Land of long drive doesn’t disappoint
JOHN ANDERSEN is travelling across Australia, and at times he has been left in disbelief at the epic scale of our country’s landscape.
I’VE just done something I’ve always wanted to do and that is to drive across the Nullarbor.
I did it with my son Will, starting from Sydney, finishing in Fremantle. All up 3958km, via a few little detours to stand on the cliffs that look out over the Great Australian Bight.
The 1200km flat stretch of road that comprises the Nullarbor, from Ceduna in South Australia to Norseman in Western Australia, must be one of the world’s great driving journeys.
I say this in a good way, but the Nullarbor really is the Great Australian Nothing.
This is Australia at its rawest, purest best.
Built into it is the famous 90 Mile Straight between Caiguna and Balladonia.
Not a turn, not a twist, just a straight slash through the metrehigh scrub of saltbush and bluebush.
The horizons melting into each other, the air so clear you can see the Earth curving neatly against the sky.
This is the land of no trees. Crows sway in the wind as they balance on the rickety tops of the desert shrubs, looking for roadkill. Peregrine falcons hover in the sky and then with folded wings drop with the ferocity of arrowheads on to unsuspecting lizards careless enough to leave the protective cover of the saltbush.
Physically, the Nullarbor is a daunting place. You imagine yourself lost out there among the saltbush, trying to survive.
Its Aboriginal and English names attest to its harshness. The Aboriginal word for this 200,000 square kilometre desert is “Oondiri”, meaning “The Waterless”.
The word Nullarbor was coined by an early surveyor and goes back to Latin derivatives which mean “treeless”. So, there it is in a nutshell; no trees, no water.
Great place to hang out.
There are vehicle tracks that dive off the road and lead to the sea cliffs that run along the Bight.
Standing there on the southernmost edge of the continent, you are witness to the Great
The horizons melting into each other, the air so clear you can see the Earth curving neatly against the sky
Australian Nothing. To the east and west there is the never-ending line of cliffs, to the south there is the Great Southern Ocean and Antarctica.
Turn around and look north and it is as though you can see all the way across the desert and the sheep and cattle stations and the Aboriginal lands, to the Northern Territory.
In the surf at one of our stops, a pod of porpoises, at least 30 of them, was working the same stretch of water just out from where the surf crashed against the boulders at the cliff bottom.
The wildness of it all, the quietness, the exuberance of nature stripped down to the bare basics, is overwhelming.
I have driven to the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland and have struggled to find a park among the tourist coaches and other vehicles.
The Cliffs of Moher run for 14km. The cliffs along the Great Australian Bight run for 210km.
Not a tourist coach in sight. No eco-lodges, no hot air balloons, no kiosks, no coffee shops and no safety rails. Just the landscape as it was a million years ago.
There is no one else there but you and the wind.
Surfers come here. There is the well-known Cactus break near Penong on the Nullarbor’s eastern end.
There are several others including Spoggies and Crushers which only the hard-core know about and know how to access.
Outsiders are discouraged and anyone who brings a camera – movie or stills – and starts taking photos could find themselves on the wrong end of a knuckle sandwich.
The small fraternity that come here to ride these waves want it kept a secret from the world.
They don’t want stories and photos in surfing bibles like Tracks and Surfing World.
Will tells me this and I say, “what
do they mean ‘outsiders’? Everyone who comes here is an outsider. It’s not like people live here”.
People do live here. They run the roadhouses along this great Australian plain.
We had been warned to stop and top up with fuel at every one of them, because there is always a risk that if you are low on fuel you might arrive at a servo that has run out.
We stayed at Penong, west of Ceduna, the first night. Had dinner at the pub where the old-school female bar attendant told us that the second busiest shipping port in Australia was at Penong. There is a saltworks there and the salt is so pure it is shipped to New Zealand to be used in the manufacture of medical saline.
Will and I looked at each other when she mentioned the “second busiest port”, but didn’t say anything.
