Latest news with #outback
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Viewers slam Nine over 'irresponsible' trailer for new season of The Block as they spot one glaring detail - but all is not what it seems
The new season of The Block is airing in a matter of weeks. A new trailer dropped on the Nine renovation show's social media last week, and not everyone was happy with what they saw. Several fans on Facebook noted that hosts Scott Cam and Shelley Craft were shown driving without seat belts on. Both Scott and Shelley are shown behind the wheel of large trucks, racing through gorgeous outback vistas - with no belt in sight. However it appears the hosts are actually stationary and only pretending to drive, with the scenery added later with some movie magic. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. Regardless some viewers were unhappy with the trailer depicting what some called 'irresponsible' driving, whether real or faked. 'Where's your seat belts?' one person asked, later adding, 'it's obviously CGI… not a good example for the youngins watching though is it'. 'How irresponsible of Channel Nine to advertise in prime time showing celebrities driving on country roads and not wearing seat belts. Clearly not aware of the road toll related to driving on rural roads' one viewer said. 'Probably should have put ya seat belts on' one more said with another adding, 'Why aren't they wearing their seat belts Nine?' 'Everyone complaining about no one wearing seatbelts - it's pretty obvious they aren't actually driving…' someone else chimed in. 'Older model Kenworth have lap belts' reasoned one viewer with another agreeing, 'they aren't actually driving'. 'You don't need to wear seat belts when you aren't actually driving lol' one person reasoned. Regardless some viewers were unhappy with the trailer depicting what some called 'irresponsible' driving, whether real or faked This year's location for the series is the sleepy Victorian hamlet of Daylesford. Daylesford is located 114km from Melbourne and its unique combination of natural beauty, historic charm and vibrant local culture provides a stunning backdrop ideal for the show. Leaked photos of one of the completed homes reveal the upcoming 2025 installment has a very similar aesthetic to a previous season of the show. While Nine is remaining tight-lipped on the official name, whispers around the network suggest the new series could easily be branded as a sequel to the 2022 'Tree Change' season, which was set in Gisborne in the Macedon Ranges - just a short drive from this year's location. 'Honestly, the style and finish of the homes are nearly identical to what we saw in Tree Change,' the insider said. 'Same vibe, same tones, same country-chic energy.' Indeed, leaked photos of one completed property by same-sex couple Han and Can show a lot similarities, in particular the furniture. One image shows a living space complete with a large white modular lounge that takes pride of place in the room. The piece of furniture is almost identical to the couches which appeared in both Ankur and Sharon and Rachel and Ryan's living rooms back in 2022. Han and Can's living room is augmented by a plush feature wall to the rear of the lounge as well as beige curtains and some mood lighting. Meanwhile, other images show an equally spartan-yet-stylish open plan kitchen and living space, complete with a large fireplace encased in a marble feature wall. The kitchen appears to be an entertainer's delight, with the space boasting a large wine rack and a refrigerator specifically for wine. Despite being similar to the 2022 season, a production insider told Daily Mail Australia that the couple's luxe fit out was very 'on trend' for the location. 'It's sleek, chic and very on-brand for Daylesford,' they said. The series, which wrapped filming on June 1, is set to premiere slightly earlier than usual, with a launch tipped for the first week of August. While fans have come to expect fiery feuds and over-the-top drama, insiders say this season is shaping up to be very different. 'There's actually much less conflict this year,' one well-placed insider said. 'But that doesn't mean it's boring. There's a charm and warmth to this season that will surprise long-term fans.' However, the source added that not everyone is convinced that producers have fully tapped into the healthy holistic living vibe Daylesford is known for. 'There was a lot of talk early on that the season might embrace living off the land, healthy eating and holistic living, which the town is so well known for,' the insider said.
