by David Yeadon
I left tired, but reluctantly, after two days of nonstop gallivanting in this gregarious, full-of-gusto place. I wouldn’t be seeing cities for a while. Urbane urges would have to be sublimated and exchanged for the echoing drone of Aboriginal didgeridoos and the howl of wild dingo dogs and the “meat pie and g’day, mate” fellowship of bush bums in the great red outback that is most of the rest of Australia.
No worries, I told myself in the Strine dialect I was rapidly learning, she’ll be right.
And—all in all—(allowing for a couple of near-death experiences) she was.
So—off I soared out of Sydney on yet one more crystal-clean late spring morning, heading northwest via Alice Springs to the recent earthquake-decimated (now rebuilt) town of Darwin, way up on the tip of the northern territory.
The last leg of this long series of flights would bring me down to the town of Kununurra in western Australia, start of my desert odyssey to the Bungle Bungle and the “never-never” nothingness beyond.
Writers and artists—even composers—have often tried (usually unsuccessfully) to express the vast scale of this empty land—the endless, unpeopled redness, and the flat, worn-down, and oh-so-ancient remnants of ridges and ranges that are now mere stumps and eroded humps, hardly noticeable at all from thirty-five thousand feet against Australia’s hazy hugeness.
There was something frighteningly indifferent, inhuman, in the land below. Even the Sahara from above displays an ever-changing repertoire of textures and colors with occasional welcoming clusters of palms around scattered oases. But I saw few such subtleties here. It looked like a dead and utterly alien place. Like the surface of some lost red planet out in the eternal silence of the cosmos. I only hoped that on closer acquaintance, I might find more comforting signs of life and growth and the presence of people, most of whom now cling to their coastline cities and towns and leave the outback to the scattered swagmen and stock hands and the relentless scouring of a cruel and vicious climate.
I never discovered the reasons for all the delays at Darwin, although everyone seemed to accept them as a matter of course—a regular dues-paying ritual for those crazy enough to be flying so deep into the outback.
“Y’should’ve bin here last week, mate.” A big burly man in jeans and floppy sweat-stained leather hat spoke to me from a nearby seat in the terminal. “Talk about bloody chaos. Two flights canceled back to back. Storms more’n likely. You’re in the storm season now—the wet—so y’gotta expect anything. Four hundred stuck in this bloody terminal. Fans not working right, Coke machine empty. No food. No grog. Tell y’mate, place was like a bloody stockyard—full of stinkin’ mad bulls.”
The whites mulled around the hot terminal in search of cold beer “stubbies” and a breeze. Family groups of Aborigines sat like Henry Moore sculptures, huddled close together on the floor of the terminal (the whites had taken all the seats), unmoving, unsmiling, silent. They seemed to exist in another place, another reality. All the shuffling and back-slapping and stubbie-swilling and impatient restlessness of the whites swirled around them like so much gritty wind, leaving them untouched, uninterested, wrapped in bold familial folds of molded flesh and baggage. Stoic and still.
We flew out of Darwin five hours late.
“Big storm around Wyndham” was the pilot’s only explanation, and the passengers nodded contentedly as if somehow pleased by this reaffirmation of the fickleness and sudden furies of their enormous, empty land.
“She’s done it to us again,” murmured a rough-cut bushman sitting beside me dressed in dust-coated dungarees and a worn denim shirt. “Bloody country….” But he was smiling along with all the others.
D. H. Lawrence, in his book Kangaroo (one of his lesser-known works, written in 1927 after a rather rapid tour of Australia), spoke of “the peculiar, lost weary aloofness of Australia.” But there is nothing weary about her notorious storms and the torrential “wets” that wash out everything that moves and a few things that shouldn’t.
Our conversation—rather, the bushman’s conversation—rambled on. He was a true Aussie “yarner” who used a colorful repertoire of words and phrases to describe his outback shack with a “dunny” (outside toilet) in the back; his penchant for good cheap Aussie “plonk” wine and beer served up as middies, tinnies, and stubbies in ramshackle pubs; his low opinion of Aboriginal “corroborees” (ceremonial gatherings); his favorite “billabong” campsites; and his constant amusement at the persistence of outback flies that smother your face and seem immune to swatting.
