by Lorna Hendry
‘Sounds good’, said James. ‘Let’s go.’
We were starting to identify regular patterns in our routine. On pack-up days we got up early. While the kids and I were still eating breakfast, James would start shouting at us. He needed the dishes done and put away so he could wrestle our huge kitchen box into the trailer. Our clothes had to be packed and taken out of the tent so he could stack the bedding. All the chairs and tables needed to be folded up so they could go in the back of the car. And we had to GET OFF the groundsheet so it could be shaken out, folded and put on top of the trailer.
In his haste, he would sometimes remove the poles holding up the annexe roof and the heavy canvas would fall on my head while I was doing the dishes. At some point he would disappear into the tent and start cursing as he undid the poles and the whole thing collapsed on him. Sometimes he would forget to roll down the windows first, so the boys and I would rummage around in the floppy canvas and do that from the outside.
My job was to pack up the kitchen, but I also had to make lunch and snacks for the day’s drive. Then I’d remember I had to organise dinner, especially if we were going to be driving all day. I would fossick around in the freezer to find something to defrost on the dashboard, which we had christened ‘nature’s microwave’.
James would emerge from the collapsed tent and I would be surrounded by a disaster of food and drinks and cut-up fruit and plastic containers and half-washed dishes.
I always said, ‘I don’t know what your hurry is’.
He always replied, ‘I don’t want to be setting up the tent in the middle of night’.
It was a jerky, disjointed dance we had devised, and I knew it was horrible to watch. We alternated between giving the kids jobs, then shouting at them to work faster, and telling them to get out of the way until it was all done. If we weren’t in a hurry I would take the kids away to do schoolwork and James would pack up by himself. This was the most harmonious option but it took about three hours so we didn’t do it often.
By the time we were in the car everyone would be in a foul mood and it would take ages before we remembered that this was supposed to be fun. I’d find a spot for my feet between the bag of food and snacks, the bottles of water and the box of maps and guidebooks. Just as I got comfortable the call would come from the back: ‘Is there a snack?’
James always drove. I tried to research the spots ahead as we went. I couldn’t read for the first half-hour of the drive without getting carsick but after that I could look at maps and plan our day without a problem. The boys weren’t bothered by motion sickness and could disappear into their books for hours at a time. I had been exactly the same when I was that age, but until now I’d never been sure that my sons knew the joy of losing themselves in a story. Their choice of reading material might be very different to mine – Captain Underpants, not Narnia – but the result was the same.
Dylan had developed the habit of racing through a new book as fast as he could, reading only as much as he needed to work out the basic plot. When he reached the last page, he immediately went back to the beginning and started all over again. This time, he read more slowly, giggling as he got jokes he had missed the first time. Only by the third or fourth reading would he ask questions about what particular words or phrases meant.
This led to some renegotiation of one of our new rules. James and I had decided that all the books belonged to everyone, but that the person who had chosen the book had the right to read it first. To Dylan, this seemed very unfair. He didn’t want to give up a new book after he’d only read it once. For Oscar, waiting impatiently to start a new story, the sight of Dylan getting to the end only to start again straight away was intolerable. And me? Even in the midst of teary fights about whose turn it was to read the latest R.L. Stine Goosebumps, I was in heaven: they were arguing about books.
When we got to our new campsite, the boys would burst out of the car and go on the hunt for other kids. James and I would climb down slowly, stiff from hours of sitting still, and check out the spot. He would walk around for a bit, then stand with his legs planted solidly on the ground and stretch his arms out in front of him.
‘I think we’ll set it up here so we’re looking at the fireplace [or bush or creek] with our back to the toilet block [or neighbours or footpath].’
I’d consider this and then ask which way the kitchen would face.
‘The same way it always does.’
I had to close my eyes and perform a tiny pantomime, which unfortunately was not always in my head. If the trailer was turned around that way, then the back of it would be here, and it opened this way, so the kitchen would be here.
