G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 10. Ten! It’s a big number. I’m so happy to have made it this far, and I am happy you have decided to join me. If I can send out ten letters, then we can probably make it out of being stuck in Coober Pedy, which is where I left you in the last letter.
For those of you for whom this is your first letter, welcome! Good on ya for signing up and reading. Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told one weekly installment at a time using my journal entries written during the trip. You’ll probably figure this out, but I thought I may as well mention that the quoted bits below are the journal entries, and the rest is me filling in the gaps with road grime, a spare tyre, and a few rocks that looked like opals but aren’t.
If you’ve just joined us and want to catch up, you can find the other nine letters here, written on the bonnet of a car.
Let’s open up your letter!
Luke
It was a Saturday when we got out of jail.
We weren’t literally in jail, of course. We were in Coober Pedy, South Australia, at the Oasis Caravan Park. The Oasis did happen to be a little compound surrounded by a metal fence, but the fence was probably there to keep people out, protecting the residents of the Oasis from whoever spent each night screaming and yelling on the other side of the fence each night. There was also a dimly lit swimming pool and Wi-Fi, so the place wasn’t completely miserable. Having been in Coober Pedy for the last 5 nights, however, because an essential car part had to be shipped in from Adelaide in order to fix our car, it felt a little bit like corporal punishment.
When last I wrote, Katie, Henry, Oscar and I were stuck in Coober Pedy. Two days had passed since our car part was supposed to have arrived, and we were beginning to lose hope and resigned to whatever happened. Resigned, even though our road trip around Australia had not included weeklong stays anywhere, much less in a hot desert town that feels like the perfect backdrop for a Mad Max movie and where the residents live in caves.
And then our luck changed.
12th October 2019, Uluru
The part came. Katie cajoled a guy named Quentin to install it immediately, and we were on the road by 10.30 am. It was early, but well past the time to move on.
Thus began the long 8 hours to Uluru. It was hot from the start, 30C (86F) degrees. By the time we arrived it was 41C (105.8F). The sun was on me the whole time when driving, which was ordinary.
I was skittish from the start, always expecting something would break - another tyre, the fuel line again. But nothing did. After an hour of monotonous scrubby desert, I worried less.
Monotonous scrubby desert is an apt summary of the drive north along the A87, better known as the Stuart Highway. The Stuart Highway is the main north-south highway running between Adelaide on the south coast of Australia and Darwin on the north, stretching just over 3,000 kilometres (1,900 miles) through the guts of the largely empty and inhospitable Australian centre.
This isn’t to be confused with The Sturt Highway, which I wrote about back in Letter #3, ’Come for the toilet block, stay for the jumping pillow’, and is named for Captain Charles Sturt. Sturt was once Stuart’s boss, but let’s not complicate things. Focus on the road.
The A87 is named for John McDouall Stuart, the Scottish explorer who in 1862 led the first expedition across Australia from south to north and back again. It took him six attempts, which should give you an idea of the type of landscape we’re talking about: It’s nasty. There’s not much water, it’s hot, the terrain is unforgiving.
The reasons for the five failed attempts are worth a few moments. They include starvation and scurvy, which you might expect, and also because on one of the expeditions, Stuart ran out of horseshoes. This seems a rookie mistake, like taking your kids to the zoo and not bringing a stash of Cheerios for them to eat.
On the fourth attempt, Stuart’s party made it 2,100 kilometres north of Adelaide before turning back because local indigenous people threw boomerangs at Stuart’s horses and set fire to the land around the party’s encampment. That seems like a pretty typical Australian welcome to me, a few cheeky boomerangs and a bonfire, and is not far off from how I welcome people over to my house. Stuart apparently thought differently, being from Scotland and all, so on his next expedition he brought armed guards with him.
About the same time Stuart was kicking off that fourth try, another group was starting a competing expedition to be the first to cross the continent. In a competitive spirit between the Australian states that holds true even today, in August 1860 Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills made off from Melbourne to great fanfare, surrounded by 15,000 Victorians who were keen to see their Victorian explorers be first to get to the north coast and back. It was a lavish and well funded endeavour that included 27 camels, 50 gallons of rum - to revive the tired camels, allegedly - and a large oak table.