Marcus Clarke had predicted in 1877 the basic character and outlook of the “New Australian” following the demise of the notorious British penal colonies that were the founding stones of early colonialization: “The Australiasian will be a squareheaded, masterful man…his teeth will be bad and his lung good. He will suffer from liver disease, and become prematurely bald…. His religion will be a form of presbyterianism; his national policy a democracy tempered by the rate of exchange.”
Precisely right. I’d just met one. His aggressively independent yet patriotic spirit is now labeled “ockerism”—a celebration of all things Australian, and watch out for your chin and your teeth if you show any signs of arrogant colonial-tinged “knock-erism” that purloins the pride and spirit of the New Australia.
My tape recorder was on the blink; otherwise I would have captured far more nuances of his long monologue. Suffice to say, it was an entertaining and enticing prelude of things to come.
We landed in Kununurra to great sprays of water spuming up from the short runway. It was after midnight but the thick cloying humidity of the air tumbled in as the doors hissed open and we stepped down onto the wet tarmac.
“Collect your car rentals now. Desk’s closing in five minutes,” came an announcement.
Mine was waiting for me.
“How long will it take me to drive to Halls Creek?” I was very weary but had to make the 250-mile drive by nine A.M. or lose the only chance I had to visit the Bungle Bungle before this newly discovered wonder of the outback officially “closed” for the summer when temperatures soared to 130 degrees and the “wet” cut off access for most of the season.
“Normally ’bout five hours, but the creeks’ll be rising, so y’better say eight, m’be nine.”
“Are the roads okay?”
“Pretty good, mate. Least for the first hundred k [kilometers] or so on the Great Northern—they’ve made a nice job of that first bit…but…”
“But what?”
“Depends on the rains. You’ve got quite a stretch of dust road. Maybe mud now….”
“You think I can make Halls Creek by nine A.M.?”
“No worries, mate. Get yourself a six-pack of Coke to keep you going.”
“Great—thanks.”
“And watch out for road trains.”
“What’s a road train?”
He gave me a strange look—a mix of suppressed mirth and pity.
“Aw—you’ll find out soon enough, mate. Pull over far as you can to the left—don’t forget we drive on the left or you’ll never make it—jus’ pull over before the lights blind you and let ’em go by.”
“Big trucks, right?”
“Bloody big, mate. Jus’ keep out of their way and she’ll be apples.”
I obviously hadn’t done enough reading on the hazards of night travel in the outback.
“Anything else?”
“Well—watch for ’roos. They hop around a bit at night. And the cattle. They like a nice warm road to sit on.”
“Wish me luck,” I said uncertainly.
“Naw—no worries. You’ll be fine.”
And I was fine, for a while. The road was fast, the Coke was doing its magic, and for the first sixty miles or so I’d not seen a single ’roo or cow.
Then the road vanished.
Just like that. No signs. No warnings. The smooth blacktop highway suddenly came to an end and I found myself careening down a red dirt road with ill-defined edges. The G
reat Northern Highway—pride of northwestern Australia—was, as I’d been warned, still under “improvement” and I was now well and truly on the unimproved bit. A long bit.
In my full beams the wet red earth track stretched ahead with occasional wiggles to keep me awake. I was feeling really tired now. Being mesmerized by my own lights and constantly on the lookout for kangaroos and cattle was sending my brain into a sullen stupor. The car radio no longer picked up anything but crackle and static. And it was very black out there. No stars, no moon. Just endless grass and scrub at the roadside. I had no idea what kind of landscape I was driving through. It was just me and this interminable red track.
And the rain.