When the trailer was in the right spot, we would check the spirit levels that we had glued onto the steel frame. The legs were adjustable, but if the ground was very uneven James would have to dig a hole under one of the trailer wheels until the whole thing was sitting flat. I helped unhook the waterproof cover over the trailer, then we slid off the groundsheets, unfolded the tent, stretched it out and pegged it down.
James would then disappear inside the mound of tent to do some swearing and muttering, his body pushing the canvas up in strange bulges as he wrestled with the poles. I would potter around outside, unzipping the windows to let in light and air.
When the tent was up, the boys’ mattresses went on the floor, all our clothes bags were dumped on our beds and we would start creating our outside room. A heavy rubber mat went down on the ground to stop us walking dirt into the tent. The awning was secured with more poles and ropes. The tailgate of the trailer swung open to reveal a two-burner stove and a cupboard. A metal frame that hooked onto the side of the stove held the plastic bucket that was the kitchen sink. A tap beside the stove pumped drinking water from the tank under the trailer. When the gas bottle was hooked up to the stove, the kitchen was done.
When the boys got back, we’d get them to set up the chairs and tables as we dragged all our boxes out of the trailer. The big grey kitchen box held all the pots and pans, dry food and cans. A smaller black box was filled entirely with shoes. Into the tent would go the library box with all our books, the backpack of school stuff and a big bag of Lego. Another tub containing even more food was opened and wedged in the open end of the trailer in case we ran out of canned tomatoes. If we had a powered site, we would pull the fridge out of the car and plug it in. The lights went up last and finally we were finished.
It did sometimes feel like hard work, but it was really the only work we had to do.
When we finally drove into the flat, scrubby campground at Pondalowie Bay in the Innes National Park it was cold and windy. What was meant to be an easy day’s drive had finished with us racing to get the tent up and dinner ready before dark. Most of the sites were vacant, so we chose one that was close – but not too close – to the toilet block and backed the trailer into the generous space defined by a fence made of thick pine logs. When I climbed out of the car I could smell the salt from the sea and, under the whistling of the wind, I thought I heard waves crashing on a beach. It was rugged and a bit deserted, but as a kangaroo bounced past I was glad to be here.
James had just unfolded the canvas from the trailer when one of the boys said, ‘There’s heaps of big ants around here.’ A seething mass of bull ants were furious because James had just dumped a tent on their home. Unlike the ants that had invaded the kitchen box on our first morning at Port Campbell, these weren’t to be messed with or easily exterminated. They were fierce and surprisingly fast and we gave in immediately.
I left James to pack the tent back onto the trailer and wandered around looking for a better site. When I found one that looked insect-free, I waved him over. ‘The ground looks pretty hard’, he said.
He put a metal tent peg on the ground and hit it with the mallet. The peg jumped about on the rock and I could see the reverberations run up his arm to his shoulder.
‘No, not here.’
All the sites seemed to be the same. There were only a couple
taken and they had vans on them. Caravans suddenly seemed to be an incredibly sensible option. You could just drive in, park, and put the kettle on.
‘I’ll just tie the bloody thing down.’
We tied ropes to the top corners of the tent and lashed them to the wooden bollards that edged each site. The boys collected stones and we put them at each corner of the tent, inside and out. The tent wasn’t very square, but then it never was. We ate a hurried meal of curry and rice and got inside just as the wind picked up and the rain started.
It was still raining the next morning. I wanted to pack up and leave, but James was still exhausted from the previous day of driving and the tent was soaking wet. It was a good day to catch up on schoolwork. It was too cold and windy to work outside, so the boys sat on their beds and tried to work on their laps. The wind howled around us, flapping the sagging canvas walls. Every gust made us flinch.
A flock of galahs were holed up in the branches of a dead tree, squabbling and flapping and fighting for the best spots. The white undersides of their wings shone out against the dark sky. Suddenly I couldn’t bear it anymore: the cold and the rain were making everyone miserable. The galahs were the only ones having fun.
