by Lorna Hendry
I asked them where they were planning to camp tonight, knowing without even looking at James that, whatever their answer, we would say, ‘Us too!’
‘Coober Pedy’, said Sue. Damn. Coober Pedy was pretty much in the opposite direction to where we were going. ‘We want to get into an underground camping place. I’m going to ring them from here and see if we can book in.’
Deflated, we discussed the dismal prospect of camping at William Creek. Tim chimed in and said he had read about a camping spot on the edge of Lake Eyre. We checked our maps. Halligan Bay, in Lake Eyre National Park, was accessible by a 70-kilometre 4WD-only track that started just a few kilometres south. Tim was keen on the idea but their kids had their hearts set on opals and caves.
We asked the woman behind the bar about Halligan Bay. ‘People go out there all the time. It’s a bit of a rough road, though. I’ve never been. There’s nothing out there.’ She warned us the drive would take a few hours.
Aware of how quickly darkness would come, we dragged the kids away from Disney and got moving. Tim and Sue wished us luck as we waved goodbye.
One kilometre along the Halligan Bay road we passed a registration booth. You were meant to fill in a form stating your car registration, the date and the number of nights you planned to stay, then put your money in the envelope and put it in the box. As I did all that, James complained that it was a ridiculous system. He said local kids probably raided the box for loose change to spend on pots at the pub. I ignored him and read the signs posted at the booth that warned of the extremely rough condition of the track and the complete absence of water at the campground.
As we drove I read up on Lake Eyre in the increasingly dirty and torn guidebooks that lived at my feet. Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre (as it has been known since 2012) is 144 kilometres long, 77 kilometres wide and covers nearly 10,000 square kilometres. At 15 metres below sea level, it is the lowest point of Australia. When it fills, which it only does about four times every century, it is the largest lake in Australia. In the aftermath of monsoons, floodwaters flow south from waterways right across Queensland’s Channel Country. The water makes its way first into Lake Eyre North, reaching depths of up to five metres and swelling the numbers of native fish that have managed to survive for years in small, isolated pools. As the water spreads south, birds arrive in their millions. Pelicans first, then silver gulls, grebes, ducks, falcons and eagles. No-one can explain how the birds know when the lake has water, especially as this happens so infrequently. The birds breed and feed on the fish or prey on smaller birds until the lake disappears as quickly as it appeared.
When the lake is dry, which it usually is, life is scarce. The salt crust can be 50 centimetres deep in places. One hardy fish species has evolved to survive in water fifteen times saltier than the ocean, and there is a local lizard that lives in the mud underneath the salt.
It is not a hospitable place for humans.
The track to Halligan Bay deteriorated quickly. The car rumbled along, bouncing over rocks that were so numerous that James gave up trying to steer around them. After a long, slow hour, during which we had seen no other vehicles, we passed a small white cross on the side of the track. ‘Caroline Grossmueller. 11 Dec 1998. PERISHED.’
I flicked through my books for an explanation, but found nothing.
Around us, the landscape was a wasteland of black rock. Giant slabs sloped away, colliding with each other and shearing off, leaving edges as clean as a knife blade. There were no trees in sight and, even in April, it was hot. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like in December. A rush of nausea flooded through me and dried my mouth. I had a sip of warm Tang and did a quick mental count of how many litres of water we were carrying.
‘Can we stop and ride our bikes?’ said Oscar.
‘No.’
We drove on.
I imagined arriving at the campground to see a few tents, or maybe even another camper trailer with a couple of kids. We would sit around a fire with other people later that night, share a drink and congratulate ourselves for being so far from the city.
When we arrived, there was one elevated toilet block, a few information signs and no signs of life. We were the only people there. We might have been the only people in the world. I felt a tiny worm of fear uncoiling in my gut, stretching out and spreading through my body, and I strode off up a sand dune in an attempt to outrun it.
White salt spread out in front of me as far as I could see. At the shore, where the patchy scrub gave up its attempt to spread onto the lake’s inhospitable surface, the salt was grimy and grey, but further out it shone as if it was illuminated from below. As I looked out onto its vast expanse, I had to fight to stop myself checking over my shoulder. It was the silence, I realised. There were no birds calling, no tiny creatures rustling in the bush, no lizards scuttling under the rocks. I swiped at my face. But there were flies. There were always flies.
A national park sign repeated information about the lake that I had already discovered in my books, with the addition of a sketch of a species of lice that lived in the salt crust. The sign also quoted, with a disarming honesty that I suspected must have escaped the notice of the park’s marketing team, Edward John Eyre’s report from one of his failed expeditions into the centre of Australia in search of an inland sea: ‘The whole was barren and arid-looking in the extreme, and as I gazed on the dismal scene before me I felt assured I had approached the vast and dreary desert of the interior’.
