Surviving The Harsh Australian Outback | Australia's Wild Places | Real Wild

Australia, the oldest, most extreme continent on earth. Nowhere else do you find snakes more venomous, wildlife more bizarre. Over tens of thousands of years, people have adapted to this untamed land. They have endured its extremes and gradually learned to love it. From the rich jungle, to the red desert, to the snowy mountains. But in this vast island of wild beauty, the crowning jewels are Australia's national parks. It was now a conspiracy of witches. Download Veely today. The red heart of Australia, the legendary outback. This sunburned country reveals little of the verdant green rainforest that covered it 90 million years ago, when it was part of the Australia's curious marsupials are the last living witnesses of that distant past. Why did they thrive here in such numbers and nowhere else? The polished sandstone domes of the Olgas and Uluru are sculpted by the eternal winds of geological time. This site, sacred to the Aboriginals, is guarded by one of the world's largest eagles, the Wedgetail. The arid landscape is gouged by occasional violent floods, which subside, leaving the soil struggling to retain moisture. Spinifex grass is a great moisture miser. It grows abundantly in the poor red soil, but tastes like straw, even to the wild camels. Their ancestors were brought here as outback transport in the 19th century. With nearly a million camels, Australia now has the biggest population of wild camels in the world. The Australian continent has been an isolated landmass for over 50 million years. Both floods and scorching heat have made it what it is today. But biologist Peter Latz believes the biggest influence of all has been fire. It burns like crazy and the heat of the flames is going to push me off the side of the rock and I'm going to fall over. And this is a cold frosty morning and just imagine in a hot windy summer's day this fuel can just burn away the trees and shrubs and that's how Spinifex takes over the country. It uses fire to get rid of its competitors and take over the country. Rather than matches though, the usual cause of desert wildfires is lightning. In most of Australia, bushfires are common. Years ago, Peter wondered how different this country would have looked without the influence of fire. He studied the fire sensitivity of shrubs, trees and other plants in the area where he grew up and which he knows best, the West Macdonald Ranges, now a national park near Alice Springs. The parallel ridges of the West Macdonalds form a jagged spine from west to east through the otherwise flat landscape. When fire breaks out on one of the slopes, the wind drives it for miles across the ranges. Only the deep-cut valleys are sometimes spared. As the midday sun beats down, the low-lying areas of the park seem lifeless in the blazing heat. But the grass provides habitat for many insects. There are over 1200 species of ants in Australia and for them, it can't be hot enough. Ants are the only source of food for the bizarre thorny devil, a small desert lizard that gobbles up to 750 of them a day. The echidna, an egg-laying mammal, also enjoys the feast of ants. The echidna rummages in rotten logs or digs in the ground for ants and termites. Nature perfected solar power millions of years ago. The blistering heat is ideal for the cold-blooded reptiles. Since they depend on warmth to drive their metabolism and movement, the hot red centre is truly the land of the lizard. The planet's greatest concentration of lizards is here. With lack of water a constant issue, most obtain all the moisture they need from their prey. But a new predator has recently arrived in the district, a formidable and indiscriminate hunter, the feral cat. Over the past 200 years, they have bred in the wild so successfully that up to 10 million feral cats now call Australia home. Feral cats threaten many species of native wildlife with extinction. Biologist Rachel Paltridge is finding out why. She is particularly interested in learning how the common cat can possibly survive, let alone thrive, in the deserts of Central Australia. The red-backed kingfisher is an easy target. Under threat, it flees, leaving eggs and young unprotected. Rachel's work has revealed that deserts are a surprisingly good habitat for cats. While cats' rivals, the fox and the dingo, must travel for water during dry times, cats stay and live off the reptiles. There's no way that I'd be able to capture cats without the help of the Aboriginal women, but with the Aboriginal women, we can always get a cat pretty well when we want it. Cats are not adapted to long-distance running. They actually tire out quite quickly. This is how Aboriginal people are able to capture cats, initially following their tracks, then flushing the cat out. The cat is exhausted before the Aboriginal trackers are. Once we've caught a cat, we put the radio collar on it. Next day, Rachel picks up signals. When they find tracks, the Aboriginal women piece together the cat's story from Prince in the Sand. Aboriginal trackers can interpret from its tracks where it's gone, exactly how far it's travelled, how many times it's pounced on prey, what it's eaten, how many times it's sat down, what's happened when it's met other cats, pretty well everything that's happened. Rachel's work has cast light on how cats can survive in the desert. I think the fact that cats can survive independent of water is the most important thing that's allowed them to survive right through the deserts. While the cat has adapted well to this harsh environment, desert bird populations fluctuate enormously depending on the abundance of the season. While budgerigars start breeding in huge flocks, as soon as there is water and grass seed about. They sweep across the plains in their