by David Mason
So, late in the afternoon, in the pouring rain, with his oilskin done up to his chin and his Akubra low over his eyes, Lindsay told me that Dulacca was 10 kilometres away, and really I ought to camp where I was. Not five minutes away, just around a bend I found a sign that said ‘Dulacca Hotel 4.5 kms’. Was he testing me or did he really think he was helping? Like so many others who stopped in cars to provide directions and distance, they were rarely correct. It seemed that once people started to travel by car they lost a sense of distance and time.
Some two kilometres later and just out of town, Lee McNicoll, the friend of a friend of my brother’s wife’s parents who had agreed to help, met me in his utility. He stopped on the western side of the floodway and held up a vehicle as we moved into town. I put the camels into the railway yards opposite the Dulacca Hotel and unloaded the camels’ saddles in the utility’s headlights. With fingers numbed by cold it was difficult to untie the knots that held the loads and I saw the skin of my fingers wrinkled like prunes. Camels, gear and I were thoroughly drenched. My trousers stuck to my legs and when I took off my hat cold water sluiced down my neck and down my back. It set me to shivering, my teeth rattling. I was cold, tired, wet and hungry, but before I left the yards I checked camel water and feed and I walked the yards to ensure they would be secure for the night.
Lee drove me out to his place, Arklow, a cattle property of 9500 acres 20 kilometres out of town. Waiting our arrival were Lee’s wife Megan, Douglas, Kate studying environmental engineering, and Rebecca who was wondering if she should take up an offer of a year in France as an exchange student.
According to Lee, the house was built in 1953 and the first to be constructed of fired brick west of Toowoomba. It was constructed when one pound of fleece from the sheep’s back was worth a pound of Australian currency, an enormous sum at the time. Lee and I did not arrive at the house until almost 8 p.m. – but the family had waited to serve dinner on our arrival. We sat down to dinner and national and world politics, the French, World War I and environmental economics until after 1 a.m. Late in the evening Lee told me to wait a moment while he went to his library. He was not quite clear where, or how he acquired it, but with his large hands scabbed with skin cancers, won during his time as a vet in the northern Territory, he tenderly opened the flyleaf to a first edition copy of Banjo Paterson’s poems, signed by the author himself.
I woke after dawn with the gentle lowing of cattle just beyond the house paddock. In early autumn the garden was lush, wet, humid and cool. The day was fine and Lee dropped me off back in town. I let the camels into the adjacent stock paddock just as it began to cloud over. Radio weather reports predicted rain. Because my gear was still wet I decided to stay in town, to get everything dry before walking again.
I got to write up my diary in the late afternoon after checking in at Jim and Bazza’s Dulacca Pub. Locals called it the ‘Pink Pub’ not only because the couple who ran it were gay, but also because they had painted it pink. It was a typical Queensland pub, but with its wide verandahs closed so as to keep the cool in and the heat out. Originally spelt Doolachah the town’s name was derived from an Aboriginal word meaning ‘emu tracks’. Something I learned from Bazza was that around the town was the site of the first push to eradicate the prickly pear, an environmental scourge of the region’s farming land that at one time covered an area of 50 million acres throughout Queensland and double that across Australia. Were it not for a moth whose larvae eat prickly pear that was imported from South America in 1925, much of Australia’s most productive farmland would have been rendered useless – but for prickly pear, that is.
Next day, after a breakfast of eggs and beans, Bazza and Jim saw me off with a bag of apples and a series of clucks. Bazza donned his favourite cravat and Jim, the strong silent type, shed a tear. I left Dulacca near 10.15 on a day when the sun’s heat bit on my shoulders and the humidity was a damp glove on my face.
Even this far into the year the grass was over a metre high and it was very difficult to see where my feet hit the ground. So, the inevitable encounter: a snake. Sinuous brown and copper steel on straw gold, it passed between my legs and I jumped. An incredible feeling as I did not sense my muscles contract. Instead, they exploded and my body sprang up and over the snake. Somehow I did not land on it. I stood still for a moment and felt the shiver as every nerve ending in my body twanged and sang. While I had jumped Kabul merely paused in his march for a moment and blinked before lowering his head to graze.
