding surprise come through. The State Government, I think probably with a little bit of political pressure, decided that they needed to show a bit more interest in the Kimberley area. And they started off an initiative of a five years’ worth of funding for the Kimberley Science and Conservation Strategy. And this was a broad funding program. It covered main roads. It covered education. It covered conservation and land management. Some of it trickled down to our department. But the idea was to try and generate some interest in the Kimberley. 

01:24 Julie

Right

01:25 Paul

It's remote, obviously, it's a long way from Perth. It has a very high indigenous population who are very protective of their culture. It has a history of being an area, which is very difficult to get access to. There are a number of interest groups there. But the directive was that we should be running some regional geochemical programs up there. And we should combine that, as we’d done before, in some of these areas with the collection of bedrock samples.

So for the first, probably three years, we just tried to get access. We started off, this was in 2011, I did an orientation trip with, with Dave Ladbrook, who was a field assistant at the survey. Dave and I drove up to the Kimberley and we drove on the Gibb River Road, right the way up to Kalumbaru right on the north coast on the Timor sea, stopping at various stations along the way, seeing what sort of facilities they had, talking to the locals about the program, and all of them said, “You'll be lucky to get in because of the heritage issues with Aboriginal people.” I’d been on an early trip with some people from state government who represented a number of bodies. We did a trip to Derby to talk to the locals there about the about the program. And I think it's fair to say didn't go down particularly well, I got a fair hearing. I didn't have any complaints, but some of the other people got a real hard time,

02:44 Julie

Right.

02:45 Paul

You know, there was obviously a great deal of antipathy towards the government. But at the end of that trip, we had a good idea, well a better idea of what we were up against as far as logistics was concerned. It's an incredibly rugged country. There's very little road access. It's ideal helicopter country. You couldn't really do anything in the area in terms of geology on a regional extent without using a helicopter. So we decided that we would do this program. And Julie Hollis, heavily involved in these programs. Early on, Julie and I spent a number of times going up to the Kimberley.

03:18 Julie

We did.

03:19 Paul

But we just kept at it. You know, we went and we met with groups, we talked to people. And I’d felt at times that we really weren't making much progress at all.

03:31 Julie

Yeah.

03:32 Paul

But the dam broke, I guess, when we did a meeting in the with the Balingarra people in 2013 Julie and I flew up to Kunnunurra to meet with the Balingarra Aboriginal Corporation. And I must confess, when I arrived up there, I thought I'm going through the motions here, you know, we'll go to the meeting, we'll do our slideshow, we'll talk about things. And we'll probably get a blank, and then we'll have a nice dinner at a hotel, and then we'll fly back to Perth.

So we went to the meeting. And there was, I think about half a dozen people there. There were some people from the Kimberley Land Council. And we did our presentation. And the chairperson, she was pretty clued up with what was going on. And she quizzed us pretty hard about what was happening. And the background to this was at the time we were trying to negotiate, James Price Point was going off just north of Broome where the State Government was trying to gain access to some land up there in relation to gas exploration. And there was a bit of a standoff up there. And the State Government was talking about taking the land under State Government law, and there was a reasonable amount of antagonism towards the government.

If we were going to do this work, we had to do it collaboratively. And we told them that and they said what are you going to do if we say no? And I said, “We’ll walk away”. I said, “We will, we'll just walk away. We won't do it”. So we went to a room next door and sat in the sofa. And after about 20 minutes or so we came back in again and they said you can do it. Well I, I could have just I could have dropped on the floor. You know I just didn't know what to say. They said you can do this program. So I thought well now we're in trouble. Now we've actually got to do the bloody program.

So we started planning. The sampling we decided to do was based out of Kalumbaru, probably the most remote place in the Kimberley. There's a campground there. It's run by the Catholic mission. We hired a couple of dongas up there. We took tents up there. We all dutifully drove up there from Perth. It takes. I think, took us about seven or eight days to get up to Kalumbaru. It's a long, long way. We had fuel taken up there, drummed aviation fuel was taken up by road up the Gibb River road by a company in Derby, a huge semi-trailer up a very, very difficult road. We got up there. We set up and another Australian National Helicopters Jet Ranger arrived and landed in the mango field next to the campground.

