by Lorna Hendry
When Dylan and I started walking again, I knew immediately that either my own memory was faulty or something about this path had changed. We were hiking along a ridge in the side of the hill. Under our feet, pebbles the size of golf balls slid and quivered as we stood on them. The track sloped slightly downwards, and every few minutes I’d gasp as my feet slipped out from underneath me. We inched along slowly, holding on to tree trunks where we could.
At one point I lost track of the trail markers. I sat Dylan in a patch of shade under a small shrub and told him to stay there, then hunted around for one of the orange triangles. It took ten minutes to find one. The temperature was in the thirties, Dylan and I were rapidly running out of water and there was no-one else walking out here.
I had promised Dylan that when we reached the campsite we would have a rest under a tree and get a drink of water. But when we got there it was an empty dust bowl with no shade and no water. It was so exposed that we couldn’t afford to wait there for the others. Heat stroke was becoming a real possibility.
We opened up the first-aid kit and left a message in bandaids on the sign pointing from the main track to the camp. We fashioned an ‘L’ and a ‘D’ and an arrow going straight ahead, in an unconscious echo of the carvings on the Burke and Wills Dig Tree. Those markings, carved into a coolabah tree on the banks of the Cooper Creek, indicated where vital supplies had been buried in case Burke, Wills and King, presumed to be dead, somehow managed to return. Which they did, just nine hours after the depot party had departed for Adelaide. Only King survived.
As we walked, resting at each shady place and then bracing ourselves for the long hot stretches in between, Dylan started chatting. He had plenty to discuss. How much would a bowler hat cost? How could a hippopotamus eat a person? What could a kangaroo kill? What do flies eat? I knew he was trying to distract himself from the heat and his sore legs, but he was keeping my mind off it too and I was very grateful.
On and on we went, dragged forwards by the trail markers every 200 metres. Finally we arrived at the homestead. Dylan collapsed on a picnic bench in the shade and I stumbled to the tap to fill our water bottles. My feet and my head throbbed in unison. Half an hour later, James and Oscar came limping along the track. They were in worse shape than us. They had run out of water and James was half-crippled by his new hiking shoes that he now knew were half a size too small.
After a rest and a drink we hauled ourselves up and made it through the Gap. The boys had a sudden burst of energy and bounded ahead, climbing rocks on the side of the track and shouting at us to hurry up because they were hungry. We got back to camp eight hours after we set out, just as the neighbours were starting to get worried about us.
That night, despite my exhaustion, I was kept awake by terrible thoughts of what could have happened. I felt foolish and irresponsible, and horribly guilty because it had all been my idea. A cool change arrived and the wind and rain muffled the sounds I made as I cried into my pillow. The next day, James and I set an upper limit of 10 kilometres on all future bush walks and he threw his new boots in the bin.
But when Oscar tried to clamber out of his sleeping bag in the morning, he had bigger concerns. ‘What’s happened to my legs?’
Chapter Five
The campground at Arkaroola in the northern Flinders Ranges was a desolate, rocky site high on a ridge. We chose a spot that looked across the gravel plain towards bare red hills that glowed at sunset. When the sun went down that night, the flies disappeared but no mosquitoes came to take their place. Millions of stars shone down on us as we slept and the sun woke us the next morning.
We were here to tackle Arkaroola’s self-drive 4WD tour. James wanted to see what conditions the car could cope with. The trek notes said the tour was only for experienced and advanced 4WD drivers, but James felt that my one-day course more than qualified us. We collected a map from the office and signed ourselves out. The woman at reception said that if we weren’t back in six hours someone would come and find us.
Ten minutes later we stopped at the bottom of a rocky hill that was so steep it would have been a struggle to walk up. I checked the map. ‘It says to be in low range and first gear.’ James looked sceptical.
‘I drove up a hill like this on the course’, I said. It was unusual for me to know something about cars that James didn’t, but this time I was confident. ‘Put it in first gear and then don’t touch the accelerator once it’s going. The car will just chug its way up. Don’t try to steer, it’ll find its own path. And don’t put your foot anywhere near the clutch.’