Times
3 days ago
- Times
Bradley Murdoch may take truth of Peter Falconio's murder to grave
Police have offered a half-million Australian dollar reward for information leading to the discovery of the remains of a British backpacker whose murder 24 years ago on a remote highway chilled Australians and sparked a wave of outback crime thrillers. The A$500,000 (£239,000) reward for information on Peter Falconio's body is among the largest offered by police in Australia and comes as the rogue desert wanderer convicted of his murder, Bradley Murdoch, 67, nears death from cancer in a Northern Territory prison. The outback killer, who was found guilty of the murder in December 2005, was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer in 2019. Despite continued efforts by police, Falconio's remains have never been found, leading to fears that Murdoch will take the location of the body to his grave. Mark Grieve, the Northern Territory police commander, announced the reward on Wednesday, adding that officers 'still hold out hope that someone will be able to provide some vital information to assist in this search'. Murdoch has always refused to say where in the outback he hid Falconio's remains. 'We've made numerous approaches to Mr Murdoch over the years that have been passed up —including very recently, this week,' Grieve told reporters. 'Unfortunately, the outcome of those conversations rests with Mr Murdoch. On all occasions, he has chosen not to positively engage with police.' It was reported on Tuesday that Murdoch was near death and had been transferred to a prison palliative care unit. Police have repeatedly conducted searches for Falconio's remains around the scene of his murder near the desert hamlet of Barrow Creek, 174 miles north of Alice Springs in central Australia. Falconio, 28, from West Yorkshire, was driving his orange Volkswagen campervan at night along the 1,690-mile Stuart Highway in the remote Northern Territory with his girlfriend, Joanne Lees, 27. They were followed by a pick-up truck, driven by Murdoch, who trafficked drugs across the outback. Falconio pulled over after Murdoch signalled that the campervan was faulty. Murdoch shot him dead on the roadside then climbed into the vehicle. He tied Lees's hands and attempted to bind her feet and tape her mouth but she fought him off. Murdoch dragged her into the back of his Toyota four-wheel-drive but she managed to flee into the bush while he was moving Falconio's body. Murdoch searched for Lees before leaving, passing nearby three times, but she stayed hidden before finally flagging down a passing lorry in the early hours of the next day. Murdoch was found guilty of Falconio's murder by a jury in a unanimous verdict. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 28 years. He was also convicted of other assault-related charges on Lees. Only after the sentencing was it revealed that Murdoch had previously been acquitted of aggravated sexual assault on a mother and daughter in South Australia years earlier. Falconio's murder partly inspired the Australian crime thriller, Wolf Creek, in which three backpackers, two British and one Australian, are hunted down and captured by an outback serial killer. Falconio's father, Luciano, speaking from his home in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, told MailOnline he had only found out about his son's killer's poor health from media reports. 'We don't know anything about him receiving end of life care, we have not been told,' he said. His wife, Joan, was too distressed to speak, fearing that the killer's potentially imminent death would prevent the couple from ever finding out the truth of their son's fate. Now aged in her early fifties, Lees still lives Huddersfield. Joan Falconio has previously told how she and her husband, who have three other sons, have remained in contact with Lees, who was once a suspect in his murder case.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Rare event breathes life back into Australia's arid outback, attracting both animals and tourists
It appears in satellite pictures like great blotches of blue and green ink; swirling, spreading, sinking into parchment paper. In Australia's arid center, those blotches represent a new inland sea, born from a deluge that has traveled hundreds of miles through the veins of a giant, parched continent. The rare event is now breathing life into the desert, bringing mammals, birds and tourists to the heart of the Australian outback. 'Imponderable' is how ecologist Richard Kingsford of the University of New South Wales describes the possibilities for scientific discovery offered by the rise of this sudden oasis in one of the world's thirstiest areas. 'It's the water birds, the spectacular flowing water through the middle of a desert. It's the fish that are in the rivers. It's also the months afterwards, where you get carpets of wildflowers growing across the desert,' he says. 'Rare events are not well understood, because they're rare. We don't know quite how big this flood is going to be.' Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre is a 3,668-square-mile ephemeral lake and, despite the name is rarely very wet, receiving just 5.5 inches of rain on average per year. It could be more readily thought of as a giant salt pan in the South Australian desert. In 1964, British speed record breaker Donald Campbell used Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre as a racetrack, rocketing to a then-world land record speed of 403.1 mph across the wide, unbroken expanse. Ten years after Campbell's shot across the salt flats, in 1974, the lake filled to its capacity for just the third time on record. That flooding has been taken as the high-water mark and not seen since, though smaller-scale events have been recorded in recent years. This year, after Tropical Cyclone Alfred dumped on inland Queensland in March, the water flowing down to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre appears to be filling it for just the fourth time in 160 years. There are two main arteries feeding Lake Eyre — the Georgina-Diamantina River, which began filling Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre's north in early May, and the Cooper Creek system. Cooper Creek, named somewhat erroneously by early British explorer Charles Sturt, is hardly a creek. 