Gorge country

A fish, first thing

There is a photograph timed at twenty-five past eight of a man in a wide hat standing on the tender holding a barramundi at arm’s length, and it is the only evidence anybody thought to send of the morning. It is enough. Nothing else about the day needed explaining after that.

Into the gorge

By four minutes past ten they were in a helicopter, and by the time the photographs start again the country has changed completely — red sandstone going up in horizontal courses like brickwork, a floor of pale boulders, and the water sitting in the bottom of it in long green pools. In one frame somebody is standing at the base of the wall in a white shirt, which is the only reason the scale reads at all.

Between ten and eleven there are waterfalls, plunge pools, and a shot taken straight out of the open door with the rotor edge still in the corner of it. Then the machine is down on the rock beside the water with its blades stopped, which is the part nobody quite believes until they see it.

And then dinner

The last photograph of the day was taken at half past four and it is a plate of mud crab in chilli, on a wooden table, with the sauce already going everywhere. There is no picture of anybody eating it, which tells you something about how quickly it went.