And we set off. And it was as we've done before, nothing really new. A typical day. Ever since I've done this helicopter work, whether I was flying and sampling or not, I've always got up at about quarter to five in the morning. Okay, I set my alarm. I'm in my little tent. I get up at quarter five in the morning. The helicopter pilots usually up very shortly after that. And we usually sit and have a quiet time for about 20 minutes where you have a cup of tea. And it's a beautiful time of the day it's. The sun is just coming up. It's very, very peaceful. Doesn't matter where, the middle of the desert is great, but it doesn't matter. If you're at Kalumbaru it's just as good and you have this very quiet time. And then if you're using a generator you turn that on about a quarter past five, 20 past five. Of course that wakes everyone up. And the organization is the people who are sampling of absolute priority. You get out of their way. If they want their breakfast you get them breakfast. If you want if they want a cup of coffee, you get them a cup of coffee. The idea is that everyone is ready to go on the helicopter when the helicopter wants to go. I had a field assistant once who forgot his camera and one of the guy back and get his camera. I said, “How long will it take you to get your camera?” He said, “five minutes” I said, “forget it, get on the helicopter”, you know, like five minutes is around about you know that's about 80 bucks worth of helicopter time.

07:07 Julie 

Yeah.

07:07 Paul

so I said “no, no get on the helicopter”. You know you have to be better organized than this. So everyone's ready to go. The helicopter leaves at first light and then everyone around the camp can relax a little bit. They have their breakfast, get tidied up, sort some samples out and things like that.

So the first people to go in the morning are the regional mappers. They're dropped off. And then the helicopter comes back and the samplers get on board. We didn't use the auger in the Kimberley because the ground is so stony. So we just dug with a small spade. Same thing, took a sample on a five by five kilometre grid. So it was a slightly lowered density than before. And I think we got in the region of about seven or 800 samples in that Balingarra area. Absolutely stunning country, just right on the coast, beautiful gorges, magnificent waterfalls, huge sandstone cliffs.

07:57 Julie 

Yeah.

07:58 Paul

Spectacular. I remember taking off one morning when I was going out sampling and the helicopter had got back reasonably quickly. And the sun, it was up but not very far. And I was sitting in the front seat of the helicopter, no doors on, had the field assistant in the back. He had all of the sampling gear on the seat next to him, getting his bags ready for sampling. We had the first site in the GPS. The helicopter pilot has taken off and we're flying over the coast. And I looked down and I can see a couple of crocodiles on the mudflat down there. I’ve got these magnificent cliffs off to the right. And I thought, ‘they're actually paying me to do this. I can't believe that they're paying me to do this’. Not only in areas like the Kimberley, but in the desert too, where you're flying over these sand dunes. And you can see the horizon which is a long, long way away and it's just so desolate. It's absolutely beautiful.

08:49 Julie 

Yeah.

08:50 Paul

So, the traditional owners were up there. They had a helicopter to begin with for a day and they went off and had a bit of a look around. They were to some places have not been to for a long time. And that was worked out well and they hung around for a day or two, some wonderful old men.

09:02 Julie 

Yep.

09:02 Paul

Some lovely old men who had great stories. And one of them grew up on the mission there. I’ve seen him since then. I've seen him since then. And we've had a couple of phone calls. He's a wonderful person. So they were pretty happy, I think. We got all the samples. We went back to Perth. And we thought, ‘Wow, this is great’.

Julie and Chris Phillips had been working in the southeast of the Kimberley and we had a meeting with the people in that area, Bunuba and Yuriangem Tarm country. Julie and I went to Warmen for a meeting and had a meeting with them there. And they had a few reservations about things, but in the end, they let us do a program there. And we did another one down there, which was in 2014.

