Walk across Australia

by David Mason

  Camels and I camped about 200 metres east of a wooden sign that marked the entrance to the Simpson Desert National Park, just at the bottom of the park’s first dune to the north side of the track. We did not arrive at Eyre Creek, a dry bed with a denser growth of bushes and trees on its banks, until after midday. This meant that we could not have gone far on the day of Big Red. So if the dune heights remained as they had been over the previous days, I calculated we might be able to make 20 kilometres a day. Not even that far perhaps. But then, it was hard, very hard work. No one had walked alone from east to west and I was fully aware of how difficult the challenge really was. My plan to reach Poeppel Corner in four to five days was entirely based on Kabul and Chloe, for they carried most of our gear, including all the water. I planned giving the camels their ration of 22 litres each when we got to what some people called simply the ‘The Corner’.

  Sturt had something to say about what he named Eyre Creek. He wrote in his journal in September 1845: ‘the ridges extended northwards in parallel lines beyond the range of vision and appeared as if interminable. To the eastward and westward they succeeded each other like the waves of the sea. The sand was of a deep red colour, and the bright narrow line of it marked the top of the ridge, amidst the sickly pink and glaucus coloured vegetation around.’ As far as I could tell, Sturt was not far from the mark. I couldn’t help but think that his description was, in part at least, seen from a jaundiced eye – one that ached not for a sea of sand, but for an inland sea of water and prosperity.

  As we descended one of the dunes that day, my body twisted and moved awkwardly through the sand. In so doing I strained my Achilles tendon, damaged while at university playing football. My right ankle became swollen so I tightened my boots further and took some aspirin as an anti-inflammatory.

  Even without being hurt, going up a dune was painful. The skinny muscles in my thighs burned fire as I turned the outside of one boot to the sand, crabbing my way up its face. But there was little purchase; my feet were not camel pads that spread the weight across the surface. Instead I sank, ankle deep at times, into sand that seemed too reluctant to release me. Every single step up the face of a dune was tiring. If there were over one thousand dunes, and I took 30 or 40 or 50 or sometimes many more steps up the face of a dune, I would have to walk tens of thousands of paces up sand dunes. It was intimidating to contemplate. Worse still, it stretched my tendons and muscles so that sometimes I felt they were close to tearing. Like my sanity. So I broke the Simpson crossing into manageable parts that did less to frighten or intimidate me. From Birdsville to Eyre Creek. From Eyre Creek to the Corner, and so on. Sometimes, I even broke up a succession of dunes into a series of small victories as we crested each one.

  I took short steps with Kabul close behind, his breath in my left ear as we worked our way up the dunes. At the crests we paused and savoured the gentle breeze that seemed to cool us a little and, for a moment, took the flies away. I had never seen Kabul’s sides heave as they did then, nor heard him suck in oxygen, great gulps, his lungs bellows. I told him that there were more dunes like these, many, many more and he seemed to understand and tremble a little, so I gently blew in his nostrils and spoke to him in smiling tones. His exhaustion worried me more than I could say, for I was nearly done and without him I was finished.

  It was at the top of one dune, just west of Eyre Creek, that I stopped again. With my head bowed and hands on my knees I waited while the camels crested the dune and then stretched myself upright. It was a moment that made me catch my breath.

  Kabul rested at the crest of the dune, his shadow in sharp relief against the terracotta red of the sand, its stippled surface clean, pristine and perfect. His shadow belonged to the desert. In the curve of the shadow of his neck grew white-petalled flowers. I knew no-one else would ever see them. The timeless shadow on an ancient canvas, coupled with the transient beauty of a flower, seemed to sum up life itself.

  I looked to the west and the crests of hundreds of red dunes marking the progress of the ocean of sand. I turned to the east and there too were the crests of dunes, rolling waves never to break. Across the waves moved the shadows of clouds mating and parting. Surrounding me were colours, shapes, and time, lots of time, dense with life and a history of living.

  My mouth was too dry to swallow. I took some of the sand at my feet and held it tight in my hand. The desert had me now. The land was reaching out to me, talking to me and wanting to claim me as part of itself.

