Mythical creatures, mysterious caves, secret rituals. A quest out of World of Warcraft? No, but more on that later. Welcome back peeps. Year four of the ‘junko’ blog starts…..NOW!  Firstly, the Photo Gallery is soooo close. All the galleries are ready to upload, but to get it to do what I want, I’m transferring the domain to a hosting site to gain full access to wordpress plug-ins. The address will still be the same and hopefully will be up in a few days,
Well, you find me in 2024 as you left me in 2023. The van was only half-repaired as the fibreglass guy ran out of time before the Xmas break, so after three weeks at Diamond Beach, the van is back in the shop again for another week. Seven days and nights in a Bairnsdale motel room – the Prisoner of Zandorf. Well, I could have been, except for Ray the motel owner, who steered me in the direction of his son Mat.
Mat is restoring a property from blackberry infested to pristine and invited me out to take a look. I had intended to parole myself for a least a day and his project was on the road to a National Park I was interested in. Mat works for Landcare and definitely walks the walk. The highlight is a gorge, complete with gurgling stream, that bi-sects his land. In the middle of a walk, the thunder rolled in and I got this uneasy feeling that we were not alone.
So easy to see how indigenous culture may have imbued the natural with the supernatural.  Mat’s plans are ambitious and include a wetland, restoring an old woolshed into a cafe, maybe and of course planting, planting and more planting. Now, this is where the Den of Nargun makes it’s entrance. Mat knew which direction I was heading, the Mitchell River National Park. He pulled out a sepia photo. His great grandfather, the first white man to discover what is known to the local Gunnai/Kurnai traditional owners as the Den of Nargun, standing with a small group of fellow explorers at the entrance. ”Must see” he implored, “especially after all this rain.”
The Nargun, half human, half stone, lives in the cave and is feared because it took children who visited the rock pool. Ironically, the Den of Nargun is a place of great cultural significance to women in the local Aboriginal community. Maybe they took pain-in -the-arse kids down there for a swim(lol). Men will not go there. Of course, as with most waterfalls, it’s all downhill one way and all uphill on the way back. While nothing could compare to the treachery that was Rawnsley Bluff, it could be slip AND several rolls for the nimbly challenged.
As luck would have it, the grey skies started to break up and by the time I arrived, sunshine was streaming through the rainforest and into the Den of Nargun.
This hide was part of a limestone cave that collapsed over time. There were pillars of stalactites around this amphitheatre, but over-enthusiastic souvenir hunters snaffled the more delicate ones back in the day. The weather is seasonal, so access to the cave behind the waterfall is intermittent and not culturally recommended.
In a case of too much of a good thing, the rain had temporarily blocked the loop trail back to the carpark, so it was back up the stairs and forty minutes later back in my ‘cell’ to write up the first of the New Year. Hopefully, my next post will be from anywhere else.