But just before we'd gone up there to do that program, one of the other Aboriginal corporations we'd been talking to, which is the Dambimangari mob, who look after the Yampi Peninsula on the western side of the Kimberley, had got in touch with us. And out of the blue, they'd agreed that we could do a program. Now, when they say you can do a program, you don't sort of say oh, well, we'll think about it. You've got to do it. You know, you've got to keep faith here.

10:04 Julie 

Yeah.

10:05 Paul

So the money was running out at the end of that financial year. So we really had to do something about this quickly. So after we'd finished doing this Bunuba and Yuriyangem Tarm program, we went back to to Broome, which was two days away. We had four days in Broome. We restocked. We had to reprovision again in Broome, all the food, we had freezers we had to get filled up, we had them plugged in at the hotel, the food to buy. And in the meantime, the helicopter pilot had been moving some fuel around from the base for the Dambimangari program, which was at Mount Hart, and had been putting some fuel around the place for us because you can't really move fuel around very easily in these areas by road, there were just no roads. So they do what's called slinging the fuel, which is where on a long line, they carry drums of fuel around and they bring them back in a net when the drums are empty. We always take our fuel drums home. We never leave them out in the bush.

10:58 Julie 

Yep.

11:58 Paul

And then at the end of four days, we drove back up to Mount Hart. Dambimangari people were pretty keen that they had some monitors on our program to go out with the with the rock samplers and also to monitor the soil sampling. It sounds great, you know, to go out and do these things, if you were a monitor. I know some of them got quite excited about going in a helicopter. But frankly, it's a little bit tedious after a while, you know, you’re flying around with no doors on. It's pretty cold. It's windy. It's noisy. And there's not much you can do when you're in the helicopter. And also, when you land, the geologists are really annoying because they want to walk all over the place. And they want to walk and walk and walk and walk and they want to collect rocks. And so it's pretty boring stuff after a while.

11:39 Julie 

Yep.

11:40 Paul

And the soil sampling is just as bad. You go to the same site, you do the same thing over and over again. You dig a hole in the ground, you put dirt in the bag and put it in the helicopter.

This was probably one of the most spectacular bit of country we ever worked in. It's got Horizontal Falls on it, you know, which is where all people who want to go to the Kimberley want to go to Horizontal falls, huge tidal range, the water races out through this gap. And then it races in again. And some of the rivers there, water does flow uphill, you know, it just goes up the river then it goes down the river. So spectacular country. And again, another one of these, are they really paying me for this moments. You know, when you're sitting on top of a hill, you're taking a sample and you look out and you're up high and you can see this coast. Absolutely amazing.

I’ll just jump a little bit to a related program. Early on a few years before, there was a collaborative program being done by with us between us, the states and the national geological survey, Geoscience Australia, which was to collect samples for national coverage of Australia.

12:40 Julie

Yep.

12:40 Paul

And it was based on collecting samples from the from the lowest points in catchments. So it's outlet chemistry. And it was one sample every five and a half thousand square kilometres, which is very low density. I had very little to do with this program. I sort of hand-balled this to another couple of people who collected it. I did do some consultation work with Aboriginal people for it.

13:00 Julie

Right.

13:01 Paul

in some of the remote communities. Ginginjarra. I went to up into the northeast of the state north of Kiwikurra, and we had some great difficulty getting agreement to go even collect. We wanted to collect five kilograms of soil at a density of one every five and a half thousand square kilometres, which is incredibly low density. But if we added together the fact that they wanted this monitor to go here, and we had to fly the helicopter there, then come back again, some of the samples were going to cost us $25,000 each to collect, so we just walked away.

13:31 Julie

Yeah.

13:31 Paul

So in the end, we collected 72% of the samples over the whole state.

13:36 Julie 

That’s not bad.

13:36 Paul

And this was largely done by Colin Strickland, and another field assistant who did a lot of the stuff in the more accessible areas.

13:44 Julie 

Yep.

