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poor but if you burn the country at the right time you get the regrowth and it takes the cattle
through the winter months.
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Marcus Barber: Can you remember the first time you saw it, what you thought about the
country up there? You grew up at Koolatah and Kowanyama. Had you seen country like
Oriners before?
Philip Yam: No I‟d never seen country like that before.
Marcus Barber: What made you think it was different?
Philip Yam: Well, up there it gets hotter, and the country dries up very quick. And you get
people dropping matches, [starting] fires, and you‟ve got to try to stop them fires coming
into the homestead. We used to watch all that. We did not want them burning the whole
place down.
Marcus Barber: What about the trees up there, are they the same as in other places or are
they different?
Philip Yam: Well, see that‟s all, nearly all ti tree country there, that‟s all other [kinds of] ti
tree there that we got. Different from here, from Kowanyama, all different. Maybe Koolatah
is a bit different too. You only get a few ti trees in and around Koolatah but Oriners is full of
ti tree, right through.
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When you get further down on the Mitchell River you see a lot of different big trees that
don‟t grow out in that country. Paperbark and ti-trees and that grow around Oriners
waterhole, but when you get down on the Mitchell you get big trees, Leichardt trees, and all
the rest of it.
Cecil Hughes
When asked about Oriners, Wilfred Jimmy responded that there was „a whole forest up there‟
and that he had noticed how the birds were different, much louder than they were at
Kowanyama. For him, as for others, it was a „different life‟ when one was living in that
location.
2.1.1.2 Rainfall patterns
Research participants made slightly different observations about rainfall in the area; some
noted that it differed from areas elsewhere in the catchment, others noted its general
consistency with the regional pattern.
Viv Sinnamon: The sky, it‟s hard to tell up there because it can rain here [at Oriners] earlier
than Kowanyama and the country responds differently to the delta. This is soupy soil, once
it starts to rain, it does not take many showers to get everyone edgy and wanting to get the
hell out if they are not going to stay here.
Marcus Barber: So it rains here earlier than down on the flat?
Viv Sinnamon: Yeah.
Jeff Shellberg: You can usually see it when you are down on the delta, looking up this way
and you can see just a line of thunderstorms, really nasty weather up here. And it will be
clear [on the delta].
Philip Yam: Here [at Oriners] we get rain early because we are close to the east coast see?
It comes from there straight in here.
Viv Sinnamon: Must be a bit of convection coming off the uplands.
Working Knowledge at Oriners Station, Cape York
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