He followed my instructions and the car rumbled up the hill like a tank, teetered on the crest and then eased down the other side. The kids were shrieking in the back and James looked slightly pale.
‘It’s like being on the back of an elephant’, he said.
For the next four hours, our elephant carried us through rocky dry river beds, it crept down inclines that were so steep that we couldn’t even see the bottom as we descended, and it dragged us through patches of deep sand. Midway through the drive we remembered that our recovery gear was still in the trailer.
On the way back, the boys were giddy with excitement. They were throwing things at each other in the back of the car, singing silly songs and bickering over which of them had got the best snacks. I was exhausted and they were driving me mad. I kicked Oscar out of the car and told him to walk back to camp.
We drove slowly behind him for a few minutes, watching him have a lovely time on the side of the road. He was ambling along, stopping to look at rocks, and bobbing his head as he sang out loud. I decided he was having too much fun, so I put him back into the car. Back at camp I tried to hide in the tent, but within minutes both the boys were in there with me. Dylan put on my sunglasses and flounced around, whirling his arms in giant circles.
‘I am your MOTHER! You are VERY silly. Get out of the car and WALK!’
I couldn’t sulk and laugh at the same time, so I went outside and watched James teach them to play bocce by throwing rocks around on the flat dirt plain.
I wanted to visit Iga Warta on our way out of Arkaroola. I had trawled the internet before we left home, looking for Indigenous communities that welcomed visitors. Iga Warta had cultural tours, accommodation and camping and we were going to be driving right past. I thought we could stay there for a night, sign up for a tour and learn a little about Indigenous culture from real people instead of reading about it in brochures or booklets. From Arkaroola, it was only an hour’s drive.
‘Can’t we just keep going?’ said James when we got there.
‘But we wanted to do this. I think it’s important.’
‘It’s only eleven o’clock. I don’t think we need to stop for another day. Besides, it’s weird. This is their home. We’ll be wandering around looking at people like they’re animals in a zoo.’
‘But they want visitors. It’s what they do. It’s their business.’
‘Yeah …’ His voice trailed off.
‘Let’s at least go in and have a look.’
We parked the car and I went into the office while James and the boys hung around outside. I smiled at the woman behind the desk, but I wasn’t quite sure what to say. My plan of booking a campsite and a tour was looking like it might not work out. I picked up a couple of brochures and mumbled something about having a chat with my husband. Although James and I had never bothered to get married, whenever I used the word ‘partner’ outside the inner city, I could feel my own eyes rolling. On this trip, James was quickly becoming my ‘husband’.
‘The campground looks nice,’ I said, showing James the picture. ‘We can go on a bushwalk today and then do this campfire thing tonight.’
He looked at the brochure. ‘It’s a lot of money to go for a walk and sit around a fire. I can make us a fire for nothing.’
‘It’s not about that, though, is it? It’s about meeting people and hearing them tell their stories.’
He squirmed. ‘I don’t know. I really
don’t want to do this. Maybe when we get a bit further north. You know, near Alice Springs, or in Western Australia.’ He shuffled his feet in the dirt as he spoke and I realised he was seriously uncomfortable. This had been important to me, but I didn’t think I would be able to change his mood and have enough energy to make it fun for all four of us.
I looked back down at the brochures in my hand. One was for Chile Creek, a small community north of Broome. I promised myself that we would go to Chile Creek, or somewhere like it. I would find a way to at least meet some Indigenous people who wanted to teach us a little about their culture. But it wasn’t going to happen today. We drove off without even going back into the office to tell them we weren’t staying.
Only a few hours later, we were looking at the Oodnadatta Track. The dirt road stretched ahead of us, smooth and wide and featureless, just like the landscape around it. It curved gently to the left, following the arc of the embankment that held what remained of the train tracks that used to run from Adelaide to Alice Springs. The old railway itself traced the route taken in 1861 by the explorer John McDouall Stuart when he led the first expedition party to trek across Australia from south to north – and make it back. It took fourteen months. Stuart, almost blind and in great pain, was carried nearly 1000 kilometres of the return trip on a litter between two horses. He died four years later, aged fifty-one. The same trip from Adelaide to Darwin on the Stuart Highway, which is named after him, can now be done in thirty-six hours.
