The Styx is set in and around Queensland’s vast Great Basalt Wall National Park, a natural stone labyrinth of lush remoteness. In the dry season, the basalt maze confuses, taunts your sense of direction. In the wet, it’s easier. You can swim from basalt ridge to ridge, snacking on wild fruit as you climb out of one channel of black ink, before slipping into the next.

The channels are deep, but you try not to touch the bottom and you certainly don’t look down. You try not to look down because the water is so black: not muddy black, but black from its depth and black from its basalt lining. At each rise, you emerge swiftly, hoping that the thing that touched you was your imagination.

Across the basalt ridges lie inner pockets of pasture, lush pasture, where unfamiliar palms, ferns and creepers sprawl. Weird prehistoric-looking birds with extra-long flappy wings rise slowly from one weird-looking tree, to hover, then settle on the next. The birds are in no hurry; they call out and other creatures reply. The trees interlink at odd angles and their leaves seem over-large. Nothing seems familiar.

Water seeping from the ground knows where it’s going, winding through grass, healthy grass, native grass, through trees, rocks, boulders, around basalt outcrops, disappearing back into the earth to reappear in another pocket, further on into the maze.

That is the geographic inspiration for The Styx.

The real Great Basalt Wall is inland, north-west of Charters Towers, North Queensland. The Styx Great Basalt Wall, transposed to Central Queensland, greets the ocean with a forest of mangroves, and tidal estuaries seep into caverns, flooding a city of lava tubes kilometres inland, deep under fictional Styx River Cattle Station. It is a beautiful place, a magnificent place, but not a place for the unwary, as the many bones attest.

Banner picture:
The Great Basalt Wall, Google satellite maps