That night I camped a few kilometres to the west of Jackson, a town set a few hundred meters south of the Warrego Highway. I was early to the swag as I had a slight head cold that compounded the fatigue caused by walking through the mud and the long grass that made my boots weigh more than they should.
When I woke, I put my head out of the swag and I looked to the camels. Watching them for a moment, I realised how lucky I was. I lay in my swag feeling my heart race with the pleasure of being alive and the privilege of moving across the country. In the drip of a dew drop from a golden grass stalk and the gentle kiss of a morning breeze on my cheek, I thought the land was reaching out to me, talking to me, claiming me. I was becoming a part of its rhythm and the world around part of me.
But what began as a day of magic ended charged with anxiety. We stopped just short of Combidiban Creek at 12.30. There was something wrong with Kabul. He had clear fluid weeping from his left eye. No sign of pus discharge, redness or any foreign body. With his left eyelid flickering Kabul sat down and simply refused to move. So, eight kilometres or so short of Yuleba, we stopped and I made camp.
I had hoped the day had marked the beginning of early starts and we seemed to be making such good time. I had thought Yuleba, next day Wallumbilla and two days later to Roma. Now I was not so sure. The fear of what might be wrong with Kabul made my throat swell. I felt it closing to choke and it was difficult to swallow the little amount of the moisture in my mouth. Very worried for my friend, there was nothing I could do but wait and see what the next day would bring. I just sat on my swag, looked at Kabul and wondered what he was feeling. He did not seem distressed, just not prepared to move. Long into the night I sat next to Kabul, told him of my dreams, and fed him muesli bars while I drank coffee.
In the pre-dawn light of the next day, my swag was clammy with sweat and fear. My hands were damp and my belly tight, fearful of the day. Would Kabul’s eye improve or worsen? I knew that without Kabul, the phlegmatic tower of strength, I could not continue the trip.
As soon as it was light enough, I folded back the canvas flap of the swag, slipped on my boots and said good morning to my friend. I put my hand into the thick dark ringlets of wool just behind his jaw and tickled his favourite spot. He was still sitting down and he blinked as though startled or something had happened that he did not quite understand. I sat down next to his head, wrapped my arms around his neck and talked to him soft words of encouragement and friendliness. He blinked again and, apart from a small glob of green yellow goo in the corner of his left eye, he seemed fine. I put my finger into the blob where it stuck. I rolled the blob between finger and thumb. Surrounded by yellow green was something round and hard. A seed, no larger than a grain of rice, had brought Kabul to a halt.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and the dear fellow yawned then sighed his sweet camel breath on me. He had no idea how worried I was about him and the future of the expedition. We saddled up as if nothing had happened in that place near Combidiban Creek, crossed the nearby bridge over a steep drop, and headed to Yuleba.
In the early afternoon Yuleba seemed a pleasant town with wide clean streets. It was the terminus of the last Cobb & Co. coach run on 16 August 1924. From our point of view, it had good yards and water troughs for the camels. We stopped off at the weatherboard railway office, but no one was inside. A little way off I saw a fellow in gumboots pushing a mower across some grass and he directed me to the railway yards.
At the yards, I began to unsaddle my friends. Behind my ba
ck a four-wheel drive slowed and stopped; then came the sound of the driver’s door opening and closing. I turned to meet Peter Maunder the Shire Stock Route Inspector. Peter introduced himself with a firm handshake and frank open stare at me and the camels. He wore green moleskins, dark blue cotton shirt, battered hat, and on his belt rode two knife pouches. He was in his early forties, married with children. In the tray of his four-wheel drive lay some wire, star pickets and bolt cutters. Among it all sat a red kelpie watching us very closely, eyes bright, his ears pricked and rigid.
Peter travelled the stock routes of the local shire repairing the bores, checking for the infestation of foreign weeds and, most importantly, keeping an eye on the route to make sure it was healthy into the future. In times of drought he had the difficult task of ensuring that those who grazed their cattle on the stock route kept moving along through the shire.