'It can be 60 to 80 kilometers (about 37-50 miles) wide in a flood,' says Kingsford. The water brought by that second system has not yet reached Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre and may not take its full effect until October. By the time it does arrive, the desert ecosystem will be feeling the explosive extremes of its boom-and-bust cycle. Shrimps and crustaceans will be spawning, fish numbers will skyrocket, mammals like the endangered Crest-tailed Mulgara and the Dusky Hopping Mouse will get their chance to propagate. Pelicans, stilts and other waterbirds will find their way to Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre from as far away as China and Japan. The dust and sand will turn green, blooming in native shrubs with colorful flowers. The birds are not the only ones flying in to see this oasis. 'There are not many wild places on earth anymore, and this is a wild place and a spectacular place,' Kingsford says. 'Quite clearly, these floods bring many local and international visitors to see this phenomenon. 'It does trigger a tremendous tourism boom.' The influx of visitors hasn't been without growing pains as the area adapts to its newfound popularity. In February, the South Australian government announced a new ban on people walking on the lake bed, both to protect the fragile salt crust and surface, and to prevent injuries in a remote place where medical help is not always close at hand. The ban also supports the cultural practices of the Arabana people, who consider the lake sacred. But according to a recent report by Australian public broadcaster ABC, people continue to venture out onto the lake bed due to a lack of signage highlighting the rule. The government has said it will add new signage and visitor infrastructure to the area soon. To serve the tourist market, operators like Phil van Wegen dedicate themselves to a life in Australia's remote outback. Marree, a town south of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, is where van Wegen runs Arid Air, a flight company that takes tourists for joyrides over the huge lake on Cessna propeller planes. 'The flight, the route that we do, just blows people away,' he says. To him, the desert is 'vast, forever changing and spectacular.' 'So if anyone's got any ambition to come and see it, Marree is a relatively easy shot. We're only about 700 kilometers (435 miles) out of Adelaide and its bitumen all the way to the front door,' van Wegen assures. The Ghan train line ran through Maree up until the 1980s, ensuring a 'bumbling busy little town,' van Wegen says. Now he's one of 50 to 60 people who live there and believes it's the vast distances that help to keep Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre pristine. 'It's lucky that it's just so remote, you know, and it's so far from anywhere that it just doesn't get touched or tapped or anything. That's its own self-preservation.' That does not mean Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre is without its protectors. Conservationists Annemarie van Doorn and Luke Playford watch over the region like sentinels. Together, the pair manage the Kalamurina Wildlife Sanctuary, a 679,667-hectare property owned by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy on the eastern shore of the lake. The vastness of their world can only truly be understood from the helicopter they use to do their conservation work. The property they alone are responsible for is the size of Delaware. When the area is dry, and the roads are open, they can get to the nearest supermarket — a nine-hour drive away in the South Australian town of Port Augusta. Now, however, the floodwaters have cut off the dirt roads that link them to civilization. They'll stay in their desert home, trapped by water for months, possibly through the rest of the year. The Royal Flying Doctor Service lands once a month to check in on them. 'You just see nothing around you. It's so, so quiet,' Van Doorn tells CNN by phone. 'There's no light pollution, there's no noise. And you look up and there's a dingo walking around on the sand dune, and you think, 'how lucky are we?',' she says. 'Then there's other times where you've got flies crawling up your nose and in your eyes, and it's 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit), and you think, 'wow, this is pretty miserable,' but you're doing it for a great cause.' The couple's great cause is keeping a pristine environment that way. That largely involves keeping a lid on the population of feral animals such as wild boar and camels. Around two-thirds of the water that flows into Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre passes through Kalamurina, and the couple will watch life transform their barren world. 'This is special because it's a natural event,' Playford says. 'It's the largest flood in 50 years, and while that did a lot of damage in Queensland, this is an act that's not induced by climate change. It's a special occasion.' 'A good news story,' van Doorn adds. 'There is hope out there.' That hope is shared by ecologist Kingsford, who will join tourists, conservationists and other scientists in hours of outback road and air travel to catch a glimpse of a desert turned temporarily fecund. 'I'm a conservation biologist, and so it's often depressing to look at the world and what we're doing to it, and this gives me incredible optimism to be able to see this system still going through its natural rhythms in such a spectacular way.'
