Wrong Way Round

by Lorna Hendry

  Dinner that night was a tense, quiet affair. At eight o’clock the next morning James rang the shop and asked if he could return everything. They didn’t seem surprised. That evening, we dismantled the twisted and bent structure from the roof rack and agreed to remain a family that fished from the beach.

  Early in January, we decided we wanted to go back and spend more time in the Kimberley. I contacted every campground on the Gibb River Road to ask if we could work for them during the dry season. I knew it was a long shot, especially as I had to explain that we had two children and would have to spend time homeschooling them.

  In February we got a reply from a cattle station near the Gibb River Road, offering us jobs running their campground. The boys wouldn’t be a problem. The woman said that she had a teenage daughter and it would be nice to have more kids around. James would do general maintenance and my job was to clean the tourists’ cabins in the morning and help the cook. She had also hired a governess, so when the campground was busy our boys could join in her daughter’s lessons. We could start at the end of April.

  It sounded perfect. We would still be living in our camper trailer and homeschooling the boys, but this time we’d be settled in one place and they could have regular lessons every day. They would have plenty of time to play and explore outdoors. The station was the kind of campground that attracted families, so there would always be other children for them – and people for James and me to talk to. We had one day off a week, so we could explore the gorges and waterfalls around the station and maybe take a couple of longer trips further along the Gibb River Road. The dry season ended in October, giving us a few months to drive back to Melbourne. There was even internet access at the homestead, so I thought I might be able to do a bit of work for my old clients in Melbourne in the evenings to earn some extra money for our return trip.

  Everything was falling into place, except that James had been coming home more exhausted than usual and had been complaining of a nagging headache for weeks. At first we put it down to dehydration. Within minutes of arriving at the construction site each day, rivers of sweat were pouring down his back. He was constantly sore and achy but, given the hard physical work he was doing, that wasn’t unexpected. One night he woke up shaking violently and complained that he was cold. I turned off the ceiling fan and found him a blanket. He fell asleep but soon woke again in a pool of sweat. His skin was hot and tight and when he got up for a drink his hands were so stiff he couldn’t hold the glass. The doctor eventually diagnosed Ross River Fever, a mosquito-borne virus, and said that there wasn’t much he could do. James could expect the symptoms to recur for up to twelve months.

  Our last weekend in Mission Beach, in mid-March, coincided with the local government elections. A friend of Liz’s was running for council so we went to a barbecue at the lifesaving club on Saturday evening to await the results. The kids got bored with all the talk of numbers and parties and votes and were running around outside in the dark, barefoot as always. We were watching them when Dylan gave a loud gasp.

  ‘Snake! Ouch, it’s bitten me!’

  James picked him up and raced inside. There were two puncture wounds and drops of blood on Dylan’s ankle. James grabbed a large tablecloth and wrapped it around Dylan’s leg. Someone called an ambulance and the first-aid kit was found. We bandaged Dylan’s leg properly, holding him firmly to immobilise the limb. A woman knelt down beside me and helped keep Dylan calm.

  ‘The important thing is to make sure he’s breathing as slowly as possible’, she said.

  For twenty minutes we sat beside him on the concrete floor. Lying on the ground, his leg bandaged to the thigh, he looked tiny and pale. His eyes were fixed on us the whole time, wide with fear. I knew that he trusted us completely, believing that if he did everything we told him he would be fine. I was terrified that we were going to lose him.

  ‘He’s so small, you know, if it was going to be bad it would probably happen pretty quickly’, the woman beside me said quietly.

  When the ambulance finally arrived from Tully, the paramedic checked his vital signs, re-bandaged his leg, loaded him onto a stretcher and drove us back to Tully Hospital. Two hours and several blood and urine tests later it was clear that whatever had bitten him wasn’t venomous.