‘Let’s go out for lunch.’
We drove for an hour to the nearest town to buy hot chips and burgers and milkshakes and on the way back I decided that a change in attitude was needed. We would put on all our warm clothes and our raincoats and explore the beach. It would be fun, I promised, and after that we would have hot showers, then snuggle up inside the tent to eat spaghetti bolognaise, drink warm Milo and play cards. Despite a sideways look from James that told me that he knew what I was up to and believed it was doomed to failure, the boys got excited.
Positive thinking did work, I thought, as I huddled in the rain on the beach watching Oscar and Dylan do cartwheels on the wet sand. Even when the showers didn’t provide more than a tepid dribble of strange-smelling water and we discovered that all our warm clothes were damp and sandy, things didn’t seem all that bad. After all, we had months of warm weather to look forward to. Our clothes would dry. We would have showers at some point. By the time night fell we were all squashed on a mattress in the tent playing an exuberant round of Shithead, and I wouldn’t have been anywhere else.
Two days later we packed up our wet tent and drove north up the Yorke Peninsula towards the top of the Spencer Gulf. The sky cleared in front of us. It felt as if we were leaving behind the grey clouds and rain forever. On the side of the Augusta Highway, in front of a tiny blue shack just out of Port Pirie, we saw a sandwich board advertising freshly shucked oysters. We stopped and sat on the plastic chairs by the side of the road and ordered a dozen each. James bought a lemon too, cut it in half with his fishing knife and squeezed the juice into the polystyrene container. I’d never tasted anything so good in my life.
At that moment I felt a rush of absolute joy. I couldn’t remember ever feeling that relaxed and happy in my whole life. We had a year of exploration in front of us. Our only job was to make sure the kids kept up with their schoolwork (although even that was sliding down our list of priorities) and to see and do as much as we could. We were sitting on the side of a road eating oysters and the only decision we had to make was where to camp that night.
We chose Wilpena Pound, arriving at the busy campground just before dusk. We were lucky to get a spot. The campground is only one section of the resort in the heart of the Flinders Ranges National Park. Tourists can also choose from ‘luxury’ camping and a motel that boasts a restaurant, a bar and a swimming pool. The resort sits just outside Wilpena Gap on the eastern side of the Pound. The Gap is the only place where it’s possible to walk directly into the Pound – Wilpena Creek trickles out through a gorge cut into the walls of the Pound as you walk in.
The Pound itself is a ring of rugged mountains, a natural amphitheatre that circles a huge area of grassland and scrub, 17 kilometres long and 8 kilometres wide. Indigenous stories explain the creation of the Pound walls from the bodies of two giant serpents. From above it looks like a giant crater. To the early white settlers who named it, it looked like a giant natural cattle-pound. Predictably, they tried to use it for farming, but periods of drought and the difficulty of clearing the thick scrub in the interior of the Pound defeated them. The final attempt by the Hill family came to an abrupt end in 1914 when a flood destroyed the road that had been built through the Gap. Many of the buildings from the old station are still standing, including the Hill family’s stone homestead.
The campground was neatly laid out with straight, tree-lined tracks leading to sensibly numbered powered campsites. Each site had its own safe campfire pit and was in close proximity to one of three clean, modern toilet blocks. I suspected, though, that the vast area inside the high rock walls of the Pound was still as untamed as ever.
As we put the tent up, stars began to appear. The clear sky released all the heat of the day and a damp chill set in, but the pegs slid easily into the red dirt and we had hot showers for the first time in four days. That night, we all slept long and hard.
In the morning a family of kangaroos had moved into the kitchen area of our tent and a joey was hiding under the table. The roos were everywhere and the tourists loved them. Some were a bit too fascinated – despite the signs asking people not to feed the native animals, we saw some German tourists tempting a group of kangaroos to come closer for a photo by holding out open bars of chocolate.