The rain began again around two P.M. Not a real outback downpour but enough to make the dirt road slick and my windshield greasy. My watch urged me to keep up the speed; otherwise I’d never make Halls Creek in time. My mind warned me of the nasty repurcussions of braking suddenly on this mud-coated track to avoid an errant ’roo or comatose cow.
I’d heard all about the damage a big ’roo can do. No wonder most outback vehicles come equipped with enormous waist-high fenders, big enough to buck an elephant.
“Six-foot ’roo’ll finish off y’front end, no problem,” my flying companion from Darwin had told me. “Likely finish you off too if it hits you dead square and goes through your windscreen. They’re silly buggers, those ’roos. See you comin’ and they decide they’re gonna fight. They just stand there likely as not waving their fists and then it’s…b’jeeze, well—it’s a hell of a mess….”
So I crouched forward over the steering wheel, peering through the slime on the windsheld, hoping and praying I wouldn’t be faced with a big boxing-crazed creature ready for a fight.
What made it even more difficult was that the topography had changed and I was now roller-coasting between creeks and gullies with hardly a flat stretch of track anywhere. Fortunately, the creeks had not risen above a few inches and I sprayed through those easily, coating the sides of the car and the windows in runny red mud, but never in any danger of stalling.
That was my other fear. I’d heard lurid stories about the characteristics of creeks in the wet. One of the passengers in Darwin, with whom I’d shared a stubbie or two, described an experience he’d had as a trucker on the Great Northern: “That was a real bastard road, few years back. You’d get a big storm backways in the hills—sometimes last for days—and down on the road everything’d be just fine. Nice n’dry. Good driving if you didn’t mind the dust. But there’s one stretch near Turkey Creek that’s real bad—six, m’be seven creeks in fifty k—comin’ right down from the Duracks. Big storm in them ranges and an hour or so later them creeks’d start fillin’ so fast it was like a dam burst. Four, five feet, m’be more in an hour. From nothin’ but a dry creek bed that ain’t seen rain in six months to these bloody great thrashin’ rivers that’d sweep you off the road in no time flat.”
“Problem was you had to make up your mind. If the first creek was rising, you’d got time to turn back and rest up awhile. Even drive back to Halls Creek and get a room and a bunch o’ mates and have a high old time.
“But if y’were carrying stuff that’d spoil, you’d think, what the heck, I’ll get through. So you’d get her all revved up and try to make it through the other creeks. When you got to Turkey you know you’d be okay. An’ likely you would if it was just startin’. But you couldn’t tell for sure. Best sign was if trucks was still comin’ th’ other way. Then you’d be okay. But—anyway—this one time I was carrying cut steer and the ‘frigerator was on the blink and I passed that first creek and everything was fine. ’Bout a foot or so—no worries. Second one, three feet. Up around th’ axles. No worries. Third one, around the door. And I’m thinking, I’ve got three more to go and it’s not lettin’ up. And there’s no traffic. Nothing. Few fellas behind me, way back, but nothin’ comin’ from up ahead. Now tha’s bad. So I’m thinking, do I go back or what? But I know them cut steer needed to get to the warehouse in Wyndham, so—I had a good truck—real good truck. So I kept going.
“Fourth one’s a bit of a problem. Bit of spluttering in the engine, but I’m through. Then comes the fifth. I knew it was all over by then. I could see them trucks, m’be twenty of ’em in front of me. Long line of ’em and I knew we was stuck. So—I got in line and walked up to the front—to the creek. Most of my mates was there—Larry Thompson, Jeff Bakely, Dave Williams. They was all standin’ watchin’ this damn creek. Like a bloody great river now—hundred meters ’n’ more across, going like the clappers, trees crashing by, boulders, the lot. Never seen nothin’ like it. And gettin’ higher by the second. You could see it creepin’ up—like watchin’ dough rise. Mean as a bitch. Pullin’ down the banks like they was cotton candy. Great slabs of soil and rocks come tumblin’ in and they’d just disappear—trees, fence posts—a bloody great boab tree—roots stickin’ out for twenty, maybe thirty meters—just came tumbling down with a bloody great crash, branches all smashin’ up, bobbin’ about like a great fat whale…took the whole bloody lot away in seconds.”
