ON THE BIRDSVILLE BEAT
Nestled on the edge of the Simpson Desert in Queensland’s south-western corner, Birdsville is one of Australia’s most isolated towns and home to a vibrant community of locals.
Senior constable Stephan Pursell is a man who deals with hot, hard facts. As Officer in Charge at Birdsville Police Station, the 53-year-old patrols one of Queensland’s most remote beats, covering some 240,000sq.km – an area roughly the size of the UK.
He is Birdsville’s only police off icer. The town, which is located on the edge of the Simpson Desert in Queensland’s far south-west, about 1400km west of Brisbane and 580km south of Mount Isa, is surrounded by hundreds of kilometres of empty desert and sparsely populated farmland. Stephan single-handedly patrols this vast beat.
He is one of only 140 people who live in Birdsville, which is well known for its extremely hot, dry climate, and the annual Birdsville Races, a horseracing event that attracts thousands of visitors each September. He is hardworking and matter-of-fact – certainly not the kind of bloke who’d believe in ghost stories. So, as we stand in what used to be the town’s courthouse and he lowers his voice to tell me there’s something unnatural going on here, a chill runs through my body, despite the baking heat. Out the back is the bedroom of a former police officer who hanged himself on the front verandah decades ago. “They say he’s still here,” Stephan says solemnly. “Tourists have seen his face at the window, and when we have coppers come to help out with the races, none of them will sleep in this room.”
Stephan, who describes himself as “the biggest sceptic in the world”, has lived and worked in Birdsville for almost two years. Soon after he and his wife, Sharon, arrived in town, they decided to put a stop to what Stephan thought was a load of poppycock and hung curtains in the infamous window. “The next day we came back and they were on the f loor,” he says. “We put them back up, but the day after that we came in and they were in the corner, neatly folded up. No-one had been in here,” he adds. “I’ve got the only key.”
He reasons that someone could have broken in simply to mess with him, but there’s an edge of uncertainty to his voice. He hasn’t put the curtains back up since.
BEFORE STEPHAN MOVED TO Birdsville, he was a beat cop at a busy shopping strip on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, about 100km north of Brisbane. Every day, he was surrounded by faces he didn’t know and over the years he became disenchanted by the number of shop-lifting and drug-related offences he had to contend with. He had a strong desire to live somewhere truly outback, which Sharon shared, although perhaps with slightly less gusto. So, when an opportunity came up for him to become one of Australia’s most remotely stationed police off icers, Stephan’s hand shot up like a rocket, even though neither he nor Sharon had visited Birdsville before.
Birdsville certainly is a true outback town. Located well off the beaten track, it is home to a very small number of locals. Although its off icial population is 140, there are usually only between 70 and 100 locals living in the town at a time. During the race weekend in September, Birdsville’s population can swell to up to 9000. In summer, when day and night temperatures hover above 40°C, the population drops dramatically to “about 30 people who couldn’t find a way to get out”, according to Stephan. “You can open the door at midnight, and it’s like shoving your head in an oven,” he says, adding that the cabin of his four-wheel-drive ute easily reaches 60°C on really hot days.
As we chat, a hot wind blows around us, whipping dust up our shorts, into our faces and down our throats. It’s hot, it’s dry, and there is dust everywhere – it even puffs out of Stephan’s wallet when he opens it. Despite the heat, the dust and the f lies, Stephan feels at home in Birdsville. “I just love it,” he says. “There are these moments, these skies, where it starts going bright orange on one side of you, but it’s still blue on the other, and above you it’s black and the stars are out, and it’s like you’ve got three skies at once. There’s just nothing like it.”
These days, Stephan knows everyone in town by name, as well as many of the people who occupy the huge stations that lie beyond Birdsville. He tries to get out to visit the farmers every couple of months, which involves huge amounts of driving. It allows him to meet people whose lives are even more isolated than his. “Living all the way out there, so far from anyone, it’s just…well, I always say, these aren’t just ordinary people out here, they are extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
ONE OF BIRDSVILLE’S extraordinar y locals is Don Rowlands. Don, 69, is a Wangkangurru traditional owner. For the past two decades, he has worked as a park ranger at Munga-Thirri National Park, which is located about 80km west of Birdsville. Munga-Thirri is Queensland’s largest national park; it covers an enormous area of more than 10,000sq.km, making it almost as large as Greater Sydney.
Don has always lived in and around Birdsville. He’s spent his life working on the land, f irst as a drover – he started driving cattle at the age of eight – and now a ranger. Don is hard-working and light-hearted. He says he’s “only been in the local ranger job for 23 years”, and that it was a bit of a get at the time. “This job wanted a résumé, and I didn’t even know how to say it, let alone write it,” he says, giggling croakily. “As a stockman you were your résumé – how you performed on a horse.” Fortunately, the town’s local bank manager helped him put together an application. Don, who jokes that he must have owed the banker money, has worked in the park ever since.
Stephan, who hadn’t done any hardcore off-road driving before moving to Birdsville, is happy to admit he would have been lost without Don, who he reckons knows the area better than any modern sat-nav systems or maps.
The two men spend a disturbing amount of time together rescuing some of the 50,000-plus tourists who pass through the town each year, generally on their way to or from the Simpson Desert. Before satellite phones and other modern technology, getting stranded on the empty, isolated roads surrounding Birdsville potentially meant a long, slow death. But these days Don and Stephan take the town’s ambulance and police truck, in case one of them gets stuck, to the rescue.
