Red Rock Billabong Sunrise (Kalkadoon Country, Outback Australia)

Corella Valley Geoscience:

Rocks typically seen in the creekbeds of the Corella Valley are dark grey calcsilicates of the Corella Formation, often intruded by a pink fine-grained rock composed of pink feldspar and subordinate honrblende, which contain numerous fragments of dark-green to black metadolerite and some calc-silicates. This is a part of the Mount Philp Breccia. Typically mixed in with these creekbeds is pegmatite that seems to intrude the breccia.

Pegmatite are intrusive rocks with extreme coarse grained texture that are developed at the final stages of magma crystallization. As huge amount of time has been granted to pegmatite rocks so it has extremely large crystals and sometimes rare minerals are associated with it which are not found in other rocks. Pegmatite contains crystals that are atleast one centimetre long in diameter.
Pegmatite have composition similar to that of granite with abundant quartz, feldspar and mica. These are sometimes also called as granite pegmatites.

The mineralogy of a pegmatite is in most cases dominated by some form of feldspar, often with mica and usually with quartz, being altogether "granitic" in character. Beyond that, pegmatite may include most minerals associated with granite and granite-associated hydrothermal systems, granite-associated mineralisation styles, for example greisens, and somewhat with skarn associated mineralisation.

The Kalkadoon People:

The Kalkadoon People, also known as the Kalkatungu, Kalkatunga, or Kalkadungu, ruled what is called the Emu Foot Province and have been living on these lands for over 40 thousand years. The Kalkadoon People owned vast tracts of land extending from McKinley’s Gap in the east where they joined the Goa tribe of the Winton district to Gunpowder Creek which was the territory of the Waggaboongas. On the southern side of their territory the Kalkadoons were touched upon by the Pitta-Pitta tribe of the Boulia district, and on the northern side by the Mittakoodi of the Fort Constantine country.

The Kalkadoons would mark their territory boundaries with an emu or cranes foot that was either painted onto rocks and trees or carved into the hard granite rock. This was also a warning for other Aboriginal clans not to pass these boundaries.

The Kalkadoon (Kalkatungu) are descendants of an Indigenous Australian tribe living in the Mount Isa region of Queensland. Their forefather tribe has been called 'the Elite of the Aboriginal warriors of Queensland'. In 1884 they were massacred at "Battle Mountain" by settlers and police.

The first Europeans to visit the area were explorers Burke and Wills who crossed the Cloncurry River in 1861. Though their journals make no mention of the tribe, their passing through is said to have been recorded in Kalkatungu oral history, and in their language they coined the term walpala (from 'white feller') to denote Europeans. Three parties sent out to search for Burke and Wills, led respectively by John McKinlay, William Landsborough, and Frederick Walker, passed through the general area. Walker, a former commander of the Dawson native police, shot 12 natives dead and wounded several more, just to the north east of Kalkatungu territory.

Another early European settler, Edward Palmer, who was described by George Phillips as 'one of that brave band of pioneer squatters who in the early sixties swept across North Queensland with their flocks and herds, settling, as if by magic, great tracts of hitherto unoccupied country', settled on the edge of Kalkatungu country in 1864, at Conobie, on the western bank of the Cloncurry River. Decades later, Palmer described the natives as a peculiar people of which little was known. Palmer was critical of the use of native police and interested in indigenous tribes. His station lands did not cover any Kalkatungu sacred sites, he did not object to their presence in the vicinity, and found no problem in his relations with the Kalkatungu. He tried to learn their language. Ernest Henry arrived in 1866, discovering, with the assistance of Kalkatungu guides, copper deposits the following year, and founded the Great Australia Mine. He successfully enlisted some Kalkatungu people to work one of these mines. A short attempt at settlement by W. and T. Brown at Bridgewater in 1874 experienced, like Palmer, no difficulties with the indigenous owners of the land.

The Scottish settler Alexander Kennedy then took up land in the area in 1877. He had managed, since his arrival in 1861, to accumulate land holdings of some 4,800 sq. miles, holding 60,000 cattle, and established himself in a residence he built, called Buckingham Downs. Kennedy is thought to have begun the troubles with the native peoples of the area by instigating murderous assaults on the Kalkatungu. Iain Davidson describes him as 'the man who led the destruction of the tribes of North West Central Queensland.'

The traditional white heroic narrative version of what then occurred drew on the account provided by Sir Wilmot Hudson Fysh in 1933. According to this version, the Kalkatungu was by nature a hostile and bellicose tribe, exceptionally brave with 'primitive' military cunning and guerilla-like tactics of strategic withdrawals to the mountains to evade reprisals for their savagery. They were eventually vanquished and broken after a last stand against men like Alexander Kennedy.

Source: Rocks and Landscapes of Northwest Queensland by Laurie Hutton & Ian Withnall, Learning Geology (geologylearn.blogspot.com), &
Kalkadoon PBC (www.kalkadoonpbc.com.au).

Taken on: January 1, 2023

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Sets appears in: • North West Queensland (Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Country)

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Camera: Nikon D5600, f/8.0, 1/125 sec, 17mm (=25mm), ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon D5600
Lens:	TAMRON 17-35mm F/2.8-4 Di OSD A037N
Aperture:	f/8.0
Exposure Time:	0.008 sec (1/125)
Focal Length:	17mm (35mm equivalent: 25mm)
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Manual
Exposure Mode:	Manual
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Saturation:	High
Sharpness:	Hard
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 12.4 (Windows)
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