I Saw a Strange Land

by Arthur Groom

  A few seconds later I was groping through mulga- and mallee-bushes into the shadowy east, scarcely able to see, feeling with outstretched hands, until the softness of a well-used cattle pad set off in the right direction.

  It was not until I was at least three or four miles out, and grey light had defined the red and brown of the low ridge running parallel a hundred yards southward, that I realized the new shoes might have been better with a trial ‘run-in’; but for the next couple of hours it was battle enough to wriggle through a network of brittle dead undergrowth, and negotiate rocky gullies, stony ridges, and isolated sand-drifts through which any sort of good pace was impossible.

  By about 9 a.m. Angas Downs homestead was at least twelve miles behind. A stony ridge lay ahead. I climbed it, sat beneath a low bush and took my shoes off. On the right foot a blister had risen two inches across, and another on the left foot an inch across – the first since boyhood. It was annoying, but so far the second skin had not been penetrated. With a razor-blade I slashed the backs and sides of the shoes. It gave some relief, but the damage was done; the rest of the journey would be somewhat of a hobble. Breakfast was all out of tins: a tin of peaches, a tin of condensed milk, and a tin of meat; iron rations with a vengeance.

  There was no sign whatever of Mount Ormerod.

  Down a little south of east a prominent range had risen into view. It was unmapped. Well to the north-north-west, the blue pyramid peaks still stood up on the skyline. By no stretch of the imagination could any one of them be Ormerod, whose direction was supposed to be north-east. I had no compass; but the sun’s direction was definite. Pakunja’s tiny blue peak had disappeared somewhere in the mass of timber and sandhills.

  A saltbush valley continued into the east, between ridges, in which I found four camels. I followed a faint camel pad a further two or three miles into sandhill country, softer, and with less order than any I had seen yet. It was as though mammoth lorries had tipped giant heaps of sand all over the world’s surface, and planted all the scratchy spinifex and dead twigs of the world on them, leaving only the windswept tops of the higher sandhills bare and pink.

  The cool breeze of the early morning dropped and left an uncomfortable warmth, bearable at first, but by late morning scorching with all the heat of hell. It slowed me down, and it was with some relief that I slithered down a sandhill to land in two deep wheel-ruts twisting away into the north-east. It was a definite landmark, and promised some relief from the laborious sandhills. At least, if anything happened, a lift might eventuate.

  I was soon harshly enlightened. Very few trucks had passed that way, sufficient only to leave the two deep wheel-marks in the soft sand. The tracks were not wide enough for comfortable walking, which necessitated similar muscular action and balance to that of a tightrope walker. I tried to walk with one foot in and one out of a rut, then both out of the rut, followed by both in; until time proved that the best method was to walk between the ruts in goose-step fashion over the prickly spinifex clumps, until that became more monotonous and irritating than I ever thought possible; then, for a change, down into the ruts again; on and on, a few hundred yards at a time, winding in and out and round sandhills along the bush track of a pioneer, who had been forced to take his own powerful vehicle only where the country would let him travel. I doubt if there is any rougher motor track in Australia. Sometimes it almost doubled back on itself, twisted well away to east or west, but always returned to the one constant, general direction, like a tortured reptile recoiling to strike into the north-west.

  But there is no better time to meditate seriously than during a long walk. Problems and all manner of questions present themselves automatically for silent mental discussion and judgment. The result is always clear. More than a thousand miles of tramping over Australia’s wild heart had made it obvious that its few hundred natives now have a good chance of continued survival. That fact alone indicates many future problems, and a different aspect on the white man’s right to enjoy the amazing winter scenery of Central Australia. Some day the wild gorges and valleys, mountain crests, monoliths and lakes, will become world-famous. It is merely a matter of time and circumstance; and the main question to be decided is, would the advent of the sightseer in large numbers spell the doom of the native?

