by Lorna Hendry
Nannette ran to the apartment to call an ambulance but he called her back. ‘I’ll just lie here for a while. I’ll be all right in a minute.’
Five minutes later, he was obviously not well. He had a searing headache but, more worryingly, he was vague and disorientated. He didn’t want to go to hospital but, when we insisted, he agreed on the condition that we didn’t call an ambulance. I helped him into dry clothes and the four of us supported him and got him into the car.
At the hospital, I let James out at the front door and went to park the car. When I walked into casualty he was nowhere to be seen. The triage nurse had fast-tracked him into the ward, but not after telling him off for not calling an ambulance immediately. By the time I found him, after getting a small lecture myself for driving him to hospital, he was flat on his back in a neck brace, shivering violently under a thin cotton blanket.
Over the next five hours, they did X-rays and scans of his neck. At ten o’clock, just four hours before my flight was due to leave, I rang Melbourne and told my boss I might not be coming. Finally the doctors were convinced that no damage had been done to his spinal cord and let us leave. They gave James a box of painkillers and told him to take it easy for a few days. Back at the apartment he collapsed on the bed, only stopping to say, ‘Call back and tell them you’re still coming.’
I argued with him, but he was insistent. We needed the money to top up our dwindling supplies of cash. And, he said, the three of them were looking forward to a few weeks of boys-only time. ‘No washing, no showers, no vegies, no sweeping out the tent. We’re going to have fun. We already have plans’, he added ominously.
I knew he was making most of that up to make me feel better, but Nannette agreed that I needed to go and promised to help with the boys for the next few days. I finished packing my bags, called Melbourne again to say that I was on my way to the airport and left worrying about how he would manage to pack up the apartment and get back on the road the next day, let alone cope without me for the next three weeks.
When I called the next morning from the St Kilda flat where I was staying with friends, James said that he hadn’t slept a wink all night. Both boys had climbed into bed with him and he had spent the night squashed between their hot, wriggly little bodies. His neck was still so stiff and sore that he couldn’t turn his head.
That day, as I sat down at my old desk at my old workplace, wearing my old winter clothes that felt heavy and unfamiliar next to my skin, James slowly packed our new life back into the trailer and drove slowly and carefully down to Litchfield National Park. While I was freezing in Melbourne, they were cruising around the Top End. When I talked to them, they seemed happy and relaxed and I wondered if they were having a welcome break from my nagging, but James said that it was just that they were taking a break from actually travelling.
I was busy at work, but in the moments when I stopped and looked around me at the people I had worked with for years, or sat at a dinner table with our oldest friends, I felt as lonely as I could remember. For the last six months, when I couldn’t see the kids I could always hear them. The four of us slept in one tent and prepared all our meals, ate and cleaned up together. When we bush-camped, we all washed in the same bucket. We argued a lot, but it was hard to hold grudges or sulk when three other people were laughing at you, so disagreements blew over quickly. Without them, I felt as if half of me was missing. It was hard to concentrate and even harder to sleep.
There was something else troubling me as well. I had some news to break to our friends. The Canadians who were renting our house had been in touch a few weeks earlier. They had been asked to stay on in Melbourne for another six months and they wanted to keep living in our house. As I told this story to Astrid, who had been forwarding our mail, fielding calls from friends and relatives when they hadn’t heard from us for a while and passing on messages from Distance Education wondering where our workbooks were, she looked at me accusingly. ‘You’re not coming back, are you?’
We weren’t. It had only taken us a couple of minutes after reading the email from our tenants to decide. We couldn’t think of one good reason to go home yet. We weren’t ready to return to our old lives. I tried to explain how this decision, which seemed so huge, had actually been one of the easiest we had ever made. Our friends were curious to know exactly what it was like – the freedom, the open spaces, living with such little stuff – but I couldn’t find the right words to describe it. All I had was a small ball of loneliness in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to go back.
