We wake up at dawn, just a faint suggestion of light on the horizon. What time is it? The watch says 7.00. Huh? Oh yes, we’re not only in a different country, we’re in a different time zone. South Australia time. But we are wide awake so we start the day. There is a faint sound of a riverboat making its way upstream; an hour later, just as we are about to leave, it comes back again.
By then we have had the full sunrise over the water and birdsong performance as perfected by outback Australia. Breaking camp has been rather delayed by the need to continually gasp and reach for the camera.
But then we are off and straight into a massive valley of vineyards, citrus orchards and olive groves. It feels as if we are back in Italy, and in a way we are. The South Australian Germans are closer in to Adelaide, and here it is little Italy. Nice statues on the gate posts! Nice palm trees!
We are getting steadily further towards the outback , not exactly wild, but more unpopulated and the little towns getting more and more drab. Everything is the colour of clay, even the sheep, they look as if they have been modelled from the dirt they are sitting on.
We cross the Murray River, wide and flowing well, on a ferry with a ferryman who looks straight out of central casting. He has a long beard he has been cultivating for a long time, and a weatherbeaten face. He waves a leathery arm with a grunt to greet us. We also have been practising our dialect –“Yerp”.
We have bought fruit and veges in Balranald, but this turns out to be a mistake. First we see the no fruit sign,oh dear, it’s fruit fly country, so the bag of apples goes into the bin beside the painting of an enormous angry insect. A bit further on, just under the huge arch representing a Goodyear tyre, there is an inspection station, and out goes the rest. Apparently almost everything is suspect. I personally suspect that this stuff goes straight into the pantry of the large lady who confiscates it, she looks as if she enjoys her tucker and needs a lot.
But the scenery is lovely. There are hills in the distance, round, greyish, with a light sprinkling of trees. It must be the start of the Flinders Ranges.
It is getting hotter and hotter and the earth is getting redder and redder. This is what we came for, and we are filled with glee at the sight. We know we need to check conditions, so we start a prolonged attempt to find out whether the road we intend to travel has been cut. We phone one government department and shire council after another.
Everyone is lovely, charming, willing to help, but no-one can tell us what we need to know. We want to follow the Anne Beadell Highway from Coober Pedy to Laverton near Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. It’s not a highway at all, it is in fact a remote and rough desert track, made in the 1950s to service Woomera, and since then barely maintained. But it sounds like fun to us, if it is passable after this wet summer.
Finally we find someone who says there was two inches of rain yesterday, and someone else who says it will be challenging, not to be taken lightly and to take 10 days of food if we decide to go just in case. No phone coverage at all, and no-one travels it except for occasional people like us out for a bit of fun.
We decide to go and have a look, we can always go back if it looks very problematic. We hope this theory holds true. We have plenty of food, water, diesel, coffee and Scotch, so we won’t die out there, but if we haven’t reached Laverton by March 29, it just might be an idea for someone to call the police station there.
So we head north from Port Augusta. The landscape gets more and more authentic, saltbush, red earth, occasional mounds of hills in the distance. Time to stop, I find a little track on the map to a site by a salt lake, and we go to the end, but it is a mine and we are fenced out, so we backtrack a few kilometres and pull off. We cause a lot of excitement to all the flies in the area, and we spend the next half hour doing our chores sporting very fetching fly veils. We give the winch a rewind, to make sure it is ready in case it suddenly is needed, then dive into the trailer for the evening.
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