Peter hunkered down on his heels and started to roll a cigarette. Then he did something very unusual for a man from the bush. He pulled out from his pocket a black cigarette holder and fitted the end of his self-made cigarette into it. ‘Want a cup of tea?’ he asked.
I got some twigs together and put the billy on to boil. As the water in the billy began to fizz and sizzle against the metal sides, he asked me questions, in a roundabout sort of way, about what the camels and I were doing. It seemed to me that he was gently quizzing me, for we were moving across his part of the country. At the same time he seemed to enjoy our conversation. Of course it might simply have been that he was a gentleman and thought that asking straight-out questions was impolite. In any event, he seemed satisfied with my responses and the cup of sweet tea I prepared. With a sigh he declared that the country had the best feed for a long time and that I was most fortunate to have such a year. Peter promised to turn on the gas so that I could have a hot shower at the Wallumbilla showground the following night.
At Wallumbilla, according to one local a town too close to Roma to ever grow, a hot shower was the best I could hope for. A couple of elderly gentlemen in pork pie hats stepped from a Mercedes and told me they were not happy at the prospect of camels in the Wallumbilla show ring. ‘Mate, it’s not you, it’s yer camels, they’ll frighten the shit outta the horses,’ one said. To keep the pork pie hats happy, I long-tethered my friends outside a little hut on the western end of the showground, not far from where I rolled out the swag.
That day the going had been much easier than previous days. As I sat on my swag and wrote up my notes I had no doubt that we would be able to make up to at least 30 kilometres a day. This was the distance we had to average to make it across the country. There was a glimmer of hope the trip could be done.
Late afternoon next day other things occupied my mind. I sat at the tennis court at Blythdale, a railway stop on the map, where a sign hanging on the mesh of the tennis court proclaimed: ‘Players play at their own risk.’ To be perfectly accurate I sat on a two metre by one metre square of concrete under the clubhouse roof trying to shelter from torrential rain.
It seemed the Alone Across Australia Expedition was experiencing a reversal of the El Nino effect. It was dark, cold and the rain sheeted down, blurring the trees and camels into smudges of grey. None of the camels looked very pleased. Chloe grimaced every time I spoke to her. Not because she did not like me, but more likely because she shared a view that too much cold and rain did not spell fun for us.
That day every step I took was heavy with clod-fettered black mud boots. At the same time I was sweating and sticky close to my body I was battered by rain and cold on the outside. Even so we must have done almost 30 kilometres for the day. No wonder Chloe appeared footsore. Once my little gas stove was fired up it provided me with the warmth of a hot brew and the swag remained dry. Sometimes I wondered if I really needed much more.
In the milky mist of early dawn I moved through the wet grass to check the camels. They were very sleepy and wet, though not shivering with cold as their woollen coats were long and dense. Even though it had rained heavily off and on all night, in my canvas refuge I was able to keep most of my gear dry. According to my pocket radio, we’d had some of the best rains we’ve had for some time. There were flood warnings for the Paroo, Maranoa and other rivers west. If they remained high we could be forced to stop and wait until the rivers dropped. After all the rain I wondered if we would even make it to Roma, southern Queensland’s great cattle centre. I was looking forward to walking the country that in 1846 Thomas Mitchell called ‘the finest country I had ever seen in a primeval state – a champaign [undulating country] region, spotted with wood, stretching as far as human vision or even the telescope would reach.’
Only a few minutes into our walk to Roma we met Bruce Lucy and his friend Dawn Binley. Dawn called herself ‘the travelling witch’. She travelled to western Queensland cattle stations where she worked as a cook and I imagined her long black hair hanging over cooking pots. She had a witch painted in the side of her car and a sign ‘The Travelling Witch’ above the driver’s door. Dawn assured me she was a good witch, ‘but don’t get on my wrong side,’ she laughed. She looked at me and narrowed her eyes for a moment as if to concentrate. Then her entire face lit up. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said.
