Running Time:

63 min

Release Date:

June 1999

Recording Location:

Track 1: Main waterhole at entrance to Ormiston Gorge, Western Macdonnell Ranges
Track 2: "Gunbarrel Highway" near Kulgera
Track 3: N'Dhala Gorge, Eastern Macdonnell Ranges
Track 4: Ormiston Gorge, Western Macdonnell Ranges
Track 5: John Hayes Rockhole, Trephina Gorge, Eastern Macdonnell Ranges
Track 6: near Luritja Road (Kings Canyon to Uluru)
Track 7: Lasseter Highway, near Mount Ebenezer
Track 8: near Kings Canyon
Track 9 & 10: Ellery Creek Bighole, Western Macdonnell Ranges
Track 11: Main waterhole at entrance to Ormiston Gorge, Western Macdonnell Ranges

Spirit of the Outback

The Australian Outback - ancient, mysterious and often breathtakingly beautiful.

Listen to predawn birdsong echoing around Ormiston Gorge, an exhilarating flock of wild Budgerigars, Wedgebills - 'the windchimes of the desert', the cries of Black Cockatoos carrying across the plains, rare desert frogs and, under a full moon, the eerie wail of Dingoes.

Andrew comments:

"The outback is one of our favourite places. It can be utterly bewitching - stark and dry, or full of life. This album captures that magic, but mostly through sheer luck on our part.

"On the first night of our field trip, tired after a long day of driving, we camped in an unassuming patch of mulga. The next morning we awoke to find the place alive with birdsong. It had rained maybe a week previously - but only on this few square kilometers of country. Nomadic birds had arrived and begun breeding, and we were treated to a rarely heard richness of birdsong. We were in the right place, at the right time.

"We were fortunate to get the dingoes too. After 8 weeks of field work, with no luck and deteriorating weather, we decided to try for them one more night. Recording in the dark by a waterhole, I realised I had a dead battery, and rushed off to get a replacement. I'd no sooner got the recorder fired up again than the dingoes began wailing. 20 seconds later and I would have missed them. Half an hour later, the wind was howling and rain began falling."

And finally - those Pied Butcherbirds at Ormiston. Many listeners have been moved by this recording. What a songbird, and what an acoustic space."

Download listening notes for this album

Audio sample of this album

1.

Ormiston Gorge, Full Moon, 3 a.m.

6.13

2.

Dawn across the Mulga

11.07

3.

Wild Budgerigars

3.24

4.

Spinifex Country

7.13

5.

Red Gorges and River Gums

10.13

6.

Mulga Afternoon

4.34

7.

Red-tailed Black Cockatoos

3.15

8.

Desert Dusk

5.14

9.

Nightfall at the Waterhole

3.23

10.

Dingoes

2.16

11.

Ormiston Gorge, The Following Night

6.01

This album on our blog

Music inspired by the Song of the Pied Butcherbird

...

Read more >
A beautiful nature sound recording - Pied Butcherbirds in the Australian Outback

There are times when nature's sounds and the physical landscape come together to create a moment that is utterly magical. Such an occasion involved the voice of one of the world's most sublime son...

Read more >

Customer reviews of this album

"Spirit of the Outback" is really wonderful, one of my favourite nature recordings - truly magical...

Anthony, USA

I bought your "Spirit of the Outback" CD. It is very atmospheric and realistic - that Western Bowerbird sounds amazing, like a coin being dropped in a jar, on track 8 at 3.41

Gary, UK

We recently spent some time in the Centre and woke each morning to the prolonged and glorious melody of the Pied Butcherbird. We were able to identify it after buying your wonderful "Spirit of the Outback" CD, and downloading the field notes from your website. We are so grateful for your lovely CD. Again, many thanks for your work.

Robert, Canada

Purchase this
album as:

Digital Album

(for immediate download)

$12.00
$12.00

Download this album
for as little as $7.50 -
View Special Deals

(Prices AU$, exGST)

About the audio formats

Mp3:

Mp3 is a universal audio format, playable on iPods, computers, media players and mobile phones.

Mp3 is a compressed format, allowing smaller filesizes, offering faster download times and requiring less storage space on players, but at some expense to the audio quality. Many listeners can't really hear the difference between mp3 and full CD-quality audio, and hence its convenience has lead to it becoming the default option for audio.

Our albums are generally encoded at around 256kbps (sometimes with VBR), balancing optimal audio quality without blowing out filesizes excessively. We encode using the Fraunhoffer algorithm, which preserves more detail in the human audible range than the lame encoder.

Our mp3 files are free of any DRM (digital rights management), so you can transfer them to any of your media technology. You've paid for them, they're yours for your personal use without restriction.

Mp3 files can be burned to disc, either as an mp3 disc, or an audio CD after converting them to a standard audio (.wav or .aif) format first.

FLAC:

FLAC is a high-quality audio format, allowing CD-resolution audio. It is ideal if you wish to burn your files to a CDR, or listen over a high resolution audio system. However files usually require special decoding by the user before playing or burning to disc.

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a LOSSLESS compressed audio format. This means that it preserves the full audio quality of a CD, but optimises the filesize for downloading. Typically, file sizes of around 60% are achieved without any degradation or loss of audio quality from the source files at the CD standard of 16bit/44.1kHz.

Obviously the file sizes are larger than for the mp3 version - usually around 300-400Mb for an album, compared to 100Mb for an mp3 album.

In addition, you'll need to know what to do with the files once you've downloaded them. In most cases you'll want to decode the files to wav or aiff, either to import into programs like iTunes, or burn to CDR. Some programs will play flac files natively.

There is a lot of information about flac online (eg: http://flac.sourceforge.net/)