I knew exactly how he felt, and I’d only travelled a few hours to get to the lake. The first white man to see Lake Eyre had come across the massive salt lake on his third attempt to find a route into the interior of Australia. After weeks of slogging north from Adelaide through dry and inhospitable country, he found his path blocked by the dry lake that would later bear his name and knew that his goal was impossible. In his journal, he wrote about his overwhelming despair at seeing the expanse of salt that lay in front of him: ‘cheerless and hopeless indeed was the prospect before us … I had now a view before me that would have damped the ardour of the most enthusiastic …’
The kids had successfully nagged James into untying their bikes and they rode past me and out onto the salt. Despite signs forbidding the driving of cars on the lake, tyre tracks showed that someone had been doing circle work. But not recently. No rain had fallen out here for a long time. The salt held the imprints of all its visitors for an age. People had gouged their names into the crust and the lake was crisscrossed with footprints.
I looked at the light shimmering on the horizon. I could see what looked like water and mountains rising out of the lake. I shook my head, blinked and looked again. There was nothing there.
I turned my back on the lake and its disconcerting illusions and went back to the tent, where I rushed around preparing dinner. I had to keep moving; when I stopped, I could feel the fear rising and sending tendrils of ice into my limbs. As I cooked, the sun dropped over the horizon. The lake glowed with soft shades of purple and a full moon rose in a lavender sky. I have never seen anything so beautiful in my life, before or since. Yet, even if I live to be 100, I don’t think I will ever feel so alone as I did that evening.
The moon was so bright that we didn’t need our lights, but I couldn’t eat more than a few mouthfuls. I whisked away the plates as soon as everyone was finished and did the washing-up quickly. I raced to bed, hoping that sleep would shut down my imagination until the morning. Sunlight would surely bring a saner perspective.
Things didn’t get any better after I went to bed. I felt completely out of place, so wrong and so unwelcome. In the darkness, my imagination took over. Maybe empty space is a vacuum that beckons to the imagination. Mine obliged, filling the void with images of cars approaching in the night, carrying men with ill intent in mind. The silence hummed in my head, masking the sound of the vehicles I knew were coming.
Twice I felt the gorge rise in my throat. The only thing that stopped me from vomiting was the fear of having to go outsid
e the tent to do it. I lay completely still, because the rustling of any tossing and turning would stop me hearing the footsteps of anyone approaching the tent.
A beam of moonlight tracked a path across the canvas walls of the tent. I watched it for hours as it passed over the foot of my bed, across the wall and touched for a while the sleeping faces of our sons.
In the depth of the night I said, ‘James, I am absolutely crapping myself.’
‘Me too’, he said. His voice was so clear that I knew he had been lying wide awake for hours too. ‘I’ve got the axe under the mattress.’
I forgot I had to be quiet. ‘Why? No-one knows we’re out here.’
His theory, developed over several hours of listening to his heart thumping in his ears, had two parts. One was that the people at the pub had told the local serial killer that we were out here. This was just a reworking of a movie plot, so I ignored it. His second theory was that by registering at the turn-off, I had placed us on the psychopath’s menu. The murderer only needed to check the box to find out that two adults and two children were camping alone on the edge of the lake. This was harder to dismiss, particularly as it contained the twist that my insistence on following the rules had sentenced us to death.
My stomach churned. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
In that moment I realised that when you are in the grips of a mindless fear, the knowledge that you are not alone in your imaginings makes it ten times worse. If it’s just you thinking the unthinkable, your fears are silly and groundless. If two of you think it, you can’t help but wonder if some basic survival instinct is at work.
It took me an age to work out that the night was over. There were no birds to herald the sunrise with song, so the dawn arrived in complete silence. After the longest and slowest sunrise I have ever endured, it was finally light. I had imagined this moment all night. The sun would come up and everything would be okay. My fears would shrivel and vanish in the brightness of a new day.
I crept out of the tent and stumbled to the toilet block. My legs were weak and uncooperative. Cramps gripped my bowels.
When I heard steps approaching, my guts turned to ice. For one terrible moment, I knew that in the brief time I had been shaking on the toilet, my family had been slaughtered and I was next.
‘Mum? Are you finished in there?’
For months afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about those fifteen hours we spent alone on the edge of Lake Eyre. I needed to understand why we were so scared. One friend, bemused at why it had terrified us so much, said, ‘But there’s nothing out there’.
‘Exactly’, I replied.
Later that year, when I finally had both time on my hands and internet access, a quick Google search turned up a coroner’s report explaining what had happened to Caroline Grossmueller.
Caroline and Karl Goeschka, Austrian tourists with no experience of 4WD vehicles, had wanted to see Lake Eyre. Following the instructions in their guidebook, they told the barman at William Creek their plan. He wrote their names and the date in a notebook, telling them if they weren’t back the next day he would ‘hit the panic button’. At the Halligan Bay campground, they drove into soft sand and bogged their vehicle. Despite letting air out of their tyres and digging around the wheels, they were unable to free the car. After two days, when no-one had come to rescue them, they decided to walk back to the Oodnadatta Track, a distance of 67 kilometres. They left at night, when it was a little cooler, but Karl became ill and had to return to the campground.
Three days later, Caroline’s body was found 30 kilometres from the road. She was still carrying more than six litres of water. There was a note in her rucksack: ‘HELP! Had to leave boyfriend alone due to health problems with less water … Myself still trying to get out of this hell heading towards William Creek, which 2 inhabitants simply forgot us. Please try to find us!’