  The next day, on his way to collect us from the hospital, James stopped at the lifesaving club and had a look around in the daylight. Behind the building, right where Dylan had been bitten, he found an old black rubber mat. It was rotting and falling apart and one of the rubber strips had two nasty pieces of wire sticking out from one end.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Leaving Mission Beach to drive back to the Kimberley, the trailer bouncing along behind us, we felt light and free. Everyone assumed their old positions: James at the wheel, the boys curled up in the back with a pile of books and me squashed in beside bags of maps and food and bottles of water. We were adventurers again.

  But first, we were taking a major diversion. We had four weeks to get to our new jobs, and we had to make good on a promise we had made the kids when we left Melbourne. We were going to Wet’n‘Wild on the Gold Coast.

  On the way down the coast – on the first sunny day for weeks – we treated ourselves to a trip to the Great Barrier Reef. Oscar was born to snorkel. Like his grandmother, he had no fear and by the end of the day he had decided to study marine biology at James Cook University in Townsville and be a professional diver. He flitted around the reef for hours in his bright yellow stinger suit, only surfacing to eat. Dylan decided his career was going to be in photography, contenting himself by doing several trips in the tiny semi-submersible submarine that chugged around underwater at regular intervals, happy to view the coral and the fish through thick, clouded windows.

  Heading south on the Bruce Highway was terrifying. By then we had driven on some of the roughest and most remote roads in the country, but I had never been as scared as I was when we were being tailgated by huge trucks pulling two semi-trailers. We made it to Brisbane, a bit shaken, and the next night James and the boys went to watch Collingwood lose by two points in the final minutes of the game.

  At Wet’n‘Wild, we were first in line when they opened the gates. It was a sunny, warm weekday in the middle of the school term so there were no crowds. We rode every ride at least twice, climbing the tall metal staircases back to the top of every ride without ever having to wait for our next turn. Oscar and Dylan only stood still long enough to eat and to let me slap sunscreen on their arms and legs and watch it slide straight off. We limped out, damp and exhausted, when they closed the gates and slept for twelve hours. Both boys declared that it had been the best day of the whole trip so far. Although I was appalled that a theme park could outrank all the other things we had done, I sort of agreed with them.

  Before we left the Gold Coast we spent a couple of days with Tim, Sue, Troy and Kirralee, the family we had first met in the pub at William Creek on the Oodnadatta Track. They were just back from their trip, and we sat up late one night, drinking and swapping stories about the places we had been. Sue had been busy printing and framing photos and we laughed when we realised that we had some identical shots taken in exactly the same places. We worked out that our paths had continued to cross since Dalhousie Springs. Tim and I had been on different whale shark boats on the same day at Exmouth and we must have driven right past their campsite in Cape Range National Park on our way to Ningaloo Station. They had lingered in Western Australia too. Tim was a fanatical surfer and they had fallen in love with Gnaraloo, halfway between Carnarvon and Exmouth, and were hoping to go back there soon. They were still one of the few families we had met while we were travelling, and we still couldn’t work out why that was. We felt like very lucky members of a very exclusive club.

  After several long days in the car, we made it to the heart of the outback. At the classic Queensland town of Longreach, located on the Tropic of Capricorn and home to Qantas and the annual RM Williams Longreach Muster, we visited the surprisingly
modern and large Stockman’s Hall of Fame. James wandered around feeling nostalgia for his days as a jackaroo and ringer, the boys were captivated by the whips and knives and guns, and I shuddered at the photos of the conditions that the women had to endure in the early days of outback settlement. That night we found a free camp beside the Thomson River. We spent most of the night around a campfire with two men who were celebrating a sixty-eighth birthday. They had a guitar, a squeezebox and a plastic bucket of rum and orange juice that they invited us to share. We sang classic campfire songs with them, starting with ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and moving on to ‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree’ and ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport’. It was only when the birthday boy fell off his chair and into the fire, then declared himself as ‘drunk as a cunt’ that we decided we should take ourselves and the boys to bed. Their wives arrived back from bingo and gave them hell, and we laughed ourselves to sleep.