Work on the Central Australian Railway began just sixteen years after Stuart’s successful expedition, but the first train to travel all the way to Alice didn’t run until 1929. It was called the Ghan, in honour of the Afghan camel drivers who had made the whole scheme possible. After decades of damage from flash floods, extreme heat and termites, the railway was abandoned in 1980. The new line, built with termite-proof concrete sleepers, is further to the west and now goes all the way to Darwin.
On the outskirts of Marree, at the southern end of the Oodnadatta Track, we saw our first outback road conditions sign. Under a red strip that warned of severe penalties for travelling on closed roads, bright green panels fastened with brass padlocks gave us the go-ahead. Marree to Bopeechee: OPEN. Bopeechee to William Creek: OPEN. William Creek to Oodnadatta: OPEN. Oodnadatta to Marla: OPEN. Feeling very intrepid, we climbed back into the car and drove onto the track. We were on our way.
Two kilometres later we turned off down a side track. We had decided to camp at Muloorina Station, a privately owned 400,000 square hectare cattle station 54 kilometres west of Marree. It had a very cheap campground and, more importantly, vehicle access to the shore of Lake Eyre. Heavy rains in Queensland were rumoured to have caused water to flow into Lake Eyre. Depending on whom you talked to, the lake was either awash with yachts and catamarans or bone dry and likely to remain that way for at least another decade. We knew that a small part of Lake Eyre would be visible from the Oodnadatta Track, but we were keen to see more of it – especially if there was a chance of seeing it as it started to fill.
The campground was large and spacious, dotted with gnarly gum trees and a few tents set up at generously spaced intervals. ‘Nice’, I thought, as we drove in.
Within seconds of getting out of the car we were bombarded by more flies than I had ever encountered in my life. If I could have collected every single fly I had ever seen or heard and put them all in one big box, there would be fewer in that box than there were swarming around our heads at that moment. I swatted at them, swearing and freaking out as they crawled all over me, even climbing inside my clothes and getting stuck in my hair. I choked as they hurtled into my mouth and dive-bombed down my throat. We set the tent up as fast as we could then retreated back to the car. A hundred more flies came with us but we rolled down the windows as we drove and bashed them with maps and books until they were squashed flat or sucked outside.
When we got our first glimpse of the southern arm of Lake Eyre there was water. We trudged through silvery, slippy mud to verify it wasn’t a mirage. We were stunned. It didn’t seem possible that water could have reached the driest, most southern areas of the lake without us hearing about it.
Excited, we continued on to Lake Eyre North. It was completely dry. What we had seen was only a puddle left over from recent rain. Now the surface of the lake was crunchy under our boots. Dylan knelt down, picked up a handful of the lumpy grey crystals, tasted it and was delighted to find it salty. He ran back to the car for an empty bottle as the rest of us wrote our names in the salt and wondered why there were no flies.
It took thirteen minutes. One fly cruised around my head and I assumed it was lost, perhaps a hitchhiker from our car. Within ten seconds there were twenty. A minute later they were swarming around us. We raced back to the car, wondering how they had found us.
Back at our dusty campsite at Muloorina I had to accept that the flies weren’t going anywhere. There was no point organising dinner until they went to sleep at dusk so James and the boys played cricket while I hid in the car, pretending to consult maps until darkness brought some peace.
When we sat down to eat, a couple of ants crawled past my plate. I brushed them onto the ground. A minute later I noticed a few more. I swept them away again and checked the food containers on the table. They weren’t coming from there. Something crawled on my head. I ran my fingers through my hair expecting to find a fly. As I searched, tiny legs crawled down my back and inside my shirt. I leapt up and shook myself, hair flapping, spinning around and hitting myself in the back.
‘They’re everywhere’, said James. The table was covered in roaming ants.
‘Where are they coming from?’ I said. I looked up into the canopy of the gum tree above us. A convoy of ants were dive-bombing us from a branch above our table, marching up the branch from their nest and dropping, one by one, onto us.