CNN
3 days ago
- Science
- CNN
Record rainfall is transforming this desert into a teeming oasis in the middle of Australia's outback
It appears in satellite pictures like great blotches of blue and green ink; swirling, spreading, sinking into parchment paper. In Australia's arid center, those blotches represent a new inland sea, born from a deluge that has traveled hundreds of miles through the veins of a giant, parched continent. The rare event is now breathing life into the desert, bringing mammals, birds and tourists to the heart of the Australian outback. 'Imponderable' is how ecologist Richard Kingsford of the University of New South Wales describes the possibilities for scientific discovery offered by the rise of this sudden oasis in one of the world's thirstiest areas. 'It's the water birds, the spectacular flowing water through the middle of a desert. It's the fish that are in the rivers. It's also the months afterwards, where you get carpets of wildflowers growing across the desert,' he says. 'Rare events are not well understood, because they're rare. We don't know quite how big this flood is going to be.' Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre is a 3,668-square-mile ephemeral lake and, despite the name is rarely very wet, receiving just 5.5 inches of rain on average per year. It could be more readily thought of as a giant salt pan in the South Australian desert. In 1964, British speed record breaker Donald Campbell used Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre as a racetrack, rocketing to a then-world land record speed of 403.1 mph across the wide, unbroken expanse. Ten years after Campbell's shot across the salt flats, in 1974, the lake filled to its capacity for just the third time on record. That flooding has been taken as the high-water mark and not seen since, though smaller-scale events have been recorded in recent years. This year, after Tropical Cyclone Alfred dumped on inland Queensland in March, the water flowing down to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre appears to be filling it for just the fourth time in 160 years. There are two main arteries feeding Lake Eyre — the Georgina-Diamantina River, which began filling Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre's north in early May, and the Cooper Creek system. Cooper Creek, named somewhat erroneously by early British explorer Charles Sturt, is hardly a creek. 'It can be 60 to 80 kilometers (about 37-50 miles) wide in a flood,' says Kingsford. The water brought by that second system has not yet reached Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre and may not take its full effect until October. By the time it does arrive, the desert ecosystem will be feeling the explosive extremes of its boom-and-bust cycle. Shrimps and crustaceans will be spawning, fish numbers will skyrocket, mammals like the endangered Crest-tailed Mulgara and the Dusky Hopping Mouse will get their chance to propagate. Pelicans, stilts and other waterbirds will find their way to Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre from as far away as China and Japan. The dust and sand will turn green, blooming in native shrubs with colorful flowers. The birds are not the only ones flying in to see this oasis. 'There are not many wild places on earth anymore, and this is a wild place and a spectacular place,' Kingsford says. 'Quite clearly, these floods bring many local and international visitors to see this phenomenon. 'It does trigger a tremendous tourism boom.' The influx of visitors hasn't been without growing pains as the area adapts to its newfound popularity. In February, the South Australian government announced a new ban on people walking on the lake bed, both to protect the fragile salt crust and surface, and to prevent injuries in a remote place where medical help is not always close at hand. The ban also supports the cultural practices of the Arabana people, who consider the lake sacred. But according to a recent report by Australian public broadcaster ABC, people continue to venture out onto the lake bed due to a lack of signage highlighting the rule. The government has said it will add new signage and visitor infrastructure to the area soon. To serve the tourist market, operators like Phil van Wegen dedicate themselves to a life in Australia's remote outback. Marree, a town south of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, is where van Wegen runs Arid Air, a flight company that takes tourists for joyrides over the huge lake on Cessna propeller planes. 'The flight, the route that we do, just blows people away,' he says. To him, the desert is 'vast, forever changing and spectacular.' 'So if anyone's got any ambition to come and see it, Marree is a relatively easy shot. We're only about 700 kilometers (435 miles) out of Adelaide and its bitumen all the way to the front door,' van Wegen assures. The Ghan train line ran through Maree up until the 1980s, ensuring a 'bumbling busy little town,' van Wegen says. Now he's one of 50 to 60 people who live there and believes it's the vast distances that help to keep Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre pristine. 