Coober Pedy to Wiluna

Coober Pedy to Ceduna


“If there’s anything you want,” bellows Gillian, “Just come to the house, but you’ll have to bang on the door really loud because I’m deaf.” With a cheery wave over her shoulder she stomps off, splashing through the puddles in her gumboots and waving her torch around.

She has deposited us on a grassy lawn in the middle of a circle of demountable huts in the middle of a property in the middle of nowhere. Gunbarrel Laager, 12 km along the Gunbarrel Highway, to be precise, although highway is not exactly precise being equal parts pothole and gravel .

The only other guest is Bevan, an Aboriginal trainer, but apparently there is a steady clientele all year round of northern European tourists happy to rough it in mining camp conditions, along with a big influx of Grey Nomads in the winter months.

We were recommended to it by a young Scandinavian couple who are tenting around Australia. But not everyone is doing it on the cheap – there is also a helicopter pad. What the well-heeled tourist might think of it is food for thought- it is definitely not the delightfully painted homestead with a shady verandah and a brave garden wrested from the harsh landscape that figures on all the tourist literature. It is more your haphazard working property with old utes and big machinery standing around, and an enormous shed with piles of tyres stacked outside.

But you can’t fault Gill’s good humour. Late arriving? No problem. Anything you need? Just knock (loudly). And Bevan, friendly and chatty, weather-beaten and shabby; he looks about 45. R and he have been having bloke talk around the Land Rover, and he comes inside.

“How old do you reckon Bevan is? “

“About 45.”

“He’s 63, with 9 grandchildren and a great-grandchild. And he’s a glass artist and potter who has had exhibitions opened by Janet Holmes a’Court, with a Master of Arts degree, although it is his Cert IV as a heavy machinery trainer that brings him in the bucks.

I look at Bevan again with interest when he next comes over for a chat. Which he does a bit, every Aboriginal’s story, to begin with, for a light-haired black child anyway, hiding in the sandhills to not be taken away and sent to a home. No schooling to speak of, later foster homes. But his ending is different: http://www.daao.org.au/main/read/7690

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Cast your mind back to the weather warnings in Coober Pedy. We are not going north across remote desert tracks this trip, and we turn south heading for the Nullarbor to go away from the rain. It’s goodbye to Coober Pedy, but with a feeling of resignation that as we will criss-cross that area many times in the future we will be there again.

I look around as we leave. It’s Mad Max country, in fact it was filmed at a desolate location nearby called The Breakaways. I bet most of the extras came from the moon-faced and rat-faced locals right in town. They are a striking lot; what do you need to wash for, you only get dirty again, why do you need teeth, you only drink anyway. Where we were camped a fellow tourist told us he had built the pre-fab courthouse years before. The specs called for a fibro skirt around the piers. “Oh no,” said the Police Sergeant, “That’s no good. That fibro will need to go right down to the ground. Or within a week someone will roll a stick of gelignite under it.”

So destination Ceduna, right in the middle of the Nullarbor. The road stretches out ahead. We miss a big opportunity to take our pictures beside the Big Galah at a fuel stop, but we pass up on it and press on. The last time we crossed the Nullarbor was in 1971, and then most of it was gravel, but now it is a smooth, sleek, but still quite empty road, pointing in a long straight line from Port Augusta to Perth. So straight, in fact, that 146 km of it is totally ruler-straight, the longest straight stretch in a country of roads that point like an arrow to the distant horizon.

We arrive in Ceduna, past a daggy caravan park near the little airport and down through the town to the water. But the two places that look quite nice are full and we head in desperation to our last chance – the airport place. If I say the office smells and the pool has a greenish tinge does it give the idea? I think most of these people live here. We lock everything and settle in. The reason why everything is so full? A combination of the crazy Queensland weather over the last couple of months changing people’s holiday plans and the current rain stopping travel through the centre to the North means that everyone has had to head south. Who would have dreamed that Ceduna would be full?