  Camp 5

  Flowers, white, yellow and pale purple, made the walk seem like a stroll through a meadow. We camped on the western side of a dune among the flowers. I put the camels out on long leads and despite the day’s hard work they were up on their legs browsing noisily on the succulent green stuff all around. Later, as I lay in the swag, I could hear them rolling, farting and chewing their cud. Even from where I lay I could distinguish them by sound. Chloe had a hard-pitched, forceful chew. Kashgar’s was more mellifluous, gentle and musical. Kabul had a smooth, rhythmic approach to the cud, efficient, pragmatic and practical. There was no wasted energy in anything he did.

  Kabul sat down three times in the course of the day. Chloe not once. I could never be angry with them, hurt, punch or scream at them. I loved all three. Using some camel psychology I unclipped the carabineer from Kabul’s saddle and walked Chloe and Kashgar around Kabul to the crest of the dune. Kabul whimpered as they passed and struggled to his feet under the weight of his load. Sometimes I felt like a bastard. I loved him so much and I did not want to hurt his heart but I knew we had to keep moving.

  They were all still passing damp shit. As the rounded lumps fell to the red desert ground I squeezed one of the brown-green walnuts between my fingers. The plasticine dampness was testament to the wonderful season and the abundance of daisies, parakeelya and pigweed.

  There was only one discordant note. We passed what would have been a beautiful campsite under a stand of georgina gidgee, the campfire coals still smouldering. Lying all around were onion peels, pumpkin, bread slices and wrapper, beer stubbies, smashed and whole, along with brown-stained toilet paper caught in the spinifex and blowing from the ground. I bent my head and set to cleaning the land. I burned the paper and other flammables. Anything that could not burn I put in my rubbish sack. The only thing I would leave behind were a few footprints, sweat, coals and a daily shit next to the fire. I wondered if my compatriots in their four-wheel drives had any idea what rubbish they left behind.

  Later in the evening I heard the trolley men, Anderson and Gates, being interviewed. They said they were 15 kilometres east of Eyre Creek, about 60 kilometres from Birdsville. It seemed to me that were making little distance or maybe I did not hear them correctly. In any event they were having trouble with a main shaft on their vehicle. One person who passed me earlier in the day gave them a hand, adding ‘They don’t seem too well prepared to me.’ We would see. They hoped to be at Dalhousie Springs on 14 July, a fortnight from now, around the same time as me. They had a lot of catching up to do.

  My Achilles tendon was worse. As I had done so often in the past, I took two aspirin in the evening. I had a lump along the tendon that was very hot and very tender. I knew I would have to elevate it in the swag and strap it up in the morning. We were doing too well to slow down now. According to my map, we were about 90 kilometres from Birdsville, and 60 kilometres from Big Red. This gave us around 70 kilometres to Poeppel Corner, roughly three or four days. Arrival depended on how the camels performed: it always did. Everything depended on them.

  I looked at the map and the compass, across to the next dune crest, the next, the next and then to where the sun set. I wondered sometimes if I needed a map at all, but it was a way to measure things, to focus my mind in a place where eternity could dissolve your mind to the nothingness it really was. I also used the map to distract me from the pain of my body, the thing of flesh and bone that hurt when I moved, that pleaded for more food and cried out for rest.

 
Over those days the flies were so bad that when I glanced at my shadow on a dune there was not the sharply defined shape I had expected. Instead, the edges were blurred, an out-of-focus negative, from what seemed to be millions of flies buzzing around the camels and me. Where did all they come from?

  In the evening’s bright moonlight I got up from the swag to check the camels. There was something about the air that wrapped itself around me. I looked to my feet and the carpet of snowflakes. All over the dunes, as far as I could see the petals of the flowers were open. While the air was cold, it was the clean and freshness of an early spring morning in a garden. And it was silent. It was a silence that gripped my throat with fear and wonder.

  Camp 6

  With 50 kilometres and our rate of travel, I estimated we would take over two more days to reach Poeppel Corner. It would be good to get the water off Chloe and give it to the camels. Both Chloe and Kabul seemed to be managing well, and I made sure there were plenty of stops for the yellow and white flowering succulents. Kashgar seemed to be more tucked up, with her sweat glands showing on her neck, and when I took her saddle and blankets off she was much damper than the other two. I wondered if it could it be due to her much finer wool.