After breakfast we wandered into the heart of the Pound, past Old Wilpena Station and the homestead, and an old memory surfaced. ‘I came on a school camp here.’ No-one was particularly interested. ‘We climbed one of these mountains. St Mary Peak, I think. They told us it was the highest mountain in the Flinders Ranges. It was really beautiful up there, you could see all the way down into the Pound. Then we walked back through the Pound to the campsite. It took all day. I must have been about fourteen.’
‘Can we do that?’ asked Oscar.
‘I’m not sure. It might be a bit far.’
‘We can walk further than you two’, said Dylan.
‘Yeah’, said Oscar. ‘Can we?’
The trail brochure classified the St Mary Peak walk as ‘difficult’. It recommended allowing eight hours and carrying 4 litres of water for each person. We mentally knocked a couple of hours off the walk time and thought that we could carry 10 litres of water between us. That should be plenty.
At eight o’clock the next morning, after I had made lunches and we had cleaned up and hidden all our food from the crows and kangaroos and made sure everyone had sunscreen on and told the people on the site next door what our plans were and when to call in the cavalry, we set off.
The start of the track wound around the outside wall of the Pound. For the first hour we walked in the shade of the gum trees and the track rose up so gradually we hardly noticed it. We played ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’, a variation of ‘Twenty Questions’, as we went. It got a bit tricky when the kids were sketchy on the classifications – ‘What about the sky? Is that a mineral?’ – but it passed the time. When that got boring, I told them about my high school hike.
I had been so grumpy about having to do the bushwalk that I had trudged along with my head down, watching my feet and refusing to look at the ‘scenery’ the teachers were going on about. Something slammed hard into my forehead and when I came around I was lying flat on my back on the gravel path. I was convinced someone had thrown a boulder at me. It was a few minutes before my Maths teacher could stop laughing for long enough to tell me I’d walked into a fallen tree that was lying across the track at head height. In the 1980s, minor concussion was no reason to stop someone completing a 20-kilometre hike. He helped me up and told me to pay more attention.
Later in the day, when we were climbing up to the summit, another teacher asked what was jingling in my pockets.
‘Money for the machine.’
I should have known from the look on her face to stop talking rig
ht there.
‘What machine?’
‘The drink machine on top of the mountain. Mr Scott told me. I’ve got twenty-cent pieces to get a cold can.’
My embarrassing stories kept us all going until things started to get a bit tougher. The track headed steeply up the outside of the Pound wall. We had to clamber over boulders and pull ourselves up, getting a knee onto the next rock and hauling our bodies up after it. I didn’t remember this part of the walk.
Dylan made the mistake of looking down. He froze and we had to coax and bully him to keep him going. I was having trouble keeping a solid footing on the loose rocks. As we climbed higher and left the shade from the trees behind, it got hotter. We had to stop in the rare patches of shade to catch our breath and have a drink.
At the top, James and I took stock. From here the signs pointed right to St Mary Peak, a three-kilometre return distance with a lot of climbing. Left was the visitor centre back at the resort, a 12-kilometre walk through the Pound.
‘We should go back the way we came’, he said. ‘It’s a lot shorter.’ ‘I don’t think I can get back down that way. It’s too steep. And Dylan will freak out when he sees how high up it is. I think we have to go the long way back, through the Pound. But I remember it. It’s an easy walk, lots of shade and flat the whole way.’
James and Oscar decided to do the extra walk up to the top of St Mary Peak but Dylan didn’t want to go with them. James and I checked the trail notes.
‘It says there’s a campsite about four kilometres away. We’ll stop there and wait for you’, I said.
We split up what was left of our water. I took the first-aid box and the toilet paper and gave James half the Tim Tams. When I went to give him the camera so he could take a photo of himself and Oscar at the peak, I didn’t have it. We had left it back at the camp. I was gutted. We’d done all that hard walking and wouldn’t even have a photo afterwards to remind us. We’d have to rely on our memories.