As well as travellers, Ceduna is also full of trolls. Every strange-looking person in Australia must have headed here, settled down and reproduced, refining the oddness over several generations. They are all strangely thin and grinning, or lumpy, puffy and tufty. With squinty eyes and crooked teeth.

Next morning, naturally, we are off as early as we can. We stop at the Head of the Bight, a few km off the road; it is where the whales, heading north from Antarctica, congregate in big numbers later in the year to have their young. The mothers can rest safely in the shallow water until the babies are old enough to go on. Even now, with no whales, this place is a big surprise: massive sheer cliffs dropping down into water with many shades of blue. It is very lovely, but there is a cold wind whipping around us and we retreat.

We fly along that straight road with its fantastic scenery. We remembered it much more brown, actually, then it dawns on us; in this memorably wet year we are seeing the arid land in a very different style. Still stark and harsh, but not just red desert. It is very varied, too, the height and style of the vegetation changes constantly. We love it.

Except for one thing. For several days now we have been repeatedly caught unawares by the fruit and vegetable quarantine checkpoints, usually just after we have shopped. It’s not the money, it doesn’t amount to much, but we would like to know, so we get a little booklet about what we can take where. Today’s problem is that we had planned to go across the desert in a completely different area (remember the Anne Beadell Highway?) and because of the risks of delay and disaster on that route we had laid in supplies for 10 days.

So we still end up having to hand over bags of stuff. I did find a young tourist with a broken-down car and gave him some, but most had already gone into the inspector’s fridge, I mean bin.

Anyway, here we are in Western Australia and suddenly gain two and a half hours, so we adjust our brains to put in a long day, 1100 km. It’s a big sky, so big that we can see individual storms dotted around, neat slabs of rain. From time to time we pass through one and out the other side. We are heading towards Norseman, near Kalgoorlie; we think we will camp in a little National Park nearby. But we can’t find the track to get into it, which should have been opposite our fuel stop at Balladonia. Maybe we were distracted by the signs every km on the approach to the servo: Cappuccino! Children’s Playground! Skylab Museum! Skylab Museum? Oh yes, this is where at least one NASA spaceship landed.

Then we see a sign for Fraser Range Farm Camping. Brake! Swerve! Let’s have a look, check it out. The entrance is a bit daunting, an old falling down shed, but as we go further it is just delightful. The falling down shed is original and about to be restored, and the campground has little stone buildings, accommodation in the old shearers' quarters, pretty gardens and farm views all around.

This was the first station settled along the Nullarbor, in 1872. It is hard to fathom how remote it must have felt then. The station covers 437,000 acres and the distance between the southern and northern boundaries is 160 km. Big numbers.

We contemplate staying two days just to kick back and enjoy the ambience. We sit outside looking at the enormous moon, closest to earth that it will be in our lifetime. From when we first heard about it, we had planned to watch it, thinking that it would look amazing from the outback, but drats, the peak night, yesterday, was completely overcast. We hadn’t considered that it would still be on display the next night, but of course there it is, still stunning. We sit and gaze.

But next morning is cold, with a biting wind flapping the canvas, so we move on. Although it is the main road across the south, there is really very little traffic. We are miles from anywhere when we pass a man walking in the other direction, and then two people on pushbikes. Awesome!

Ahead to the West lies Perth, but we turn north. After a detour of about 1500 km we are pointed to Broome again.

We pass by Norseman on the way to Kalgoorlie, which turns out to be a bigger town than at first glance. Lots of very ugly shopfronts, but more graceful old Victorian buildings speaking of a prosperous history. The area all around the town is a moonscape with massive slagheaps. There are signs pointing to a major attraction: the Superpit. We manage to contain our excitement and keep going.

This is the first place we have seen road warnings for eagles. A menacing silhouette on a yellow road sign, and sure enough they are there, massive Wedge-tailed eagles gorging on road kill, slowly and reluctantly heaving into the air at the last minute.