We had a chuckle about it afterwards in the dark while experiencing a famous South Australian blackout that lasted for five hours in night-time temperatures of 2 degrees. Good on’ya South Australia. The roadhouses across the Nullarbor appear like space stations out in this universe of low scrub. They are their own little kingdoms and provide proof that out here there is human habitation.
Out of all the roadhouses where we bought fuel and food, we received the grand total of two smiles from people serving us. One was a teenage girl and the other was a young teenage boy.
Travellers sit around tables drinking cans of Emu Export beer, known colloquially as “bush chook” or “chookies”, while eating burgers.
We arrived at the Caiguna Roadhouse late in the afternoon, hoping to get a motel room. It was booked out.
We didn’t want to drive at night because of animals, which I should have mentioned also include wild camels.
We had some gear and made a rough camp behind the roadhouse. I ordered some toasted sandwiches for dinner and asked if they could be wrapped in Alfoil to keep them warm. The attendant looked at me oddly at the mention of Alfoil. “Alfoil,” I repeated, again. “Could you wrap them in Alfoil?”
And then the roadhouse owner, who had been hovering nearby came over, saying, while looking towards the floor, “no Alfoil. Alfoil too
expensive. Greaseproof paper only. You’re in the Outback now,” he said. “Copy that,” I thought.
The mood sometimes spreads to your fellow travellers. Will complimented an elderly bloke, camped near us with his wife, on his smart looking off-road caravan. “Are you happy with it?” Will asked. The bloke looked annoyed, as if he didn’t want to talk until, eventually, he came out with “I’m never happy with anything”, before turning away.
We wondered later how that made his wife feel.
I’d lost count of the number of people who told us “never stop for anyone out on the Nullarbor”. Everyone and I mean everyone, mentions convicted killer Bradley John Murdoch and the 2001 murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio.
Falconio was murdered in the Northern Territory, but Murdoch spent a lot of time running drugs across the Nullarbor.
If anyone camps along the highway you can bet they get well off the road and that they light a very small fire and that they tense every time the headlights of a car out on the highway washes over their camp.
We were pressed for time and had to come into Fremantle the fastest way which meant coming through Coolgardie and the wheat belt town of Merredin. Ideally, we would have swung south to Esperance and Margaret River, but time-wise that wasn’t on the cards.
We stopped at the first place we came to in Merredin which advertised itself as hotel-motel.
We discovered when we put our bags in our rooms that they didn’t have ensuites and that you had to cross an open, weedy, courtyard in the rain to get to the bathrooms which hadn’t seen a mop or a brush for months. “Well,” we laughed. “We hit the fail button big-time on this one.”
Evidence of the prosperity that once belonged to these wheat belt towns is in the architecture.
Grand old court houses and public buildings.
Now they are down-at-heel. Empty buildings line the streets.
The young people have moved to Perth and other cities across the continent, leaving, largely, only the elderly to shuffle along the footpaths to the shops.
The towns tell their own stories of times when things were better and simpler, when jobs were plentiful, when the population turned out on weekends to watch the local lads play cricket and footy, when the Lions Club and Country Women’s Association were bursting at the seams with members, when teenagers went to dances put on by the Rural Youth Club, when Wolf Cubs went on bob-a-job and, when there wasn’t this irresistible, magnetic pull that drags so many young people away to the city.
We left from Bondi which is
Pacific Ocean-aussie-beach culture on steroids and arrived in Fremantle on the Indian Ocean 5½ days later. With its 19th century sandstone buildings, wall-to-wall restaurants, cafes, bars, grand old pubs and its resident population of Notre Dame university students, Fremantle gives off a bohemian, European vibe. It’s like a little Europe in the southwest corner of Australia.
Hard to believe that just a few hundred kilometres to the east is the start of the daunting, but still beautiful, Great Australian Nothing – The Waterless – where crows perch on top of the saltbush shrubs and the surf from the Great Southern Ocean pounds against the rocks of the Great Southern Land.