  The next day we drove to Winton, which is not only the birthplace of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ but also has the world’s only fossilised footprints of a dinosaur stampede. At the caravan park we showered in the sulphur-scented water, which was a less-advertised feature of Winton. The man at the caravan park said that you weren’t considered a local until you no longer noticed the smell. ‘Mind you, I’ve been here fifty years and it still stinks.’

  I liked the Waltzing Matilda museum. It had a light and sound show with an animated swaggie telling his story and talking about why Banjo Patterson’s song meant so much to Australians. There were rooms full of old bottles, early settlers’ furniture, recordings of different versions of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and hundreds of old photos. We had optimistically bought the full Winton Tourist Pass, so we also went across the road to see the life-size diorama of the dinosaur stampede. The building didn’t seem big enough to hold a dinosaur, but wandering past a collection of crocheted doilies and old bottles, I found some small fibreglass dinosaur models lurking in the corner behind a faded picket fence at the back of the dusty shop. We stared at it, confused.

  The next morning we drove to Lark Quarry, the site of the actual stampede. Bill the Dinosaur Man explained that the stampeding dinosaurs were about the size of chickens, but assured us that they had been running away from a much bigger dinosaur. We couldn’t understand why the chicken-size prints were running towards the bigger ones so Bill told us to think of ourselves walking into a chicken shed and then imagine the chickens running past us to avoid being cornered. It was starting to sound much more like a scurry than a stampede. But the footprints were definitely there and, as Bill told the story and pointed at the fossils with a plastic T-Rex on the end of a long stick, we got the picture and were a little awed. After the tour, Oscar told Bill that he wasn’t very interested in dinosaurs but he would like to know more about the stuff that had killed them, like comets and meteors. Bill seemed okay with that.

  Our next stop was 360 kilometres west of Winton in the only caravan park in Boulia, home of the mysterious Min Min lights that have been reportedly seen in the area since before European settlement. Back in the swing of camping, we were all set up in just seventeen minutes. An hour later, two families drove in and spent an hour dusting the outside of their campers before they even started unpacking. As the adults put up tents, set up long stainless steel kitchen benches and unloaded boxes of cooking equipment, their hungry children ran around screaming and shouting and playing in the toilet block. At nine o’clock a German man in blue pyjamas emerged from his caravan and told them off. The kids were eventually fed and put to bed. At ten o’clock, their parents finally started preparing their own meal.

  It was that evening – because, of course, we wandered over to meet them – that I realised I was turning into the kind of annoying, know-it-all traveller that I had always hated. They told us that they had decided not to take the Plenty Highway to Alice Springs because they been told it was so corrugated and rough that it was virtually impassable.

  I couldn’t help myself. ‘Oh, that’s complete bullshit. If it was as bad as that, it would have to be the worst road in Australia.’

  Before I knew it, I had told them all about the many places we had been in the last thirteen months and no doubt gave the impression that I believed I knew everything there was to know about road conditions across the entire country. The next day James told me he had seen them exchange looks as I talked. He knew those looks. They were the same ones we swapped when people offered us unsolicited advice.

  I was right, though. The Plenty Highway wasn’t that rough. It was, however, so mind-numbingly featureless and boring that a game of I-Spy in the car only lasted four minutes.

  ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with C.’

  ‘Umm … that cow over there.’

  ‘How did you get that?’

  ‘It was either that or “car” and I just did that one.’

  Dylan and Oscar conspired for a while in the back and came up with a variation.

  ‘Okay, so Level 1 is something real that you can see. Like the road. And Level 2 is something that’s real, but you can’t see it right now. So, maybe, like … a tree’, Oscar explained.

  ‘I want to go first!’ said Dylan. ‘I’m going to do Level 3.’

  ‘What’s Level 3?’

  ‘Something that you can’t see and isn’t real. Ummm … I spy with my little eye something that begins with D’, said Dylan.

  ‘Dragon!’ said the rest of us.

  ‘That’s not fair! How did you get that?’