Three weeks later, even after an evening flight to Darwin and an early morning bus trip to Katherine, I was so happy to be back in the heat and dust with my boys that I couldn’t stop talking. As we drove down the Stuart Highway to Mataranka, where they had been camped for several days, I wanted to know everything that they had done while I was away and I had messages to give them from their Melbourne friends. But all three of them had begun the marathon task of reading the entire Harry Potter series and the boys were so deep in their books that they could only raise their heads and nod a polite response before diving back into the pages. When we got to the campground, James abandoned me for Harry too, so I wandered around aimlessly, trying to wind down and rediscover the slow pace of camping life.
After a day of lolling in the tree-lined thermal pools for which Mataranka is famous and then sitting in the local pub’s open-air bar watching Collingwood make it into the preliminary finals, we packed up for a trip across the Gulf Country. A shopping spree in Katherine meant that we were carrying quite a lot of alcohol and we were worried about getting through the Gulf Country to Queensland. The most direct route was the Roper Bar Road, but it travelled through Aboriginal land and the Federal Government’s Intervention had come into force in the Northern Territory the day before. It was now an offence to travel through certain areas carrying alcohol.
I called the Katherine police station to check. They still weren’t sure how the laws affected the Roper Bar Road but advised us not to carry any alcohol. The NT News, however, had a front page story that said that as long as you were travelling straight through the banned areas it was permissible to carry ‘thousands of dollars’ worth of alcohol. We left with all our cargo.
After hours of driving we pulled into the Butterfly Springs campground at the southern end of the Limmen National Park. Covering 10,000 square kilometres, Limmen is the second-largest national park in the country. According to our guidebook, the only safe swimming spot in the whole park was Butterfly Springs, a tiny rock pool with a lacklustre waterfall at one end. Hot and dusty, we hurled ourselves into the water before realising that it was stagnant and a bit smelly. We decided that the tiny trickle of water leaking down from the rocks qualified it as flowing so we stayed in.
We set up camp under some flowering gums and made friends with two other groups who pulled in after us. Despite the temperature still hovering at 25°C well after the sunset, we lit a campfire and sat around it late into the night. The air was heavy with the smell of bushfires in the area and the sweet, cloying scent of pollen from the trees around us.
In the morning we woke to a droning noise that was so loud that the air practically vibrated with energy. Native bees were busy harvesting the blossom from the gums. We were fighting a losing battle against the soporific effects of the sound of the bees and the sickly sweet smell from the trees so there was little point trying to do any schoolwork. Instead we explored the Southern Lost City. Eerie sandstone pinnacles towered above us and we wandered around silently, staying close to each other. Smoke haze from the nearby bushfires made visibility difficult and the view from the lookout was obscured by smoke.
The following day we had planned to go to the fishing camp at King Ash Bay, which was 150 kilometres to Borroloola and then another 50 kilometres out to the coast of the Gulf. Half an hour into the drive we passed a sign to Lorella Springs Station. It said there was camping, beer, showers, natural hot springs, great fishing and waterfalls. We turned off and d
rove 40 kilometres to have a look. The managers were a bit surprised to have people arrive so early, but they were very friendly. We spent hours in the warm thermal pool, paddled an old wooden rowboat up the stream to where the hot water bubbles out of the earth, slid down a natural rock waterslide and checked out a twenty-year-old sea eagles’ nest with a huge mound of discarded turtle shells and small animal bones beneath it. Cooling off in a waterhole, we nervously kept an eye out for crocodiles, as we had been advised.
According to the woman who lived at Lorella Springs, we should have done the same thing back at Butterfly Springs. It was home to a pair of freshwater crocs. ‘They’re not man-eaters or anything but, you know, they could break a bone if they had a go.’
Our route was now being dictated by James’s need to watch Collingwood progress through the AFL finals series. Their next match was against Geelong on Friday night. We had been told that King Ash Bay, 130 kilometres away, was ‘very nice and it has a pub with a TV’. When we arrived on Thursday, it was a dry, hot dustbowl on the banks of the Macarthur River. Saltwater crocodiles made the water completely off-limits for swimming and there were no trees or shade to alleviate the heat. A little white dog skulked under a caravan, looking as miserable as I felt. Two women – fishing widows, I presumed – hurried past with plastic baskets of washing, heading for the grey concrete toilet block. There were no families here at all. I couldn’t imagine what we would do here for forty-eight hours.