  Thus I had plenty to think about, and somewhere about 2 p.m. I gladly flopped beneath a shady mulga. My feet were aching from the cramped shoes and the heat of the sun, which was pounding down with all the force of midsummer. I built a fire, which neither by accident nor design could upset my quart pot of precious water, and lunched on a tin of luncheon beef, condensed milk, and dried apricots, washed down by the scalding hot tea. It seems an odd paradox that man should sweat with pounding heat, and apply heat to heat, to bring about a delightful coolness in a desert in one of its mocking moods.

  The temperature was probably well over a hundred in the shade, and the morning breeze had died away. There was still no sign of Mount Ormerod. Instead, a mile or so beyond the lunch camp, the track wound through scattered mulga and down a sandy slope, then up a long rise for several miles, with one large sandhill slightly higher than the one preceding it, until the increase in elevation was perhaps a hundred feet in a mile. It was a long, slow, hot plod, necessitating frequent rests; and all landmarks were hidden by the sandy crests. The mulga had disappeared, and stately, dark-topped desert oaks dotted the spinifex and sand every thirty or forty yards.

  Towards sundown I came to a heap of about three tons of cement dumped beside the track. Another mile or so farther on a second lot had been dumped and covered with a tarpaulin, and there were tell-tale skid-marks, stop-and-start depressions in the sand, indicating truck trouble; a deserted campfire and overnight camp, a discarded tyre, footmarks of men and women in the sand; more heavy vehicle tracks in from the north-east, a turning in and out of the spinifex, and off again, probably towing the broken vehicle in for repairs – nearly two hundred miles to Alice Springs. The dumps of cement all along the track indicated an overloaded truck setting out with faith in dry weather; but unable to pull over the terrible sandhills and the boggy valleys between, the dumping at first of a ton or two, then another dumping, until the truck itself broke down, and Andrews had been forced to leave his precious cement out in a wet desert land, where normally it never rained in spring. It told a story of tragic effort and disappointment, a home delayed, money lost, and of time and elements dealing another hard blow at a pioneer.

  Out in that mass of piled sand, once again, where was Mount Ormerod? For that matter where was any known mountain or hill? One of my maps showed white space for many miles round. The other indicated Mount Ormerod close by; and Bill Liddle had said it was wrong.

  The track continued up and up, and I walked barely a mile at a time between rests, until I came to an abandoned red jeep beside another pile of cement and several boxes, one of which was filled with green shrivelled limes.

  If ever Mr Andrews reads this he will know that half a dozen limes were bashed open on stones and sucked in succession, and another half-dozen squeezed into my remaining water-bottle; then I went slowly on, uphill to a rocky knoll, and descended it slowly to sit awhile and look for landmarks.

  There they were, now on every horizon, but unmapped. According to one map Mount Ormerod was about where I sat; but the rocky knoll was far too insignificant to fit in, and the track wound away north-east of it, whereas the mountain I was seeking was supposed to be three miles east of the track! No! A sandy waste still lay ahead, and yet it held a fearful grandeur. It was late afternoon and there was nothing else to do but to continue on, slowly now, but with the cool of night at least approaching.

  Somewhere towards midnight, blisters and legs threw in the sponge and demanded rest; and I ate a belated tea of tinned meat and condensed milk. It was the last of the food. I had half a bottle of water left. Mount Ormerod must be sighted before midday. Meanwhile a few hours’ dozing would be in order. I had come to a definite conclusion that the wilderness are
as of Central Australia belong firstly to the natives, and to the white man only on sufferance.

  A large black desert oak had fallen across clean sand. It made a good fire, which cast a glow weirdly outward, so that the dark trunks of surrounding desert oaks standing straight and proud, seemed like surrounding warriors; but sleep was easy and deep.

  CHAPTER XXV

  JOURNEY’S END

  Within three hours after sunrise I had wandered slowly down a long, monotonous mallee slope towards a blue pyramid mountain three miles to the east, rising gradually higher as I approached – Mount Ormerod! Mount Ormerod! It was easy to repeat the name. It was unmistakable in feature; sudden, bold, with a greyness running through the red. For the past twenty miles or more the only animal tracks had been those of wandering camels and kangaroos; now horse and cattle marks crossed the deep wheel tracks; scattered tufts of grass had been eaten down to the sand; and then on over a broad sandy saddle to sight the winding course of the tree-lined Palmer River – another mile, a wisp of smoke, and the iron-roofed, stone huts of Mount Quoin* Station. Old Alf Butler walked out to meet me.