That night I only woke once, when a herd of wild horses thundered through the campground on their way to the waterhole. They called to each other as their hooves pounded past the tent, so close that I could hear their breath snorting as they galloped through the moonlight to the waterhole.
We left the campground at Muloorina Station early and were back on the Oodnadatta Track by eight o’clock in the morning. The first car we overtook, after driving for nearly two hours, was also towing a dusty campervan. Its roof was loaded with surfboards and a tinny rested upside down on the van, and as we went past the two kids in the back and the adults in the front waved and gave us big smiles.
We had been surprised by the absence of other families since the start of our trip. Before we left, every second person we talked to had a story about someone they knew who had done the same thing. For a while we wondered if there were thousands of families driving around the country.
But so far we hadn’t met any. We had met families living in caravan parks, but they were on a completely different journey. Sometimes we met people camping with their kids on weekends. We had started keeping track of the days, trying to time our Saturday stops at places where there might be families. The April school holidays had just started in Victoria and South Australia, but the Oodnadatta Track was a long way for anyone to come for a fortnight’s holiday.
These people had looked like us – a bit feral, a bit dirty, and way too relaxed to be a family on a mini-break. They were also cruising through the dry heart of Australia with surfboards and a boat – not something you see a weekend traveller doing. Perhaps there were other families on the road after all.
A few hours later, at an old railway bridge just south of William Creek, we checked our map. We were already only 205 kilometres from Oodnadatta but it seemed silly to dash all the way up the Track in just two days. After our standard lunch of warm ham and salad rolls washed down with orange Tang, we stretched our legs and explored the abandoned train tracks.
What was left of the original wooden sleepers lay broken and scattered alongside the red dirt road. In some places they had been positioned along the slight rise
of the old tracks to spell out words. Baz Woz Ere. Jack 4 Me. Ireland Forever. ‘Don’t believe that crap about there being no wood on the Track’, we had already been told. ‘It’s everywhere.’ We collected some and put it on the roof of the car to use as firewood. I felt bad about taking it but, looking around, it was obvious that there wasn’t any other firewood – probably for hundreds of kilometres.
As we burned those sleepers over the next week – and they were made of hardwood that burned hot and long – they left behind six-inch nails that still bore the marks of the blacksmith’s hammer. Millions of nails, crafted by hand, must have been pounded into the wooden beams to build that 1500-kilometre railway. That day Oscar and Dylan also picked up handfuls of those old blackened nails from where they lay beside the remains of the steel tracks. Those nails jingled on the floor of the car for months.
William Creek was the first town since Marree, if you can call a place with a population of six a town. There was one pub and one general store, which faced off across the dusty road like feuding relatives. Both establishments had campgrounds, but neither of them seemed like a nice place to spend the night. The store looked cleaner and brighter than the pub, but it had all the character of a truck stop. We chose the pub. Inside, it was dark and dusty and the walls and ceilings were groaning under the weight of the detritus of drunken tourists. Foreign bank notes, fading student cards, postcards, torn t-shirts and even lacy bras lined every surface, but at least the air was cool.
We sat in the dim lounge bar and nursed our icy drinks. The boys were zoned out in front of a huge plasma screen showing the Disney Channel when the family we had passed on the road came in. The kids made a beeline for the cartoons and their parents looked at us and rolled their eyes.
Sue and Tim were from Queensland. Like us, they were on the road, homeschooling their kids, Troy and Kirralee, who were a bit older than our boys, and cruising around without much of a plan. They had camped the night before at Coward Springs, an old telegraph station that had been turned into Oodnadatta Track’s version of an outback playground, about a hundred kilometres back down the road. We had considered camping there but dismissed it as too touristy, instead spending the night with swarms of flies, mosquitoes and ants at Muloorina Station. But Tim and Sue had loved Coward Springs. It was named for its thermal pools, part of the chain of permanent water sources that spring from the Great Artesian Basin and make life possible in this hot, dry region. They had swum in the mineralised water that bubbled out of the ground, and at night the manager lit a fire under a steel drum to heat water for showers.