Gnammas

Don’t say gnamma hole

Although often used, the term ‘gnamma-hole’ is a tautology; the concept of ‘hole’ is already incorporated in the word ‘gnamma’.

The word ‘gnamma’ is from the Western Desert aboriginal language. The Nyungar word ‘nama’ has the same meaning.

What are they?

Gnammas are a peculiar type of hole that occur in rock outcrops, particularly granite. They usually have a small opening on the surface of the rock with a larger bowl shaped cavity beneath. They hold anything from a few litres to a thousand litres or more, although the larger holes are rare.

Gnammas are formed by eons of chemical weathering by water. It is suggested that some aboriginal groups started or enhanced gnammas by lighting fires on suitable rocks.

Gnammas are not a soak – they fill after rain. Aboriginals often covered them with sticks to prevent access by native animals. This had the bonus of minimising evaporation. Gnammas were vital to explorers and prospectors and are an important water source for all kinds of fauna.

A more recent practice is the insertion of a stick into the water that allows small animals and/or insects to exit the gnamma should they fall in.

In Darkest West Australia: A Guide To Out-back Travellers, H.G. Mason wrote:

In desert spinifex, gnamma holes and soaks may be found in patches of scrub mulga, which occur here and there throughout the interior, generally low-lying formations of granite and desert sandstone, clothed with weeds, silver grass and scattered small narrow-leafed salt bush with occasional quondong and kurrajong trees…

 

© Kim Epton 2015-2024
326 words, four photographs.

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Place Names

The reports of the various trips, tours and travels on the Adventures website have a lot of information about place names – their naming and features – toponymy.

Accurate toponymy can a tell a story of a place’s discovery, its naming and why it was so named. If you like to find out about where you have been, where you are, and where you are going obviously you need to work with place names and names of features. Often, beyond the bald facts of a place or region, there is much attendant data in the toponymy that can enrich and preserve its culture. This toponymic information then flows over to Geographic Information Systems (GISs) – a discipline plagued with lies, deception and political correctness – fortunately the initial two are not seen so often in modern Australian toponymy/mapping.

This Information For The Aficcionados

Toponymy in Australia is the responsibility of the individual States. In Western Australia, Landgate reluctantly accepts the responsibility for this task, through the Geographic Names Committee. Place, feature and road names are stored in a database known as Geonoma,  however, because it is not accurately maintained, this resource is of declining value.

In 2011, the Geographic Names Committee produced a booklet titled Policies and Standards for Geographical Naming in Western Australia. A PDF of this may be accessed here. Additionally, the Committee for Geographical Names of Australasia has produced Guidelines for the Consistent Use of Place Name’, which may be accessed here.

Anyone may propose a new name for a feature or a correction of a name by contacting the Geographic Names Committee.  Providing one’s information is accurate and compelling, I know from personal experience of naming/renaming 24 features, the submission will be successful.

Time Travel

Reading the eyewitness accounts of Australian exploration history allows us to travel back in time.

Because naming of places and features is inextricably entwined with ‘history’ many of the articles on this website that include details of toponymy also provide a snapshot of another time. With only a small bit of imagination one can ‘time travel’ to when our nation was growing up.

 

 

© Kim Epton 2010-2024
396 words, one photograph.

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Australia’s Largest Sand Dune System

Descriptions on a number of websites about sand dune systems in Australia often include various unreferenced qualifiers such as “largest landlocked dunes”, ‘largest mobile dunes” or even “largest moving coastal sand mass” often combined with “in the southern hemisphere”. It is difficult to determine the accuracy of these claims and equally difficult not to reject the thought that the claim is made  to ‘hype’ the writer’s story.

Fraser Island is Australia’s largest dune system and, indeed, the largest sand island in the world.

The sand dunes at Eyre, historically referred to as Eyres Sand Patch/Sandpatch (1877) are Australia’s largest single sand dune system. The Eyre Bird Observatory (formerly the Eyre Telegraph Station) is located in this dune system.