  By early evening I had them tethered and feeding on their own patch of shrub and bushes and an hour or so later heard Kabul nickering and pulling on his rope looking for the other two. Even though they were no more than 20 metres away, I got up from the fire and moved him nearer to his girls. He was boss camel, they were his harem, and he wanted them close.

  That day Kabul dropped to the desert sand eight times. Though still fat, he seemed to tire, especially when he saw another dune coming. Though I could not blame him, he developed a smart, but to me very annoying habit. At the base of the dune he would move to pick at something, stop and then go to hoosh down. It did no good to my body to be twisted and I had to be ready to tug on his lead rope, to let him know I knew what he was planning.

  Kabul’s procedure to hoosh down was different from that of Chloe and Kashgar. First, a pause and a blink of eyes as he appeared to collect his thoughts. He put both hind legs together and a drop onto his right foreleg with a whump, followed quickly with the left and a tuck in of rear legs. He sighed as he settled forward on his brisket and buried his forelegs into the sand.

  Chloe gaped. Instead of methodically putting one foreleg to the ground like Kabul, she would fold both forelegs and thud to the ground, all her weight on her knees. Quick to follow was a brief jig as her hind legs were tucked in and a perfect settling on the brisket.

  Kashgar was similar to Chloe in that she dropped to both knees, but instead of a gape she would give a little bellow of distress. When settled on her brisket she would let out a sigh, perhaps of resignation, a camel comment on the state of things.

  We had seen dingos, only one rabbit and plenty of camel sign. For the first time I wore the fly veil. I was prepared to suffer a little more heat, as the mesh slowed the movement of air, than the onslaught of the flies. I was tired of squeezing them from the corners of my eyes, or having climbed another dune and breathing deeply, having to expel them from up my nose where they struggled in the mucus or from my throat when I gagged. The black buzzing spots were everywhere.

  Camp 7

  We walked another 20 kilometres. We even passed a salt lake to the south, white glass reflecting the light. The dunes were getting more broken up, rather than consistently longitudinal across our path. All these elements indicated we were getting close to the point where we would turn south along the shore of a dry salt lake to Poeppel Corner. This I expected after lunch the next day.

  Late in the day, just before we camped, we passed some four-wheel drivers setting up camp. I watched from a distance as the four tents were set up in a square, all facing inward, the vehicles stationed on the outside of the square, each just beyond its tent. One fellow stood at the entrance of his tent, stretched out his arms and said ‘Ah, home sweet home.’

  I stood on the summit of a far dune, watching. My hand scratched Kabul’s favourite spot behind his ear and the other camels took advantage of the pause to browse. I wondered at the point of being out here if you did not embrace it. Did people congregate because they felt nervous about the ‘emptiness’ of the desert? Why did they feel that it was better to have the desert outside the tent and their world on the inside? Is not being in the desert wanting to be part of what the desert is? We did not stop to introduce ourselves.

  Late that same night I watched camel ears prick and faces turn to the west. In the distance I heard the chug of a struggling vehicle. I thought something must have been wrong and I walked the few hundred metres to the track with a torch and an offer to help, if help was needed. None was. It was a red dust face in a Toyota doing food and water drops for a Japanese guy attempting to walk the French Line from west to east and Birdsville. Apparently the walker and I would meet on the track in a few days.

  I went back to the fire and reflected on others in the desert. Anderson and Gates had problems. They had yet to reach Eyre Creek, and as one chap described it today, ‘There was stuff and jerry cans all over the dune as they pushed and pulled the wagon up it.’ Not good. Apparently the axle was shorter than the axle width of a four-wheel drive, which meant their wheels could not run in the ruts of the QAA Line, like so many others of the tracks across the Simpson, the remnant of a seismic line.

