by David Mason
When it hit it was terrifying. The bolts hit the ground all around us and the ozone hung like an invisible mist in the shadow dark. I lay in my swag utterly helpless, a pathetic weak thing of skin and bone and blood wrapped in canvas. Would the next bolt hit me, a camel or gear? Did I put the metal boxes far enough away? How far did thousands of volts travel when a bolt hit the ground?
As the storm raged and the crowns of the trees flailed and writhed in negative, dear Kashgar got to her feet and bellowed. I called out to her some reassuring words, but I was sure my voice was little more than a puny squeak. So I shut up.
A sunny day followed, just 30 minutes after the storm passed. It was as if the sky sought to reassure me with a kiss. I rolled from the swag and set to cleaning and preparing for departure. I emptied the food tins of water and again worked out the food I would need to get for the stretch to Wiluna of around 30 days. Early on we met one of the workers from the Warburton depot servicing a grader. He reckoned we were just short of 60 kilometres from Warburton. I thought it was more like 35 kilometres but I was not going to argue with the only person I had seen in days.
I noticed the small changes in the land. It was a marvellous thing to walk along and notice the minute changes, from a crumbling ridge to the stones and pebbles at its feet. From the large grains to the finest dust. The colours of deepest red to white. Sometimes I felt I was reading a part of myself.
After we camped I sat on the swag and watched the moon rise to just above the horizon. Dalhousie ran back to Chloe after Kabul tried to nip him. Dalhousie knew nothing about respecting personal space. Chloe gave a thrummed contented murmur and Kabul went back to chewing his cud. The firelight was caressing an old tree, time’s sentinel. I wanted to sing but how could I disturb such an evening with my voice?
It was only one more day to Warburton and next night we camped within sight of its light. We were on the eastern side of the track just a couple of hundred metres from a one-room outstation building of corrugated iron. We could not have been more than four kilometres from the roadhouse as we passed a sign that said ‘Roadhouse, 5 kilometres’. It was warm, hardly any breeze and too many mosquitoes. There were also lots of spiders, half a tea saucer around and probably harmless, with eyes like a reflection from a shattered windscreen.
In the still and quiet of early next morning we passed the rubbish tip on the way to the roadhouse, just outside the community. Below the blue of the sky were bleached blues, yellows and greens of Ford and Holden skeletons, bones softened by grey white spinifex and the curves of the sand.
The only moving things were the dark smudge of a crow against blue and the ripple of melted horizon. As the camels and I made our silent passage past the steel carcasses I sensed other things moving among the abandoned cars and broken bottles.
Small black marsupials uncurled themselves from the front seats of Holdens and the boots of Fords. Mostly barefoot, they wore bright coloured dusty shorts and ripped T-shirts. They laughed and sang and coughed, too small and slight with grey green snot from their noses to their mouths. Around their necks the albatross of small plastic bottle or aluminium can with petrol. They smiled and said ‘Hello camel man’ and lifted the containers to their noses to suck in the vapour. To kill their present and their future.
These were the rubbish children Jimmy and Pat told me about. These were the children born to traditional people in a non-traditional world. Where football meant that young men and young women met, fell in love and had babies, when according to the laws of their parents it was taboo. These children would not know the laws of their parents for they had none to care for them. Instead, they lived short lives and broke into the roadhouse, unscrewing fuel lines in their search for leaded petrol.
We made it to Warburton Roadhouse around 8 a.m. I was in tears. Over the next weeks and months I asked questions of many people. ‘Why are we not looking after these children?’ The answers, never good enough, came from European and Aboriginal administrators, government officials and locals. ‘Not our problem,’ some said. ‘Not a government problem.’ Or, ‘It’s their problem.’ (‘Their’ could mean local Aborigines, government … anyone other than them.) Europeans did not want to be seen to be racist. Aboriginal people did not want to be seen to confirm the results of traditional ways. The practical result of avoiding the problem was that children died. I was diminished as an Australian.
I watered camels, showered and washed clothes. Kabul drank more than 35 litres. Then I brought food.
The managers and employees at the Warburton Roadhouse held mail for me. It included two pairs of boots; enough, I thought, to see me to the end. While I was in the telephone booth at the back of the petrol station calling Amber, I read a note. It said that the Canning Stock Route could not be accessed through Cunyu Station. According to the note, travellers had been ignoring the requests of the station people not to travel when the track was wet and they were fed up with pulling people out of bogs and having their station track made impassable. Some people weren’t even responsible for themselves.
7 Across the Gibson Desert
– 11 September 1998
Oh, would that I had camels!
Ernest Giles, 1874
We camped a couple of kilometres up the Old Wiluna Road, also known as the Gunbarrel Highway. On our way out of town we were followed by children who clapped and laughed and moved off to the dry Elder Creek bed to vomit after too much petrol vapour. I watched two boys, no more than 10 years old, weave arms over shoulders and share a sniff, like other young boys might share an apple on the way to school.
I did not expect to see anyone until we got to Carnegie Cattle Station in l5 days or so. According to Kevin Black at the Warburton Roadhouse, it was getting too late in the year for people to be travelling. Heading west I could feel the sun getting warmer on my face, but the evening remained cool, sucking the heat from my cheeks.