  We were so bored that when I found a shortcut to Alice Springs through the rugged but beautiful East MacDonnell Ranges we decided to take it. We spent the night at an almost deserted campground near Harts Range, 215 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, that had the fantastic name of ‘Spotted Tiger’. The only other people there were eight men, aged from their early twenties to late fifties, all heavily bearded and decidedly grimy. They were camped in the far corner with their dogs. We waved at them as we drove by but they just stared at us and didn’t wave back. Half an hour after we set up they started up their chainsaws. James and I didn’t sleep well that night. In the morning they drove out early, all wearing orange safety vests, and we worked out that they were a road crew.

  In Alice Springs we visited the School of the Air, where we had a long conversation with one of the teachers about homeschooling. We swapped notes and realised that the workbooks we were using were very similar to theirs. We talked about how difficult we had sometimes found it to do the lessons with our kids, and she told us some parents employed young women with teaching experience. That explained the governess we would be meeting in just a few weeks. We watched a class of students from all over the Northern Territory have a lesson via a video link-up. They were all white, and I asked how many Indigenous students they had. The guide explained that most of their pupils lived on remote cattle stations. Indigenous children, she said, tended to live in communities that had access to a school.

  On our way out of the Northern Territory a couple of days later, we stopped at the art centre at Yuendumu, 300 kilometres west of Alice Springs. While Oscar and Dylan checked out colourfully decorated music sticks and shallow bowls made from bark that the salesgirl told us were called coolamons, James fell in love with a triptych of the Seven Sisters constellation painted in achingly beautiful shades of purple and lavender.

  The woman who ran the centre laughed at him. ‘You can’t have that. It’s spoken for.’

  The work had been commissioned by a gallery in Switzerland so even if we could afford it – which we couldn’t – it wasn’t for sale. She promised to ring James if the Swiss gallery changed their mind. We left, dreaming of winning the lottery.

  Once we got outside the art centre, Yuendumu was a shock. It was the first time we had been in a Central Australian Indigenous community. Rubbish blew past as we drove to the general store for fuel and snacks for what was left of the afternoon’s drive. Faded tin houses squatted in patches of bare dirt and plastic bags and nappi
es collected against the wire fences that divided each bare yard from the next. Rusting car bodies sat on bare hubs and leaked foam upholstery onto the ground. Scrawny dogs loped past in packs and paid us absolutely no attention. Neither did the people gathered in small groups on the porches of the houses, some of them warming their hands over fires burning in 40-gallon drums.

  Ten minutes earlier, we had been fantasising about paying thousands of dollars to hang a painting on the wall of our inner-city house. It was a shock to be confronted with the appalling living conditions of Indigenous people in this wealthy country.

  That night, 400 kilometres further up the Tanami Road, we camped out the back of the Rabbit Flat Roadhouse, run by a recluse who was notorious for chasing away visitors who dared to arrive on his days off. We sat around the campfire while the pastel colours of twilight slowly faded into the dark velvet of a desert night and talked about being homesick. I’d known something was brewing earlier in the day when both the boys had used the last of their pocket money to buy gifts for classmates they hadn’t seen for more than a year.

  I was homesick too. We’d been gone for more than thirteen months, travelled nearly 50,000 kilometres and camped in over a hundred places. We’d driven across deserts and through rainforests, snorkelled in coral reefs on both sides of the country, climbed mountains, camped on deserted beaches and met people from all over the world. It was a wonderful experience, but home suddenly seemed very far away.

  That night the boys and I talked about the people we missed, and about how different it was to being in Melbourne. We talked about what our lives used to be like – James and I working and the four of us not really spending any time together. Sometimes all we seemed to do was argue about getting ready for school in the morning and about brushing teeth and going to bed in the evening. We rarely ate our meals together. On weekends, we would cross paths sometimes in the mad whirl of cleaning, shopping, washing and the kids’ sporting activities. Oscar thought about that, and then said accusingly, ‘When we were at home, we never saw you!’ As if he’d only just realised.