I hated it so much that I refused to get out of the car. James insisted on driving around to look at campsites, but I was so angry that I wouldn’t speak to or even look at him. Eventually I accused him of being so obsessed with football and fishing that he was ruining our trip. He said I was too uptight, that I couldn’t cope with a bit of adventure and that my silent disapproval of everything he did was chipping away at everyone’s enjoyment. Half an hour later we were still arguing so nastily that the boys pleaded with us to stop. We drove out of King Ash Bay, went straight through Borroloola without stopping and turned back on the main dirt road and headed for the Queensland border. Furious at being forced to leave a place he had thought was pretty much perfect, James said that we would bloody well camp in the bush that night and we did, but not until we had driven nearly another 200 kilometres.
We spent Thursday night on a hill above the Robinson River. At sunset, the smoke haze turned the sky purple and the sun hung like a huge crimson ball on the horizon. Sunrise brought exactly the same colour palette. The sun rose in the pale grey sky, shining a terrifying bright red through the smoke. It looked as raw and angry as I had felt the day before.
We stuck with our tradition and kicked the footy into Queensland, 160 kilometres along the road from our camp. Signs on the road had advertised hot food and cold drinks at the Hell’s Gate roadhouse, just 50 kilometres from the border, and we promised the boys that we would stop for morning tea. When we arrived it was closed. I jumped out of the car, clutching the phone number for the nearest campground at Adels Grove. It was still nearly 170 kilometres away, but I was hoping to make amends with James by ringing ahead to check that they had a television and would be showing the football that night. But there was no phone – the phone box was as empty as the roadhouse.
It took us more than three hours to reach Adels Grove. Before checking if there were any campsites available, James marched up to reception and asked if they had a television. Yes, they did. Would they be showing the football?
‘Nah, mate. We did that last weekend, but there was too much whoopin’ and hollerin’ so we’re not doin’ it again.’ The man behind the bar had no sympathy for James. ‘You’re in the outback now, mate.’ We all piled back into the car in silence. I felt terrible. I knew how much this meant to James. The nearest pub was at Gregory Downs, 90 kilometres of unsealed road away. Despite the long and disappointing day they had already spent in the car, there was no whingeing from the boys. They knew this was deadly serious.
‘Three hours to go’, said James, grimly. It was already after two o’clock. Thank goodness it was a night match.
When we got to Gregory Downs, the boys and I hovered anxiously as James spoke to the woman behind the long, towel-lined, wooden bar of the pub. ‘Yeah, no worries. The telly’ll be on. Just camp down on the river, everyone else does.’
He grinned at her. It was the first smile we’d seen from him in more than twenty-four hours. ‘Fantastic. We just drove nearly 700 kilometres to watch this game.’
We chose a shady spot on the river and had swimming races until it was time to go back for dinner and the football. At first, James and Oscar were the only people paying attention to the game. Everyone else was playing darts or singing along to the jukebox. By the final quarter, however, with the score at 62–67, the whole pub was whoopin’ and hollerin’.
In the end, Collingwood lost by five points. James was philosophical about it but Oscar had truly believed that they would kick a goal in the final seconds and win their way into the Grand Final. When the siren went, it was too much for him and he burst into hot, painful tears. James was so proud that he went out to the public phone box and rang friends in Melbourne to spread the news that his oldest son was now a true Pies supporter, heartache and all.
We trailed back to the river under the bright moonlight, slept until late morning and woke to the sound of the river rippling past our tent. When we stopped into the pub on the way out to thank them for a great night, they asked if we would like to stay on and work for a while. I glanced at the neat little one-room school across the road and gazed around the vast arid landscape that I was beginning to see the beauty in, and tried to imagine what it would be like to belong here. It felt good in that moment, but we declined the offer. We were going to Cape York.