'It's lucky that it's just so remote, you know, and it's so far from anywhere that it just doesn't get touched or tapped or anything. That's its own self-preservation.' That does not mean Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre is without its protectors. Conservationists Annemarie van Doorn and Luke Playford watch over the region like sentinels. Together, the pair manage the Kalamurina Wildlife Sanctuary, a 679,667-hectare property owned by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy on the eastern shore of the lake. The vastness of their world can only truly be understood from the helicopter they use to do their conservation work. The property they alone are responsible for is the size of Delaware. When the area is dry, and the roads are open, they can get to the nearest supermarket — a nine-hour drive away in the South Australian town of Port Augusta. Now, however, the floodwaters have cut off the dirt roads that link them to civilization. They'll stay in their desert home, trapped by water for months, possibly through the rest of the year. The Royal Flying Doctor Service lands once a month to check in on them. 'You just see nothing around you. It's so, so quiet,' Van Doorn tells CNN by phone. 'There's no light pollution, there's no noise. And you look up and there's a dingo walking around on the sand dune, and you think, 'how lucky are we?',' she says. 'Then there's other times where you've got flies crawling up your nose and in your eyes, and it's 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit), and you think, 'wow, this is pretty miserable,' but you're doing it for a great cause.' The couple's great cause is keeping a pristine environment that way. That largely involves keeping a lid on the population of feral animals such as wild boar and camels. Around two-thirds of the water that flows into Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre passes through Kalamurina, and the couple will watch life transform their barren world. 'This is special because it's a natural event,' Playford says. 'It's the largest flood in 50 years, and while that did a lot of damage in Queensland, this is an act that's not induced by climate change. It's a special occasion.' 'A good news story,' van Doorn adds. 'There is hope out there.' That hope is shared by ecologist Kingsford, who will join tourists, conservationists and other scientists in hours of outback road and air travel to catch a glimpse of a desert turned temporarily fecund. 'I'm a conservation biologist, and so it's often depressing to look at the world and what we're doing to it, and this gives me incredible optimism to be able to see this system still going through its natural rhythms in such a spectacular way.'
CNN
3 days ago
- Science
- CNN
Record rainfall is transforming this desert into a teeming oasis in the middle of Australia's outback
It appears in satellite pictures like great blotches of blue and green ink; swirling, spreading, sinking into parchment paper. In Australia's arid center, those blotches represent a new inland sea, born from a deluge that has traveled hundreds of miles through the veins of a giant, parched continent. The rare event is now breathing life into the desert, bringing mammals, birds and tourists to the heart of the Australian outback. 'Imponderable' is how ecologist Richard Kingsford of the University of New South Wales describes the possibilities for scientific discovery offered by the rise of this sudden oasis in one of the world's thirstiest areas. 'It's the water birds, the spectacular flowing water through the middle of a desert. It's the fish that are in the rivers. It's also the months afterwards, where you get carpets of wildflowers growing across the desert,' he says. 'Rare events are not well understood, because they're rare. We don't know quite how big this flood is going to be.' Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre is a 3,668-square-mile ephemeral lake and, despite the name is rarely very wet, receiving just 5.5 inches of rain on average per year. It could be more readily thought of as a giant salt pan in the South Australian desert. In 1964, British speed record breaker Donald Campbell used Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre as a racetrack, rocketing to a then-world land record speed of 403.1 mph across the wide, unbroken expanse. Ten years after Campbell's shot across the salt flats, in 1974, the lake filled to its capacity for just the third time on record. That flooding has been taken as the high-water mark and not seen since, though smaller-scale events have been recorded in recent years. This year, after Tropical Cyclone Alfred dumped on inland Queensland in March, the water flowing down to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre appears to be filling it for just the fourth time in 160 years. There are two main arteries feeding Lake Eyre — the Georgina-Diamantina River, which began filling Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre's north in early May, and the Cooper Creek system. Cooper Creek, named somewhat erroneously by early British explorer Charles Sturt, is hardly a creek. 