We’re heading for the road which would have been the end of our desert track, near Laverton; we look wistfully at it as we speed past. But we’ll be back, and when you look at the map (we bought a couple more in a servo at Norseman, both standing drooling over the detail, we couldn’t resist them, plus a book, “Great Desert Tracks”) there are just so many great places to go and things to see.

There has been no phone, no internet, not even water for the last couple of days, except for occasional towns like Norseman, and we stop for lunch in a true red dirt landscape. It is truly awe-inspiring; the colour of the soil, the thought that just perhaps no human foot has ever trodden on this piece of dirt in the history of the world. It’s a nice thought anyway, as we sit on the tailgate and scoff our sandwiches.

Further along the road it becomes greener and greener. Don’t get carried away, no-one’s going to play bowls on it, but great swathes of land on both sides are carpeted with low grass and a big variety of groundcover; tufty, lumpy, greenish, brownish, all making the most of the season, and in low lying places there are patches of water, trying hard to be little lakes. It says floodway here and there, nothing covers the road, but there’s a sort of suggestion that at any minute a flush of water could come through. And there are wildflowers lining the edge of the road, little low Australian-style wildflowers, small, pale and spiky, but there nevertheless, making a brave show.

Here’s a question: we have a CB radio and we have used it a bit. It’s loads of fun, “Thanks buddy.” “No worries.” But mostly what we hear is the crackle of static and a dialect which is almost incomprehensible. Is it the accent? The vocabulary? Will we pick it up so that we understand what people are saying to each other? It’s like being in a foreign country.

It’s getting dark, and the sky is getting darker still because it has been raining steadily at our destination all day. We stop at a tiny town called Leonora, with a median strip full of flowers, and spot an information centre in a pretty little original bank building. It’s rather striking that outside there are Aborigines slouching aimlessly along the street and inside the spic’n’span building there are two nicely dressed white women manning the desk. They are very helpful, anyway, ring ahead to our destination to let them know we are coming and give us good directions.

Which is lucky, as we need to turn east at Wiluna, which is a tiny speck of a town and in the dark and wet we would have been very uncertain. But we arrive, find Gill in the office and make camp. It has stopped raining, be thankful for small mercies.

During the night we wake up. Water is spraying on the canvas. “That’s really weird rain, “says R. But I have been listening for a few minutes and recognise the sound from our farming days. The irrigation system has switched on and we are in the path of the sprinklers watering the lawn. It is 2 am. After a bit R gets up and goes outside. The water stops but there is still a strange gurgling noise. “What did you do,” I ask. “I put a bucket over the sprayer,” he says, and we fall asleep still laughing.

Today dawns hot and dry, a big blue sky without a cloud. We decide to do a short day and re-organise our storage systems. As we are not going to do anything daredevil, we won’t need the amount of diesel we had on hand, so to reduce the weight, we decide to empty a jerry can into the fuel tank. Alas, this triggers the failsafe system that Land Rover has installed to stop people who are so stupid that they would accidentally put petrol into a diesel vehicle. If it detects a narrow spout a little cap springs across the pipe into the fuel tank. When this happens there is a special tool to re-set it. But oops, a little piece breaks off it as r tries to use it as per the instructions in the manual, and Houston we have a problem.

After having a quiet moment we decide to test out the Land Rover roadside assistance. Anywhere? Yes, anywhere! Ok, buddy, let’s see. We call, and the wheels are set in motion. A new tool is being overnighted from Perth, and when it arrives the closest operator will come and fix us up from Meekatharra, 200 km away. So we settle in for a holiday day, put the spare room on the rig to relax perfect comfort, get out the footballers girlfriends chairs and potter around. R washes everything in sight, and tries out every piece of equipment we haven’t yet used, just for fun. I do the blog, read the last of Vasari on Michelangelo. We have lunch, I have a siesta. Where is the music for “Beautiful Day?” It should be playing in the background. We’re here till the part and the mechanic arrive.