...farming town some 6000 residents that is the centre of the Ord River irrigation scheme in far, far northwestern Australia. Its profligate

use provides a bizarre experience for visitors from the parched south, who live in resentful fear of being turned in to the aquacops if they water their geraniums too freely.

In Kununurra, sprinklers swish at you when you cross the lavish median strips and grassy verges that flame the town's well-kept streets. You've got to be quick on your feet to avoid a drenching when you turn down a path between palm trees in the luxuriantly forested grounds of the Kununurra Country Club Hotel. You need to be watchful, too, when you settle too early in the day into the comfortable concavity, almost tailored to your own personal bottom, of one of the plastic stools at the hotel's Poolside Bar and Grill. Every morning, the bar stools receive an extravagant hosing down and if you don't give the sun time to dry them off you may dunk your personal bottom in a small lake.

Down the road a few kilometres is, of course, the big lake. Created by the damming of the Ord River thirty years ago, Lake Argyle is so vast that from the centre you can't see the shore. The Kununurra tourist office says Lake Argyle is properly classifiable as an inland sea, rather than a mere lake. Sounds reasonable. Its surface area is usually in the vicinity of 1000 square kilometres and it carries about 600 islands in its vast pouch. Not to mention pelicans so numerous that some people call them "Lake Argyle seagulls", and a reputed 25,000 freshwater crocodiles. Unlike the saltwater variety, they are torpid, timid fish-eaters and harmless to humans. But to anybody who has seen a Tarzan movie, one set of nostrils and bulging eyeballs skimming the surface is as petrifying as the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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