19/01/2026
"Place of the Devil Man."
South of Tennant Creek, in the Territory- the red earth is alive…
Karlu Karlu. Australia.
It inhales …it exhales- like any living thing would. It is a place that does not welcome a careless gaze.
By day, it appears as a valley gone mad with balance-innumerable granite giants poised one upon another, eggs of stone made by an ancient, devil god. They should not stand. They should fall. And yet they remain, suspended in a silence shaped by millions of years of erosion and something far older than time’s calculation. The land belongs to the Alyawarr, Kaytetye, Warumungu and Wakaya -connected not merely by country, but by memory- by responsibility.
What truly formed this place is known… and not told.
The Dreaming stories exist, but they are not for mouths unprepared to carry them. They are locked behind ceremony, kinship, and obligation. Outsiders receive only the echo- smoke screens-just enough to feel watched.
And watched you are.
As dusk settles, the rocks begin to change their posture. Shadows pool where none should be. The air tightens. Overhead, lights speed in impossible directions without sound or sense-hovering, darting, vanishing. Cars on the surrounding roads sputter and die, engines silenced as if by a passing malevolent thought.
Just beyond, at Wycliffe Well-now a dead and decaying hamlet- but once the self-proclaimed UFO Capital of Australia-the skies are already infamous for their visitors.
But here, above Karlu Karlu, the lights feel less curious… and more acquainted.
Old people once spoke of little ones-not children, but creatures-shape shifters perhaps- not of this realm. Small, watchful, older than laughter. They lived beneath the boulders, in the cool hollows where sunlight dares not linger. They were not evil, the elders said-but they were …playful. If young children wandered without the proper care, without the right respect, the little people might take them.
Not with violence.
With invitation.
Children would vanish.
No tracks. No cries.
Only silence.
In those days, the clever old people knew what to do. They would sing-not loudly, not in panic-but precisely. A song in lingo, woven with names, places, and breath. The land would listen. The rocks would remember. And the children would return, dazed but alive, as if waking from a dream they could never fully describe.
But colonisation came- relentless and brutal.
Languages fractured. Ceremonies were interrupted. Songs fell quiet. The old people passed, and with them went the last verses capable of calling the children home.
Now, the boulders still balance. The lights still wander the sky. And sometimes, when the wind moves just right through the valley, it almost sounds like singing-broken, searching, incomplete.
Karlu Karlu waits…
This is Insomnia 2026 on 102.7 FM Toowoomba