13:44 Paul

I had very little to do with that. But we made a commitment that if we did go to any of the areas that where we hadn't collected any of these samples, we’d collect the samples. Even though the program had finished, we told Geoscience Australia, we’d do this. So getting back to the Dambimangari program, there was one sample from the National Geoscience Geochemical Survey, which was on the Dambimangari area. So after we'd finished doing the soil sampling, Andrea Schieb who used to work with me as a geologist in the regolith section, and the helicopter pilot and me set off with the auger to collect this outlet sediment sample, which naturally enough was on the coast.

And we flew to this area, and it was in a river valley. It was it was enclosed by some sandstone cliffs. We flew in there. I thought, we're never going to find a place to land here. They're horizontal bedded sandstones. And I said to the pilot, I said, “This doesn't look too good”. Now, we always had a bit of a rule with the helicopter pilots. I didn't tell him how to fly the helicopter, and he didn't tell me how to do the geology. So if he said, I'm not going to land there, that was the end of the story. If I I said, I'm sure you can get in there, he’d probably throw me out the helicopter.

14:51 Julie 

Yeah.

14:51 Paul

So I don't know anything about flying helicopters. So, he said, “I can get down there.” So I thought, ‘if you can get there, up to you’. So he landed on the sandstone shelf on the side of the river. And I was in the front seat. And as we landed, I was watching the rotors. And he got the airplane down and stopped the engine. And the rotors were 20 centimeters off the cliff,

15:13 Julie 

Wow.

15:13 Paul

the front of the rotors. So he had the skids down nice and flat on the rock. It was fine. We got out. There was a very small drop into the stream there, perhaps four feet off this ledge, you could sort of step down into it. And it was, at the time, a series of pools going down the stream. And he said to me, “Look”, he said, “if I was you I’d get that sample really quickly,” he said, “because I think the tide’s coming in.

15:36 Julie 

Oh God.

15:37 Paul

And I think that pretty soon the water is going to be coming up the river”. And he said, “when we were coming,” he said, “that pool over there's got a crocodile in it,” he said, “and that one down there has got a shark in it”. So he said, “Don't wait until the pools join up. And you're on the other side of the river,” he said, “because if you try it like it's it might only be three or four feet across,” he said, “but one of them will get you if you're going across the river with the auger.” So we raced across the river. We could walk across the sand banks. We took the sample and we got back and sure enough, the water was rising. And before long, it was a river but it was going upstream. And it was, it was deep. You know, it was four foot deep. The water was coming up towards the top of the sandstone platform we were on. The helicopter pilot had, needless to say, gone off to do some fishing. So he was off somewhere.

So we're sitting on this platform, and then we heard this noise and it was an outboard motor. And round the corner came this tin boat with about eight people in it coming up the river. And they saw us there and they all went “Oh!” and it was from one of these high-end tourist boats that go up and down the Kimberley coast. And they were doing the sort of look around thing and you know, the guy who was on the engine said “What are you guys doing here?” We said, “Oh we work for the government, you know, we're just doing some sampling”. They were, as we were, very, very surprised in the middle of nowhere, here was a helicopter.

17:00 Julie 

Yeah.

17:01 Paul

This, you know, really big helicopter. And then this boat comes around the corner. So they had a bit of a look around. They waved and they took off. And just after that helicopter pilot came back, we strapped ourselves in the helicopter. And he fired it up. And he just backed out. He just backed off a little bit and went straight up and took off. So we got the sample. 

17:19 Julie 

Yeah.

17:20 Paul

So that was the last sampling program we carried out in the Kimberley. We published three sets of explanatory notes from that from the program for the regolith work. All of the data went in the geochemical data set. And I think, well, we had a meeting of all at the end of the program, in Perth at the Department of Premier and Cabinet, about the program, a bit of a debrief. But I like to think that the work that we put in, in talking to people paid off, you know, from that original program we did in the Balingarra country where I think we were very honest with the way we dealt with them. 

17:52 Julie 

Yeah.

17:53  Paul

I think the phones ring around the Kimberley. And if the news is good, then it works well.

17:58 Julie

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