美国国家地理杂志-澳大利亚图片集 (图)

Beef for the “barbie” fills a truck bed at a cattle station near Halls Creek in the Kimberley [region of Western Australia]. Served outback style—in huge blood red chunks—the beef will feed the crew during the annual roundup. Stations in the Kimberley average more than half a million wild acres [200,000 hectares]. Helicopters often drive cattle into pens for shipment to market. Two centuries of shifting dunes have exposed the thousands of limestone knobs that give Australia’s Pinnacles Desert its name. Wind, rain, and sand sculpted the pinnacles—the main attractions of Namburg National Park. Offbeat humor pervades the outback, where many conveniences must be built by hand. Jackaroos [Australian for “cowboys”] at Drysdale River Station joke that they have to keep the telephone in the fridge so that it doesn’t melt. Phones replaced static-filled radio chat sessions in the Kimberley only about 20 years ago. Heir to a culture that spans 60,000 years, an Aboriginal youth wears a mask of mud while swimming in a Cape York water hole. Spiky barricade against the outside world, a dead mangrove on a lonely beach in the Northern Territory evokes the harshness of Australia’s forbidding northern coast. Battered by tropical cyclones, washed by treacherous tides, steamed in tropical heat, and haunted by crocodiles, this ragged coast remains a wild frontier 60,000 years after the first Aborigines stepped ashore here. Harsh shadows trail a stockman in the rugged Gascoyne River country as he guides a 400-pound [181-kilogram] bale of wool onto a truck bound for market. Although Australia’s economy no longer “rides the sheep’s back” as it did a century ago, wool from the nation’s 120 million sheep makes up 2.6 percent of the country’s total exports The lights of the world’s loneliest city shimmer to life as the last of the sun’s rays recede over the Indian Ocean. Separated by 2,000 miles [3,220 kilometers] of desert and mountains from Australia’s eastern cities, Perth evokes a frontier feeling—a sense that the bush is never far away—that belies its modernistic skyline and air of prosperity