  ‘Here, mate, you look a bit tired. Come right in – sit down there – tea and tucker’s right ready. I’m just having a sort of late breakfast. Where’d you come from? Here – take your shoes off, and rest those feet.’ They were welcome words. Mug after mug of tea went down, scalding hot, fresh and strong. No better tea was ever brewed. I didn’t ask the brand. Alf Butler kept up a supply of freshly cooked prime beef and large slices of home-made bread. A tired, exhausted stomach would have revolted at the bread and meat and hot tea; but weeks of open air and solid exercise had made me thoroughly fit.

  Alf Butler lives a lonely life in his clean little shack beside the southern bank of the Palmer River, with the usual retinue of natives and their families. He wanted me to stay overnight, but sore feet or not I had to get moving towards any spot where a radio message could be sent explaining my delay. Henbury Station was a little more than twenty miles east-north-east, by clear, hard road over many hills.

  ‘It’s just as well you came the way you did,’ Alf Butler told me later. ‘You’d have missed out on a truck from Tempe Downs. O’Brien managed to get in past here a couple of days ago. Daughter getting married in at the Alice. Fact is, you’ll be lucky to get a lift from anywhere before the mail-plane comes to Henbury. Nobody’s travelling unless they have to until the ground dries more, and half the trucks are bogged or broken down. Old Bob Buck might run you in. He’s at his place – Doctor’s Stones – twenty miles beyond Henbury. What about a horse from here on? I’ll send a boy with you to bring it back.’

  But I preferred to walk.

  Alf Butler cut more large slices of beef and bread, piled them into my pack; and I left his little home at midday and walked out past clay-pans and waterholes to the Palmer River crossing, a mile eastward.

  Mount Ormerod now rose a couple of miles southeast, in tiered formation, shimmering in the heat, red rock, and green spinifex; but I soon lost interest in it and crossed the river to a broad sandy flat north of it. Green grass took a welcome breeze and rippled it along over hundreds of acres. The sandy desert country lay south across the river. To northward, rocky hills, conical hills, square hills, long flat hills, escarpments, silhouetted their shapes against a jagged skyline. Alf Butler had told me not to worry about water. ‘You’ll find it all along the road right to Henbury. It’s all good holding country.’ It was in deep gullies and wayside pools, some as yellowed clay-pans with water thick as soup shortly to evaporate in the early summer heat; others beneath leaning trees and deep enough to last several months; all in sharp contrast to the enormous deposits of sand south of the river, where the same amount of rain had fallen and hissed its way deep into the sand, to become salt and brackish somewhere down in the bowels of the earth.

  Each turn of the road revealed new colour and lengthening shadows of hill and valley and ravine. Blisters had long ceased to hurt, but pace was necessarily slow, with welcome halts every mile or so to fit in with hilltop panoramas.

  Towards sunset I was bearing down the eastern easy slope of a divide between the Palmer and Finke River systems, towards the sharp teeth of a line of hills that were red and revealing in the last rays of the setting sun behind me; deep purple and blue depth of shadows promised a cold night. Roger’s Pass lay ahead in the hills. A line of trees curved in a long boomerang to the hills. In that delicate film of coloured light the pass could have been two or twenty miles distant, and the hills five hundred or five thousand feet high. The pass was named by the explorer Ernest Giles during his return with Carmichael and Robinson from the George Gill Range, on Tuesday, 12 November 1872, in honour of a Mr Murray Roger of the Darling River.

  The red faded to deep purple, the blue to darkness; the dark grey of dusk drifted up the sky over the eastern horizon so that the sharp hilltops and the narrow road stretching straight and darkly ahead remained the only visible things.

