Readers Digest Australia Sampler 2022

lived along its shores for thousands of years; Yellowknife is named for In- digenous copper knives. It began as a fur-trading outpost, then ignited with a gold rush in the 1930s, and is now a diamond-mining centre with a pop- ulation of roughly 20,000. Until 1960, the whole region was inaccessible by road, and until about ten years ago, Yellowknife was not a major tourist destination. Its winter visitors were mainly miners, trappers and a few travellers seeking a hideaway. By 2019, there were almost six times as many visitors as residents. A large proportion of visitor spend- ing here is related to the aurora bo- realis. Viewing it is often promoted as a kind of primeval encounter with nature. Just as people yearn to see megafauna such as lions and elephants, we seem to have a col- lective desire for the cosmic view, for those things large enough to push us down into our place, close to the skin of the planet. I JOINED THE CAS GROUP for a trip to Blachford Lake Lodge, about 100 kilometres away from Yellowknife. Small bush planes are a common way to get around in this vast territory of more than 163,000 square kilometres of fresh water. There were about a doz- en people from the US, England and Australia going up in the Air Tindi turboprop. We crammed in among luggage and supplies, and the un- pressurised craft slid over a quilt of spindly trees, frozen lakes and satiny mounds of snow. This is part of the immense Canadian Shield, where the continental crust was swept clean by ice, and the oldest rock in the world was found. The boreal forest of black spruce scribbled across the white in all directions, a fraction of a vast bi- ome stretching around the globe. Ex- cept for a few snowmobile tracks just outside Yellowknife, there were no signs of humanity at all. We landed on the lake; a smooth, fast slide between small islands. The lodge, at the top of a hill, was to be our living room for several days. Our cabins were down the long slope, along interlacing trails; their paths compressed by snowmobiles. The surrounding snow was deep and fine; I learned to beware of the trail’s edge when I stepped off it and into powder up to my waist. Three of us from Oregon shared the cabin farthest from the lodge, near the shore. The low trees leaned every which way in the permafrost, small and dark and ancient, and the lake stretched out of sight around lay- ered hills under virgin blue sky. Our time at Blachford Lake was marked by shared meals and conviv- iality. We gathered every evening in TO INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES, THE LIGHTS ARE WORTHY OF RESPECT 8 May 2022 READER’S DIGEST