'It can be 60 to 80 kilometers (about 37-50 miles) wide in a flood,' says Kingsford. The water brought by that second system has not yet reached Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre and may not take its full effect until October. By the time it does arrive, the desert ecosystem will be feeling the explosive extremes of its boom-and-bust cycle. Shrimps and crustaceans will be spawning, fish numbers will skyrocket, mammals like the endangered Crest-tailed Mulgara and the Dusky Hopping Mouse will get their chance to propagate. Pelicans, stilts and other waterbirds will find their way to Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre from as far away as China and Japan. The dust and sand will turn green, blooming in native shrubs with colorful flowers. The birds are not the only ones flying in to see this oasis. 'There are not many wild places on earth anymore, and this is a wild place and a spectacular place,' Kingsford says. 'Quite clearly, these floods bring many local and international visitors to see this phenomenon. 'It does trigger a tremendous tourism boom.' The influx of visitors hasn't been without growing pains as the area adapts to its newfound popularity. In February, the South Australian government announced a new ban on people walking on the lake bed, both to protect the fragile salt crust and surface, and to prevent injuries in a remote place where medical help is not always close at hand. The ban also supports the cultural practices of the Arabana people, who consider the lake sacred. But according to a recent report by Australian public broadcaster ABC, people continue to venture out onto the lake bed due to a lack of signage highlighting the rule. The government has said it will add new signage and visitor infrastructure to the area soon. To serve the tourist market, operators like Phil van Wegen dedicate themselves to a life in Australia's remote outback. Marree, a town south of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, is where van Wegen runs Arid Air, a flight company that takes tourists for joyrides over the huge lake on Cessna propeller planes. 'The flight, the route that we do, just blows people away,' he says. To him, the desert is 'vast, forever changing and spectacular.' 'So if anyone's got any ambition to come and see it, Marree is a relatively easy shot. We're only about 700 kilometers (435 miles) out of Adelaide and its bitumen all the way to the front door,' van Wegen assures. The Ghan train line ran through Maree up until the 1980s, ensuring a 'bumbling busy little town,' van Wegen says. Now he's one of 50 to 60 people who live there and believes it's the vast distances that help to keep Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre pristine. 'It's lucky that it's just so remote, you know, and it's so far from anywhere that it just doesn't get touched or tapped or anything. That's its own self-preservation.' That does not mean Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre is without its protectors. Conservationists Annemarie van Doorn and Luke Playford watch over the region like sentinels. Together, the pair manage the Kalamurina Wildlife Sanctuary, a 679,667-hectare property owned by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy on the eastern shore of the lake. The vastness of their world can only truly be understood from the helicopter they use to do their conservation work. The property they alone are responsible for is the size of Delaware. When the area is dry, and the roads are open, they can get to the nearest supermarket — a nine-hour drive away in the South Australian town of Port Augusta. Now, however, the floodwaters have cut off the dirt roads that link them to civilization. They'll stay in their desert home, trapped by water for months, possibly through the rest of the year. The Royal Flying Doctor Service lands once a month to check in on them. 'You just see nothing around you. It's so, so quiet,' Van Doorn tells CNN by phone. 'There's no light pollution, there's no noise. And you look up and there's a dingo walking around on the sand dune, and you think, 'how lucky are we?',' she says. 'Then there's other times where you've got flies crawling up your nose and in your eyes, and it's 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit), and you think, 'wow, this is pretty miserable,' but you're doing it for a great cause.' The couple's great cause is keeping a pristine environment that way. That largely involves keeping a lid on the population of feral animals such as wild boar and camels. Around two-thirds of the water that flows into Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre passes through Kalamurina, and the couple will watch life transform their barren world. 'This is special because it's a natural event,' Playford says. 'It's the largest flood in 50 years, and while that did a lot of damage in Queensland, this is an act that's not induced by climate change. It's a special occasion.' 'A good news story,' van Doorn adds. 'There is hope out there.' That hope is shared by ecologist Kingsford, who will join tourists, conservationists and other scientists in hours of outback road and air travel to catch a glimpse of a desert turned temporarily fecund. 'I'm a conservation biologist, and so it's often depressing to look at the world and what we're doing to it, and this gives me incredible optimism to be able to see this system still going through its natural rhythms in such a spectacular way.'