“We all pulled the trucks back up the hill far as we could. This thing looked like it wasn’t going to stop…and it didn’t. Rain kept comin’ for three days…never seen anything like it. Three solid days. Even then it took another two days to get so’s we could think about crossin’.”
He paused in his long monologue. I could sense him reliving the experience; his eyes were bright and his hand was shaking as he tried to capture the enormity, the power, of that raging, if short-lived, river.
“So what did you do for five days?” I asked.
He let go a huge bellowing laugh. “What did we do, mate? We lived like fuckin’ kings is that what we did. Set up a kitchen in one of the empty trucks. I dragged in some beef—we cut it up and roasted steaks, played cards, one fella was a beer trucker—Foster’s man—so we got plenty of stubbies—’nother bloke had his guitar…. I tell you, we had a real party. Fellas on the other side of the creek were partying too. Couldn’t get across, but we could see ’em well enough…. We had a great old time. Made a few bob on the cards, so—no worries. Beef was gettin’ a bit high, but nothing I could do ’bout that. W’ate as much as we could. I drove the rest of it to Wyndham. Don’t know what they did with it there. Couldn’t care less. I tell y’mate…in Australia you get used to making do…get yer billies out, get the beer out, get y’self a good steak three, four times a day…won’t get no crook in the gut that way. S’not such a bad life.”
Replaying the mind-tape of our conversation I may have lost concentration. The rain was still falling, the windshield was getting a thicker coating of goo, and I didn’t spot the headlights approaching until it was almost too late.
I’d just topped one more rise on the track when my vision vanished in a thwack of brilliant silver light. I couldn’t see a thing. But I knew something was coming straight at me…and it was coming fast. My brain screamed at me, pull over, pull over!
I had no choice. I also had no idea where the side of the track was. All I knew was that the road was a quagmire and I’d been driving close to the center to avoid the ominous headlight gleams of mud and rainwater pools.
I braked hard (not a good idea), pulled the wheel violently to the left, and felt the car fishtail and slide into the morass.
A horn, far too loud for any normal vehicle, blasted through the silver miasma, lights flashing furiously, and something like a herd of mad rhinos tore past, sending surf waves of red mud and gravel surging over the car, which rocked and quivered like a frightened rabbit in the howling slipstream.
The noise took a long time to die. I sat frozen in the driver’s seat; the bones in my fingers seemed reluctant to release the hard security of the steering wheel. I had missed a very messy and ignominous demise on this hell highway by inches. In fact the buffeting from the slipstream had been so furious that I was convinced the side of the car had been ripped off like a microwave dinner wrapper as the whateve
r-it-was tore by.
But of course I knew what it was, even though I hadn’t actually seen it.
It was an all-Australian, drive-through-the-night, stop-for-nothing road train. A remorseless wall-of-gears monolith, twice the size of anything allowed on the roads in the United States, tearing across the empty outback like a low-skimming B-52, a roaring juggernaut going straight for the jugular of any unsuspecting, half-asleep, remember-to-drive-on-the-left novice of the highway like me.
My body began to shake. First the legs, then stomach muscles, then arms and shoulders. I reached for a can of Coke, but nothing remained on the passenger seat—cameras, notebooks, pens, films, the Cokes, and God knows what else were scattered around the car like so much flotsam and jetsam after a boat wreck.
Finally I found a can. The sneezy-wheezy pop of the flip-top was reassuring. The geyser of warm brown carbonated syrup that shot straight up to the roof and then immediately cascaded down again, drenching me in sticky fluid, was not. But at least it allowed me to hurl epithets by the dozen at the mud and the goo and the black, sodden night outside.
I felt a little calmer until I realized the car was tilted at a rather peculiar angle.
Of course. I was in mud. Hopefully still on the road, but certainly in mud.
I crawled out of the door onto the—thank God—slick but hard surface of the track.