These dunes stretch 105 kilometres in length and encompass an area of approximately 1000 km2. The average height of the dunes is 10 metres.

The oft mentioned Bilbunya Dunes are the largest mobile, coastal sand dunes in Australia. Note the qualifiers!!

They are also home to Australia’s largest star dune system. A star dune is one that is subject to wind from three or four directions forcing the sand upwards rather transversely.

 

References

Queensland National Parks – Kgari

World Heritage Places – K’gari (Fraser Island)

Geonoma, Landgate.

Short, Andrew D., Beaches of the Western Australian Coast : Eucla to Roebuck Bay. A guide to their nature, characteristics, surf and safety, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2006.

Australian Extremes – Sand Dunes

 

 

© Kim Epton 2024
282 words, three photographs.

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Why is Wiluna the finish of the Canning Stock Route?

Although Western Australia’s first gold rush at Halls Creek in 1885 was short-lived, it opened up the East Kimberley to the cattle industry.

Gold was discovered in Wiluna in 1896 and at its peak, the Wiluna mine became the largest in Western Australia, supporting 9000 miners. There was a huge demand in the mines for fresh meat. Most of Western Australia’s beef came from the Kimberley. At the time, however, East Kimberley cattle were quarantined due to an infestation of tropical ticks. This gave the West Kimberley pastoralists a monopoly on the beef trade — which caused prices to soar.

In 1905 independent MP James Isdell came up with a bold solution to the tick problem – develop a stock route through Western Australia’s harsh desert country, and drove the cattle to market. Isdell believed the ticks would fall off and die in the hot dry conditions. He was right.

Many in government considered the idea of a desert stock route to be impossible, however, H.S. King, who was the Under Secretary of Mines at the time, came up with a suggestion the government couldn’t refuse – marry the stock route survey to a search for gold. The respected bushman and surveyor Alfred Canning, who had just finished work on the Rabbit Proof Fence, was commissioned to survey a potential route and identify gold-bearing country.

Once the stock route was complete cattle were able to be droved from the Kimberley to the terminus of the stock route at Wiluna to supply the huge demand for fresh meat.

Read more:

Work Completed, Canning by Phil Bianchi.

 

© Kim Epton 2022-2024
300 words, one photograph.

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Why Butane Camping Stoves Don’t Work When It’s Cold

What’s in the can?

Fuel canisters used in single burner butane stoves contain a compressed blend of butane and propane. Butane typically accounts for 70 to 80 percent of the fuel mixture – with propane making up the remainder.

butane stove

 

How it works

The pressure in the canister keeps most of the mixture in a liquid state although a small amount vaporises into a gas above the liquid. When the canister is attached to a stove and turned on, the gas is forced out of the canister to the stove burner.

In order for this to work, the pressure inside the canister must be greater than the pressure outside.

Cold weather performance

However, as the canister temperature drops below freezing, its internal pressure starts to drop until this is no longer the case and the burner sputters and goes out.

This is because butane stops vaporising at 0.5 degrees Celsius (its boiling point).

Unlike butane, however, propane continues vaporising even in very cold temperatures (down to minus 42 degrees Celsius). This has some interesting implications for cold weather performance.

butane canister

Propane burns off at a disproportionate rate in temperatures below freezing. As the remaining butane/propane mixture shifts increasingly toward just butane, less and less fuel vaporises until eventually the pressure in the canister drops below what is required to continue feeding the stove. This means that a brand new fuel canister may work for a while in sub-freezing conditions, but can stop working long before the canister is empty.

Other factors

There’s also another factor that affects a butane canister’s cold weather performance. The process of vaporisation—the changing of physical state from liquid to gas—takes energy. In a butane canister, that energy comes mostly from the latent heat in the fuel mixture itself, which is why a fuel canister will become noticeably cooler while the stove is operating. In cold temperatures, this effect can drive the canister temperature down and stop the burner cold—even if the ambient temperature is above the butane’s boiling point.