I was sure that over the next two days we averaged more than 35 kilometres a day. The following day I expected we would pass the Heather Highway turnoff, a track to the north. Though I was happy with the progress, it came at a cost. The track had a hard surface and my feet and lower back felt the change. My body ached; my flesh felt desiccated, my bones too rigid and my sinews twisted. My right Achilles ached all day; the corrugations did not help. The day was made even more miserable with a high temperature and a raw throat. I supposed that walking alone for so long and meeting so few people, being tired and not eating well, meant that when I entered a community I was vulnerable to anything contagious the people carried.
But no matter, I could never let my guard down. At l.30 p.m. or so, at a pass at Mount Charles in the Todd Ranges on the eastern edge of the Gibson Desert, I looked up to my left at an orange escarpment that had the eyeless sockets of caves. I thought for a moment that I might leave the camels and see if there were any Aboriginal paintings. Just before I did, though, I saw a bay-coloured movement. Two camels on the track.
Headache quickly forgotten as the adrenalin pumped through my body. Two rounds into the first and still he came forward. Both in the shoulder! He lurched off as the second came at us at a canter. Dropped him and went after the first. In my head I kept begging, ‘Please drop, please, you magnificent creature.’ I shot him in the head from 10 metres and he went down. He looked at me before the shot and he knew he was done.
We moved off quickly, away from the carcasses, and continued west. Even though my throat was dry and my eyes were wet my muscles flexed and tensed and drove me to the setting sun. Sometimes I felt disembodied, part of me was above the country reaching out for the edges of the great land, my eyes watching the puny struggling human form and its four humped followers as it moved so slowly across the landscape.
We reached the Heather Highway intersection at mid-afternoon and headed west along the Gunbarrel. We must have covered more than ll0 kilometres in three days and according to a rusted battered sign at a track intersection we had 720 kilometres to walk before we reached Wiluna.
We camped only a few hundred metres from Beadell’s tree, a magnificent eucalypt, with the names of Beadell’s party stamped in metal and nailed to the trunk. Len Beadell has been described as Australia’s last explorer. During the 1940s and 1950s he and a team of men with a bulldozer drove tracks across the interior as part of the infrastructure for the rocket launch facility in South Australia, at Woomera. The Gunbarrel Highway was just one of these tracks; others he named for his wife and children.
The following morning, as we got ready to move off, four young lads pulled up. They were from Port Headland and appeared delighted to meet me. They let slip they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and of course they gave me the obligatory paperwork. Their only complaint was that there were so few people to try to convert! I looked at them for a moment and said the obvious; there were never going to be many people out here. Nor must I have looked promising as I had been up most of the night with a streaming nose and a burning face. My night T-shirt was wet with sweat, as was the cotton liner to my sleeping bag.
Mid-afternoon I watered the camels below Thryptomene Hill. There was a hand pump that brought up water into a dish and all the camels drank. As usual I watered each three times, which meant that the watering took the best part of 45 minutes. At first there was a guzzle, secondly a concentrated sucking, and third a polite sipping. I topped up a jerry can for me.
I shot another two camels. They were part of a bachelor group of six that moved across the ridge of a dune. Three young ones, two older and one adolescent. I think they were just as surprised to see us as we were to see them.
I had been reading the Jehovah’s Witnesses material that I had in my pocket, saving it for the fire that night. It was not until Kabul stopped, leaned down with his nose and pushed me in the back that I looked up. The six were slowing to a stop, their lower lips hanging loosely at the sight and scent of Chloe and Kashgar.
Dalhousie ran to my side and bleated. Kabul nipped him and Kashgar and Chloe moved close to me. Four camels and a human facing off the lust of unsatisfied male camels. I reached for the rifle and watched the golden round with its dull grey nose slide into the chamber. The two older camels began to canter toward us, the woolly dorsals wobbling from side to side. The younger ones watched and waited from behind.
I stood, braced, and fired at the lead camel. He dropped to the red sand, but the second carried on and raised his pace to a gallop. He was burbling white foam and the pink of his dulaa glistened with spit and glowed and pulsed with hot blood. With a shot he dropped too and the younger camels of the group made off over a dune. I made sure both the camels were dead with a round each into the head.
Another beautiful bull camel.
We moved off at a brisk pace, feet and pads crunching the sand, and camped on the northern slope of Notabilis Hill. When I looked up from writing my diary I could see the sun bleeding into the horizon. I had done some killing and was sure there was more to come. While I did not like it, there was little choice. To put myself in this environment with female camels meant I had to be willing – and able – to kill.
We made for Mount Beadell and camped at its base. On the top of the rocky outcrop was a cairn, a memorial to Len Beadell. The inscription included a misspelt dedication and a theodolite in a cage. The view from the summit was magnificent. An enormous open plain to the north-east, and to the north-north-east was Mount Everard, 50 kilometres away.