  The passing of that night, half-way through Roger’s Pass, was a miserable affair of mosquitoes, aching feet, a relentless, whipping, cold wind, and drizzling clouds passing darkly overhead between the looming black east and west bluffs of the pass. It took some minutes to get going before morning daylight conquered the darkness, along a road now hard and pebbly, through gates and fences so seldom seen in the heart of Australia that I stopped awhile at the first fence to stare in some stupefaction at the long line of posts marching up a bare ridge like a lot of black sticks silhouetted against the dawn sky.

  The road led onto the main Alice Springs to Oodnadatta bush and desert track, at a corner of the Henbury landing field. Nearly a fortnight had passed since the flood rains, but only two heavy trucks and one tractor had left marks on the road; and several days might pass before the next.

  Henbury Station is invisible from a distance. Only its high radio mast juts above the dense green river gums, and the road swings from riverside sandhills, nearly a quarter of a mile westward, before crossing the Finke. Water was still racing in a wide rapid nearly three feet deep. The homestead is set between large sandhills on the north bank; one of the sandhills fifty yards to the west, surmounted by a large water-tank, another a hundred yards north-west, and the most impressive of them all a hundred yards to the east, with a broad valley of sand and spinifex and desert oaks running into the north. A few yards from the front gate, set up oddly behind harness- and buggy-sheds, blacksmith’s shop and store, a signpost points to Adelaide, nine hundred miles south, half-way across a continent of sand and desert and wayside lakes.

  Mrs Ted Cooper, wife of the young manager, set a delayed breakfast before me in a modern kitchen that was crowded with new cakes, biscuits, scones, jellies, and all sorts of things for a party. The Cooper kids and their cousins, the Hodge kids from Alice Springs, were on school holidays. They were not shy, but healthy, fair-headed, and lively as crickets. ‘Hey, what about coming out on the big sandhill with us. We run over the top, then jump right out, and slide down – nearly a hunred feet. It’s beaut! Y’ coming?’

  Later on, perhaps; meanwhile tired feet needed a spell, and urgent messages had to be sent.

  Reginald Pitts, of Alice Springs Flying Doctor Service, was calling: ‘PU Henbury. Have you any traffic? PU Henbury. Have you any traffic? Over to you.’

  Within a few seconds my messages had gone out over the air. Mr Pitts would relay them to the Alice Springs post-office, and from there they would go quicker, as I had proved several times, than many similar distances elsewhere in Australia. Mr Pitts was talking again, asking for river-crossing information. Had any vehicle passed in through Henbury? Was the Finke fordable? Had there been any rain? Alice Springs had recorded a sharp morning shower of eighty points; and someone wished to set out on a long journey, and wanted the latest information.

  From 7.45 a.m. until 6 p.m. Alice Springs maintains contact with all its transceiver stations, and Mr Reginald Pitts distributes and receives the news of the land, receives requests for
medical and other advice, passes out hints and answers. It is a two-way wireless service that, if situated in Sydney, would cover New South Wales and much of Victoria; and speak and hear to and from every little town, responding to emergency signal at any time, with an added advantage that a listener may talk with the central station on a routine plan or carry on prearranged conversations, known as ‘skeds’, with one or more parties over hundreds of miles. The one flaw to a stranger, which doesn’t seem to worry the local users much, is that anyone on the circuit may listen in to business and private telegrams and messages passing to and fro. My sharp ears and wondering senses were amused at a message loud on the Henbury receiver to someone a long way south, the text of which went: ‘If you are anywhere in the land of the living, for goodness’ sake write.’

  Henbury is one of the oldest and largest cattle properties along the mighty old Finke. It is no outback pioneer’s shed. It has beaten the test of time and drought and flood and heat; and the newer buildings are of stone and concrete and plastered interior, roofed with iron instead of clay and daub; while older buildings of neatly axed timber slabs and cement floors are still in good condition. The station has electric light, refrigeration, running water, enclosed vegetable gardens boughed over to check the burning summer sun, flower gardens and a rich green lawn. A windy day blows sand in fine stinging swirls to maim and kill plants, and a hot day scorches all to ground level. Every flower has its price.