hundreds of thousands in one of Australia's most spectacular wildlife displays. To many, the outback is an arid wasteland, but Indigenous Australians use it as a vegetable garden. What at first seems like a desolate acacia scrub provides good food for the experienced bushmen, like Peter Latz, who learned from the Aborigines. So even though this lovely big mulga's dead, we have now a solanum growing up after the fire and you can see there's lots of flowers on it and in another month there's going to be, oh not only another month, look at the fruit on here already. This is bush tomato, it's not ripe yet. I grew up eating this plant and I like it, but it's just like someone eating olives for the first time, they don't think they're very delicious, but once you get used to the taste, good eating as far as I'm concerned. Ah, what have we here? This is one of the most important grass seeds in Central Australia, tiny little seeds, a lot of work. So Aborigines, the women had these culamans which they used to winnow the seed from the ash and anything else that's in there and then put it on the grinding stone and grind it up with a bit of water and make like a dough which you then cook on the ashes and it's like the bread of the natives. So we're looking at the wheat of the desert here. Peter is a botanist and a doctor of biology. His publications on the dry habitats of Australia are known internationally. He still goes searching for signs of the original vegetation of the outback. We're in the middle of what I call a dry jungle, it's just very unusual in the desert to see this vine climbing up the tree and if we can keep far away from it, it'll go right to the very top. But you can see here the trees are multi-stemmed because it's been burnt in probably 100, 200 years ago and it's had to re-sprout from the base. In his childhood, Peter and his Aboriginal friends roam the West McDonald's searching for nature's treats. So here's a flower you just pluck out as you walk past and you can just suck the nice sweet honey out of it. But which plants are edible and which are toxic? This poisonous plant bears a confusing likeness to the delicious bush tomato. For the edible things it's really quite simple, you find the plant and go to the most sensitive part of your skin which is under your arm and rub it in there and if it doesn't sting then you can try putting it in your mouth and if it still tastes all right then, well lucky you've got a pet dingo there and you can feed him quite a bit of it and if he doesn't die then you know that it's edible. The outback seemed utterly bleak to the first European explorers. For them the red centre meant only hunger, unbearable heat and deprivation. But if you understand it like its most iconic resident does, you can find something to eat almost anywhere. The giant red kangaroo is the largest living marsupial in the world. A red kangaroo mother with her offspring. The joey will rely on her milk for a year. They have coped better than many other marsupials and live wherever the trees are to act as shade. What we have here is the most important plant to the aborigines even nowadays, it's used for chewing tobacco. This is a plant that comes up after fire, it's most prolific after fire and aborigines probably burnt a lot of country just to produce this plant. They didn't smoke it because it doesn't smoke when it's dried it just keeps going out. So they got a special ash from different plants and mixed it with the ash and then chewed it just like chewing tobacco and what the ash does is actually allow the nicotine to get into your bloodstream easily. You know the hippies at owl they would like to think it's a psychedelic drug but actually it's no different to what I'm smoking now. Peter's grandparents were 19th century German immigrants. The family grew up in the Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission on the edge of the West Macdonald Ranges. His father was a mechanic. It was here Peter learned about life in the outback and especially the so-called bush tucker, the food that nature provides even in the desert. Yeah well I was born here in 1941, actually born in Alice Springs but spent my first 12 years of my life here. For a young boy it was a fantastic life because every Saturday we used to, I only had Aboriginal mates at my age and we'd go out every Saturday fishing down in the fink or eating bush tuckers and lighting up the spinifex and sometimes three of us on a donkey with no saddle or bridle just wandering through the bush. Hermannsburg is still inhabited with the old village around the church preserved as a museum. The settlement was founded at the end of the 19th century by immigrant missionaries. Young pastor Carl Strelow was one of the few with the necessary stamina to endure this harsh life. There was two church services every Sunday, one in English and one in Arrinda and then Sunday school for us. That's my father, photo of my father with my great uncle and the boring machine when they were boring to get water and the machine is still there over in the distance. Word gets around that Peter has arrived. His old friend Hermann comes to see him. He speaks Arrinda, the language of the original inhabitants of the West McDonald's region. We were riding donkeys together when we were young fellas and catching the fish. Hermann and I used to go out and spear them didn't we, spear them. Yeah and take netting wire. Well we used to walk around. What I owe the people that brought me up is the fact that they taught me not only bush tucker but they taught me to be a good observer and that's held me in really good stead as a scientist. I mean there is a theory that the first five years are the important part for your brain and it actually forms pathways and so my brain is wired more in the aboriginal way.