The police found Karl, still alive, at Halligan Bay. He too had written a series of notes in anticipation of his death. A police officer deflated the vehicle’s tyres, spent ten minutes digging out the wheels and drove the car out of the sand.
The coroner’s report into Caroline’s death included recommendations about compulsory training sessions for tourists hiring 4WDs and mandatory communication and recovery equipment in all rental vehicles. The coroner also ruled that the people at William Creek were not to blame. However, in his evidence, the man they had spoken to admitted that he had indeed forgotten all about them.
I also discovered that I wasn’t alone in seeing mountains rising from what looked like water in the lake. Lake Eyre is famous for its hallucinatory qualities. Navigational equipment goes haywire too. In the days before GPS you couldn’t even rely on your compass. Nor can you trust your ears. One research team accurately recounted conversations that they had overheard quite clearly across several kilometres of salt. More bizarrely, they reported seeing one of their shore-based colleagues riding towards them on a penny farthing.
I think now that what I felt that night at Halligan Bay was not just about being alone. It was also that, after forty years of city life, I was surrounded for the very first time by a landscape that made no concessions at all to the requirements of human life. I had spent my entire life priding myself on my independence, when only a few days’ drive from home there were places where my urban resourcefulness was totally inadequate.
Chapter Six
‘This is great’, I said, as I wandered around the Pink Roadhouse.
I loved Oodnadatta. I loved the noticeboard papered with clippings about the roadhouse’s crazy owner, Adam Plate. Adam was so well known that people from all over the world rang him when they were planning their outback holiday. For hundreds of kilometres, he had planted pink metal signs to point out interesting landmarks, give directions at the intersection of unmarked dirt roads and tell you how much further you still had to drive.
Although James wanted to keep driving, he knew there was no chance of getting me out of a town that night, even one as shitty as Oodnadatta. We set up in the campground behind the pub. It was eerily reminiscent of the one in William Creek that, just twenty-four hours before, we had spurned in order to spend a terrifying night on the edge of Lake Eyre.
Oscar and Dylan spent the afternoon hurtling down an old metal slide that had been precariously placed on the edge of the swimming pool. On the other side of the fence, road trains loaded with two layers of cattle rumbled into the service station, but not even the smell of the cows and their mournful lowing could put a dent in my celebratory mood. I felt like having a drink.
James went to the store, returning with beer and a six-pack of premixed cans. ‘It’s all they had. I’m not paying $40 for a bottle of bad wine that you won’t even finish.’
My tolerance for alcohol had taken a beating on this trip, probably because I was so dehydrated the whole time. Just one glass of wine squeezed every drop of moisture out of my body and replaced it with an instant headache. I had struggled to get any enjoyment out of drinking. Nausea and pounding temples came well before any lightening of my mood and stifled any urges to tell mildly inappropriate stories to strangers around a campfire.
I cracked the icy can and took a sip. It was cold. Bubbly, but not too fizzy. Sweet, but in a tangy kind of way. Not like lemonade. I sipped again. Ten minutes later, the can was empty. I put it down in mild shock. James grinned at me. ‘That went down pretty fast.’
I reached for another one. ‘There’s nothing much to it. It’s like a soft drink, really.’
After two cans, I decided to get dinner organised before I lost the will to move. I stumbled back to the tent and managed to cook pasta and slop some tins of tuna and tomatoes over the top. I knocked off another can as I worked, and finished a fourth as we ate.
At four o’clock in the morning I was wide awake. So much heat was pouring off my body that I couldn’t believe James was sleeping through it. My skin was tight and dry, rasping painfully wherever my limbs were touching. My cheek on the pillowcase felt dangerou
sly hot. I rolled over to find a cooler patch but the movement triggered a sludgy wave of nausea that I couldn’t ignore.
Five minutes later, as I vomited in the portable toilets on the edge of the caravan park, I felt my spirits lift. I knew that, despite what James was going to say about how much alcohol I had drunk, I was purging the fear that I had been carrying for the last twenty-four hours. The next morning, feeling much better than I deserved to, I regained my camping mojo and agreed to go to Dalhousie Springs, on the edge of the Simpson Desert.
The track across the Simpson wasn’t on our itinerary. We knew about it, though; it was an iconic desert crossing and one of the things that people on the road used to work out who was a serious traveller and who wasn’t. More than once we’d been asked, ‘Are you doin’ the Simpson?’ We weren’t. For one thing, it went in the wrong direction for us. It would take us east, past Poeppels Corner where the borders of South Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland collide, all the way to Birdsville. From there, the only way out was back across the desert, or south down the Birdsville Track. Also, as far as I could tell, the track was pretty much 600 kilometres of sand dunes. Sand dunes weren’t our strong suit so far. Plus, all the recommendations about the crossing included strongly worded statements about carrying lots of fuel, water and spare parts, travelling in a group, and being prepared for at least six days on the track. It wasn’t the kind of trip you did on the spur of the moment, no matter how free and spontaneous you felt.