Chapter Thirteen
From Karumba, there were three ways to get to the top of Cape York. We could take the sealed road that curved south, forming a gentle smile on our map, and finished 1100 kilometres later in Mareeba, north of Cairns. From there, we could head up Cape York on the main Peninsula Development Road, which ran up the centre of the peninsula like a spine. This was the easiest and fastest route.
Alternatively, we could go north on the unsealed Burke Development Road, which stretched up promisingly for more than 200 kilometres before turning south to meet up with the sealed road 100 kilometres west of Mareeba. Both of these seemed like the long way round, and we would also be backtracking on our return journey down the Cape.
But our map also showed a shortcut. At the northernmost point of the Burke Development Road, a dotted line ran from Dunbar Station to a point about halfway up the main Peninsula Road. It would knock about 600 kilometres off the trip.
We went into Karumba for advice. The officer on duty at the police station was the largest man I have, and will ever, see in my life. From his great height, he pointed out that between the road and the track lay the Mitchell River. Dunbar Station charged $500 to tow bogged vehicles out of it. The carpenter who was fixing some cupboards in the police station piped up to say that 98 per cent of people got through the river without being towed and that we’d be fine. The butcher down the road said her dad was working on a road plant up there and he had heard there was quicksand in the Mitchell River. The local RACQ man thought the river crossing would probably be okay if we let our tyres down.
No-one really seemed to know much about the track on the other side of the river. The policeman did ask why we wanted to go that way. We told him it was to save time. He laughed down at us, but in a nice way.
James decided we may as well go and have a look, so we packed up the trailer and drove 250 kilometres to Dunbar Station. A man working in the yard said that the year before they had towed 150 cars out at $50 a time. This year, after they put up a sign saying the fee was $500, they had only towed six vehicles. ‘We go over in the utes all the time, but there’s no way I’d tow a trailer. It’d get bogged in the sand and turn into an anchor.’
We were so close to the crossing that we tho
ught we may as well drive down to see it for ourselves. There were people camped on the other side of the river, so James waded across for a chat, keeping an eye out for crocodiles.
‘A guy did it with a trailer yesterday, but it took him eight goes’, one of the men said. ‘We’ll give you a tow if you get stuck. $500.’
At two o’clock, after nearly an hour of standing at the bank of the wide, shallow river, James decided we should give it a go and started deflating all of our six tyres.
I had always known this was going to happen. Every one of the 250 kilometres we had driven up to Dunbar Station was another kilometre out of our way if we had to turn around and head south, and James couldn’t resist a shortcut. I had $500 in my pocket that I’d withdrawn from an ATM before we left Karumba, just in case.
Sweating slightly, his mouth tense, James put the car into low range and gunned the motor. Lurching on the soft sand, the car entered the running water, found some traction on the riverbed and ploughed on and up the steep bank on the other side, following the tracks made by previous vehicles. Oscar and Dylan shrieked with excitement. The campers stood up, gave us a round of applause and waved their stubbies in the air. ‘Best crossing we’ve seen yet!’
As James got the compressor out to pump out our tyres, one of the women asked where we were going to camp that night. I looked at my map. ‘I think we’ll make it to the Peninsula Road.’ I was hoping that we could have dinner at Musgrave Roadhouse, a popular stop on the Peninsula Road that had accommodation, a pub and – it was rumoured – a pool table. She looked at me a bit strangely and went back to her friends without another word. I wondered if I’d misread the map. I checked it again. It was less than 200 kilometres and we still had about five hours of daylight.
One kilometre from the river crossing, the road turned into a goat track. We had to creep along very slowly in first gear, wheels bouncing in and out of ruts and gullies in the hard yellow clay. We were averaging about 10 kilometres per hour. James sat forward and up high in his seat, looking over the bonnet for dangerous washouts in the track, fallen trees, axle-breaking holes, sandy patches and buried rocks. The track had them all. At five o’clock we realised we weren’t going to get anywhere near Musgrave that day. We found a clearing on the side of the track and set up camp for the night. A car drove past as we messed about with the tent and the big Aboriginal man driving seemed surprised to see us, but gave a friendly wave.