  I wondered if I had planned well enough. As we were descending dunes my mind kept resting on what would happen if I slipped or if Kabul did. I could so easily break a leg or be crushed under three rushing camels. Holding his headstall with my left hand I tried to walk Kabul slowly down the dunes. If there was a rush I believed I could either keep up with him or turn him in a circle. Of course, I had thought that outside Birdsville and I had been wrong.

  A reminder of my vulnerability came when I was between Chloe and Kabul, tightening Kabul’s girth strap. Both Chloe and Kabul moved closer. For a moment my head was almost trapped between the two lateral bars of the winged saddles, and I had a vision of my head crushed like a melon.

  Camp 8

  I was getting skinnier and the cold worried and bit at me like an angry dog. The dry air and the cold made my skin want to crack and split. When it did, moisture from my body collected dust and flies. We camped approximately four kilometres short of Poeppel Corner in a beautiful meadow, a camel heaven.

  For much of the day we walked south along the western edge of the salt lake. Oddly enough seeing my shadow falling in front of me, and having the lake to my left, reminded one of a walk I did in November and December 1992, north along the eastern shore of Loch Lomond in Scotland, when on leave from the Foreign Legion.

  As I had planned, at the end of the day I gave the camels all the water they wanted to drink. Predictably Kabul drank most, then Chloe and Kashgar. There was more than a jerry can and a half left of the camels’ water, and I decided to present it to them in the morning.

  Camp 9

  It was getting colder, much colder. The cold bit my ears with what felt like fire and my forehead ached. I thought it must be due to the fact we camped so close to the salt pan. My breath froze on the underside of the swag and light dew froze on the face of the desert flowers, diamonds for a moment as the sun rose above the horizon.

  Later in the morning, only a few kilometres from our camp, we made it to Poeppel Corner where a plaque on a wooden post read:

  This red gum replica of survey corner post was presented by Friends of the Simpson Desert 4 July 1989. Original erected 1880 by Surveyor Augustus Poeppel. Fallen post recovered 1962 by Dr Reg Sprigg AO, held History Trust, Adelaide.

  Along with Big Red in the east, and Purnie Bore on the desert’s western edge, Poeppel Corner was probably the most widely known landmark in the Simpson Desert. It marked the point at which the borders of South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory met. In 1880 surveyor Augustus Poeppel located the South Australian and Queensland border from Haddon Corner, the north
easterly corner of South Australia, to Poeppel Corner. Just a year later it was found that the chain he used to mark the border had lengthened by an inch through use and wear. It meant that the survey work had to be redone. In 1884 the corner post was reached by surveyor Lawrence Wells who calculated that it was 315 metres too far west in the bed of Lake Poeppel itself. The post was moved out of the lake bed to its correct position on the eastern edge of Lake Poeppel.

  Poeppel Corner.

  We arrived at Poeppel Corner near 11.30, or at 11, South Australian time. I took some photos and we moved across the salt of Lake Poeppel where our shadows trailed behind us and onto the French Line. We soon came across fresh camel sign. There, in the middle of the track a number of camels had settled for the night. I counted four discrete piles of dung. By the length of the impression in the sand, of forelegs and the end of hind legs, at least two were much, much bigger than Kabul. The spheres of dung were rounded walnuts and still soft. Camel urine still stained the red sand and was of great interest to Kabul and the others who sniffed and nuzzled the damp dust. As for me, I gripped the rifle tighter.

  Before I hit the swag I forced myself to have another weak brew of coffee. As I sat on the feed tin tipping the fluid into my body to make my cells swell, I reflected on the quietness of the desert. Where were the night birds and the crickets? If I listened carefully I could hear the crackling and sighs of the fire, water against the side of the billy sizzling, and the digestive vegetable murmurings and burblings of Kashgar and Kabul close at hand.

  Chloe was a little further away. As the birth of her calf drew nearer she seemed to be getting crankier, more inclined to curl her lip at me and even hiss with displeasure. I even caught her moving her body preparing to kick me with a hind leg. Camel training taught me that a kick from a camel was not something to be taken lightly. I could be winded if I was lucky. Anything else I would have to manage as best I could. What to do if Chloe calved while we were in the desert? It seemed that we did not have time to stop while the calf grew strong enough to accompany us. I again told myself I would worry about that when it happened.