Bruce and Dawn put me on the right track to Roma. This meant again travelling through black soil bogs, a feature of this region after heavy rain. The mud tried to suck my boots from my feet so the going was slow and tiring. I stopped for a moment on the track and spoke to a stockman on a chestnut horse working cattle. He directed me to the best approach to the Roma saleyards. When we arrived I saw these too were a bog. They were tall yards surrounding liquescent brown mud and dung.
That afternoon I met up with Bev Lacey, a photographer for the Toowoomba Chronicle. I had first met her on the escarpment to Toowoomba. She had taken my photo and run a story in her paper which, as she put it, ‘was better than taking shots of road wrecks and plastic covered corpses at the bottom of the escarpment.’ I was unsaddling the camels and in the watery afternoon light noticed a couple of people clambering over yard railings.
Bev and her friend Katherine took me out to the club restaurant, the place to be seen in Roma, and later Bev drove me back to the saleyards around 2 a.m. The sweet smell of cattle told me that they were in the yards next to where I had tethered the camels. The cattle became noisier in the couple of hours before dawn.
My swag I had rolled out on the seller’s platform and I was roused from sleep by bearded and tattooed men who swept then hosed down the concrete yards. One told me that over the last few days Roma had 10 centimetres of rain. Little wonder the place was a quagmire.
While I was boiling water for a cup of coffee, Jim, one of the men with a beard, leant on the handle of his stiff broom, tilted his head in the direction of the camels and said, ‘You’d be the camel man then.’ It was a statement. He collected his thoughts for a moment and said, ‘You know that sheila, the camel lady who walked from west of Alice Springs to the WA coast in the seventies came from around here dontcha.’ He continued, ‘No one around here likes her much. She’s up herself.’
He looked at me with a closed face, inviting a response I did not give. ‘No reflection on you, but. Just that she hasn’t got a good word to say about anyone but her greenie mates and rich bastards. We’re not all arseholes out here ya know.’ I told Jim that I knew this very well. Many people had gone out of their way to be helpful to me and the camels.
Jim’s commentary was the first but not the last time Robyn Davidson was mentioned. Sometimes people were negative, sometimes they were positive. Perhaps the men were misogynist or just plain jealous. Many women, most over the age of 30, knew of or had read her book, Tracks. They told me of the way in which it had opened their eyes to the experiences available to women. ‘It liberated and inspired me,’ one said. I thought that anything that liberated and inspired people to adventure was good. Other people were sceptical and, like Jim, asked why it took her so long to walk across less than half the country
in more time than it would take me to cross the entire continent. To Jim I said I did not know. ‘Maybe she just wanted to take her time. And you know what,’ I said, ‘at least she woke in a lot of people an interest in Australia and its vast open places.’ Jim shrugged and grunted a ‘Yeah, ’spose so.’
I also said that at the very least, her story cast a bright white light on the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. I asked him if he wanted some of the coffee I was brewing up for my breakfast. He thanked me for the offer but declined. ‘Sorry mate, got work to do,’ Jim grunted and as he moved off, his broom pushing brown muck, I checked my watch. It had just turned 6 a.m.
On Anzac Day the sunrise was more magnificent than usual. The clouds on the horizon were the golden cloak of a swirling dervish. The sun cast red and gold light into the high clouds, above which was the moon in its last phase. Above it all was Venus. I thought of all the dawn services across Australia. From Byron Bay to the west coast, as the sun lit the horizon the Last Post would sound. I imagined that as the last note of one bugler died another would take up the call, a golden ripple of brass across the continent.
Because the cattle yards were on the eastern side of town, we did not get out of Roma until about 12.30 and then made good time out to Hodgson, a railway siding with wheat silos 18 kilometres away. We arrived at the tall concreted silos just before sunset and saw a drover’s camp of horse float, truck and trailer; what drovers call ‘the plant’. I introduced myself to Ronnie Creevey and his barrel-chested heelers Chippie and Soap (who just wanted to rip my leg off) and moved the camels to the other side of the silos.