I was still suffering the effects of a virus and rose from the swag with difficulty. I had a temperature and my bones wanted to fall through my feet. It seemed that all the muscles and sinews and tendons had dissolved. Putting my feet into boots and boots under my body was a task that demanded concentration. Not the sun, the breeze, the red or the grey green caught my attention, just the need to get my feet under my body. I was wearing out. For some reason I had been thinking about the Foreign Legion again. I joined the Legion because I wanted to taste, smell, see and feel fear. I experienced more than enough of this and endured. I wondered if I would survive this walk I had wished upon myself and reflected again on why it was so necessary to expose and test myself in this way. Estimated time of arrival to Carnegie Station was nine days, just 300 kilometres away.
In the meantime I had a blinding headache, my eyes felt like they were being squeezed from my head. It was probably due to combination of sinus infection and a high temperature. My cold was getting worse. Just a tin of baked beans for dinner; I was too tired to cook.
After passing Mount Everard we headed west into a hot and dust-laden wind. Kabul and Chloe appeared to have a cold or be reacting to the dust. They opened their mouths a little, letting their upper lips sag, so they looked like people who had forgotten their dentures.
We saw hundreds of red-headed finches flying in a dark asterisk across our path. I checked the map and there was no water marked for many kilometres in any direction. Given that finches needed water every day and could not fly all that far, there must have been some of it close by. The Aboriginal people who moved across this country would have known where all the water was, how long it would last and how reliable it might be. It depressed me that, just like the location of the water, Aborigines’ knowledge of the Gibson Desert was, for the most part, lost. There were no Aboriginal people moving across this country now. Instead they were clustered in places like Wiluna, weeks away.
Whenever I did feel depressed, maudlin or sad, it was not for long. Little Dalhousie never failed to make me smile. He was still very naughty, trying to mount Chloe and Kashgar when they were least expecting it. Just preparing himself for life as a bull camel I supposed. Sometimes, though, Kashgar bit Dalhousie’s neck so hard that he bellowed and bleated with the pain and indignity of it all. But he always went back for more.
We did not meet anyone all day. When we reached the Gary Highway intersection I took some photos and noticed some glass bottles, coffee jars with screw-cap lids set up beside the track like short round sentries. People had put messages in the bottles, some dating back many years. These messages had been read many times, evidenced by the soft lines across the pages, soft folds of caring and reading. There was even some Jehovah’s Witness material. Those boys got everywhere.
I noticed a little message to me from a family I met some days before, wishing me well and thanking me for sharing my adventure. I smiled at the thought; I loved sharing my adventure and the pleasure it brought me.
Late in the afternoon, after I had tied up the camels to good feed trees, I was walking back to the swag when I tripped on an exposed root and banged my right Achilles tendon on one of the logs I had collected for the fire. It felt as though someone had taken a heavy mallet to the back of my leg and felled me.
I collapsed to the ground and into some spinifex and sobbed. I lay on my back and realised my whole body hurt, my arms from continually being jerked to the side in Kabul’s search for food, my lower back from the pounding of the track and my head from my sinus-cold. In fact I realised I was in a pretty sorry physical and emotional condition.
Giles called it ‘that abominable vegetable production’. I knew that spinifex, in all its forms, covered almost 25 per cent of the continent and grows in some of the poorest soils. Spinifex can grow in a distinctive pattern. As it grows and ages it begins to die in the centre and spread outward as a circle so that from the air, and against the red earth, the circles can look like bleached yellow flowers up to 20 metres in diameter. I also experienced why one of the names of a spinifex in Australia means ‘spear point’ in Greek.
So, as the sun began to set I lay immobile and felt the sharp pricks of the broken ends of spinifex in my back. I thought of what Giles called spinifex and thought of a few other things to call it. Then I cried, the tears coursing their way down my cheeks. Just a self-pitying cry for the pain I was causing myself, and the thought of the festering ends of spinifex working their way out of my back in the days to come. I was sure there would not be any permanent damage. It was just that the pain would not go away. And there were an
other two months to go.
Chloe frames a road sign west of Warburton on the Gunbarrel Highway.
We arrived at the Geraldton Historic Society Bore around l.30 p.m. next day, to find two bores. One had a plastic cap and a jar and string and the second a bore cap under a tripod of three poles. When we camped I calculated we were 185 kilometres from Carnegie Station.
The next day, 19 September, was my birthday. I was 38 years old. For my birthday present I set up the mobile phone and rang Amber. She seemed tired, dispirited and distant. She told me that she had been out late the previous night and did not get to bed until 3 a.m. After a phone call of silences that were too long I felt a long way from her. After a moment’s reflection I decided on another present for myself; clean feet. I washed my feet from the jerry cans and changed my socks. It was sweet delicious pleasure.
In the evening I sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to myself, then cut the fruit cake I bought at Warburton. Kashgar looked over with a bemused expression and Kabul appeared startled out of a camel dream. Kabul really did have a cold. It was possible that I passed to him what I had caught in Warburton. While I was walking in the lead he would walk forward to rub his greasy snot nose on my shoulder or arm. The most favoured location was the middle of my back where he could wipe the snot and have a good scratch of his nose. His attentions meant that my shirt was too often rather sticky, but in the warmth of the day it soon dried to green snot crustiness. Chloe ventured a blink and continued to chew her cud.