“We had a family who set off an EPIRB at Walkers Crossing after it rained recently, and they’d been stuck there for three days,” Stephan says. “They didn’t see anyone in that time and were starting to get anxious.” He explains that, although Walkers Crossing is only about 120km from Birdsville by road, it takes f ive hours to get there. Rough terrain usually makes rescues diff icult. “In the city, you have an accident and within 15 minutes the ambos are there and you’re probably in hospital within 30 minutes,” Stephan says. “Out here, in 30 minutes we’re probably still getting organised to come and get you.”
Don jokes that although rescue expeditions are often difficult, they keep Stephan busy. “Which is lucky, because there is no crime here,” he adds. “I think we need to put an ad in the paper so Stephan can have something to do: ‘Criminals wanted for vacancy in Birdsville’.”
DON HAS A LIFETIME OF stories about his experiences in Birdsville, which he animatedly shares. He tells me about learning to hunt in the traditional ways when he was young, when he’d use boomerangs to catch ducks. “I could just snatch them out of the air, I was that fast,” he quips. He recounts colourful anecdotes from his time spent working as a stockman, and it’s clear he has a deep connection to the landscape. “They were some of the best times of my life, riding horses and chasing cattle,” Don says. “There’s just so much freedom.”
Despite today being an active and involved member of the Birdsville community, Don recalls the struggles he experienced as an Aboriginal boy growing up in the small outback town. When he f irst started working as a drover, he was promised sixpence a week but says he’s still waiting for that f irst pay. Half his money never showed up, and half went to the local police, as the law decreed at the time.
“We were just free labour for years, and then when things changed and we had to get equal pay in the 1970s, they kicked
“These aren’t just ordinary people out here, they are extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.” Tourists chat to Stephan Pursell outside the Birdsville Bakery, one of only two places to eat in town, and home to the famous curried camel pie. There are photos inside of Malcolm Turnbull enjoying one.
us all out,” he recalls. “But we were all so happy just the same. We didn’t have electricity, or car or house payments, so I didn’t really need money.
“It sounds bad because they promised to pay us and they never did, but it was still fun.”
Don’s jovial humour occasionally gives way to an undercurrent of resentment that surfaces when we bump into his wife, Lyn, 64, who works at the local hospital. She mentions that she was born in Birdsville, in the tiny shed at the back of the hospital grounds. “We weren’t allowed to be born in the actual hospital,” she says with a shrug. “Everything was segregated back then.”
Lyn remembers having to celebrate Christmas separately from her non-Aboriginal friends during the town’s festivities. “Up until 1976, we even had a separate Christmas tree,” she says. “When everyone ate, the Aboriginals would go out the back and eat their food in the back room, and all the whites would eat in the kitchen.”
She says Don was vocal in instigating change in the town. “He speaks up for himself, and so do I,” Lyn says. “In 1976, he actually said, ‘No, we’re not going to be treated like this anymore.’”
Don admits that, although he loved riding horses and rounding up stock, he always resented the fact that Aboriginal stockmen were treated differently from white ones. “Blackfellas would always have to eat separately,” he says, his giggle gone. “You weren’t allowed to sit inside with the whitefellas you’d worked with all day.”
DESPITE HIS COLOURFUL LIFE, Don reckons he’s not the most interesting character in town. He regularly works with local nurse Andrew Cameron, who can honestly say the town is one of the less remarkable places where he’s plied his trade. Andrew is the only medical off icer stationed in Birdsville full-time. The Royal Flying Doctor Service f lies a doctor in for a clinic once a week, but other than that Andrew is the only health worker on staff at the hospital.
His job involves helping Stephan and Don with rescues, and being at the end of the phone around the clock for whatever medical emergencies arise. “Before coming here, I’d worked mainly in big hospitals,” Andrew says. He’d be rostered to work in specif ic wards, where he’d treat patients with a limited range of similar conditions. “Coming out here is so much more interesting, because you get everything: heart attacks, someone falling off a horse, rescues,” he says.
Driven by a desire to help people, Andrew also works as a volunteer humanitarian aid nurse for the Red Cross during his time off. He’s travelled to war zones and crisis areas all over the world and tells gruesome stories of carving off grenade-damaged legs in South Sudan, treating bomb injuries in Iraq and nursing battle wounds in Kenya, Georgia and Afghanistan. Some of his most horrifying stories recount his time in Sierra Leone during the 2015 ebola crisis, where he was responsible for burying dozens of victims killed by the virus every day.
“You might think Birdsville would be relaxing after that, but it’s not,” he says. “You have to be ready, by the phone, 24/7, and you never know what it’s going to be – a heart attack, a sick child who’s stopped breathing – so it’s never dull here.”
ON MY LAST EVENING in this extremely remote yet welcoming place, Stephan drags me out of town, across 37km of brutal road covered in rocks the size of baseballs, to Big Red. This famous landmark is an enormous sand dune that marks the start of the Simpson Desert. Rising higher than 30m, it is one in a series of more than a thousand dunes that stretch for kilometres across the desert. It is so vast and incongruous that it is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in Australia. It leaves me completely awestruck.
As the sun starts to set, the red of the dune seems to slip up into the sky, which soon sparkles with unfeasibly large stars in the twilight. Stephan walks off on his own and stands on the edge of the dune, leaning backwards, with his hands on his belt and his face pointing up towards the incredible sky. He looks as his life does, completely isolated and utterly content.
It is so vast and incongruous that it is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in Australia. It leaves me completely awestruck. Standing at the edge of the Big Red sand dune, Stephan Pursell waits for another outback sunset to start lighting up the sky, as the wind whips the red sand away beneath his feet. It truly is one of the most jawdropping vistas in Australia.