Stuart preferred to run lean and mean operations, which probably led to the large number of failures. On his first attempt, for example, he brought with him 6 weeks of food for a 4 month journey. And of course there were the horseshoes.
Stuart’s successful expedition also seemed doomed to failure, as not long after starting on 10 October 1861 he was kicked in the head by a horse, leading to a delay of several months. He and his party persevered, however, and in December 1862, they arrived back in Adelaide after successfully reaching Darwin several months before. Stuart spent a portion of the return trip from Darwin on a stretcher set between two horses.
As for Burke and Wills, they actually reached the north coast before Stuart, but both men died during the return trip to Melbourne.
Ten years after Stuart’s successful journey, the route he took was used as the basis for the construction of the Overland Telegraph line. The line connected Adelaide to Darwin on the north coast, and then to an undersea cable running to the Indonesian island of Java, and then on to Europe. Until then, Australia was still receiving all outside communication from the world via mail delivered by ship, and a simple letter could take a year to reach London.
Fast forward to 1908, when a pair of men named Harry Dutton and Murray Aunger drove a British-made Talbot motor car equipped with wooden wheels and steel-studded Michelin tyres, from Adelaide to Port Darwin. The 42 day journey - their second attempt - made Dutton and Aunger the first people to drive across Australia from south to north. They largely followed the Overland Telegraph line, following in Stuart’s footsteps.
The history behind the route, coupled with Dutton and Aunger’s success and the coming emergence of the car as a widespread mode of transportation, cemented the drive up the middle as a legendary Australian overland route, a classic, something that might be achievable even if you weren’t a hardy Scottish explorer with a fleet of camels and gallons of rum.
But that’s not to say that the drive north wasn’t hard work. It took until the 1940’s before the section of highway north of Alice Springs was improved significantly, when it was done so in order to transport supplies and troops north to defend the Australia against the Japanese. The south section of the highway wasn’t paved until the 1980s.
The Stuart Highway has about it an aura of stark heroism, of haunting romance. It's our equivalent of ancient spice routes, of the Canadian Pacific Railway, of the Grand Trunk Road, prizing riches from the uninhabitable. - Keith Willey, Australian travel writer
Today, the Stuart retains some the of aura and mystique that Willey wrote of, but sadly the adventure is mostly gone. On the whole, the Stuart - also referred to as “The Track”, “The Road”, “The Bitumen”, or my favourite, the “Bitch-O-Mine”, is just a very long drive.
I can’t help but wonder what Stuart would think of his namesake highway, and whether he would consider it boring, opting instead to veer off into the bush and try to make a day of walking all the way to Perth. I didn’t find myself feeling that way, my main worry being whether I had 10 hours of podcasts downloaded onto my phone or that the boys would eat all of the best snacks.
I’ve read that some call the drive a ‘horror’, but that’s not so. Despite 10 hours of mostly flat, red desert, it’s also not boring. It’s just that the highlights come at you slowly. There’s artwork painted on to the bonnets of old cars. There are roadhouses to stop at, even if you don’t need to stop. Wedge-tailed eagles - wedgies - cruise the cloudless skies above. And there’s the vast and ever changing desert buzzing by out the window.
The desert is interesting here. It has changed from white to yellow to orange to red as we moved north. The road colour changed too. Usually there are two colours of road, gray and black, maybe a shade in between. Here the road changed as much as the color of the desert. The red one is my favourite.
For some reason out here it’s customary to acknowledge other drivers. This is usually done by way of a one fingered half wave which you can do without taking your hands off the wheel. This has always interested me. I think it’s a throwback to the days when a drive up the middle of Australia took a bit of courage, and the finger was a bit of acknowledgement to other travellers. The roads weren’t great, the weather could be unforgiving, and the services were unreliable. It’s a drive we’re all in together.
Anymore the road is nicely paved and the roadhouses have wifi. But the ‘finger’ has endured.
I’m a bit of a badass and drive with my hands at 9 and 3, so my finger doesn’t often make it above the dashboard. But wanting to give it a proper go, I tried some alternatives.
I tried the wave, but a simple ‘Hi there!’ didn’t seem to hit the mark.
A big thumbs up, ‘good job buddy!’, I found to be a bit too enthusiastic.
I saluted one bus driver, but received no response.
I tried the Dave Parker. Dave’s a former baseball player who, when he hit a homerun, would run around the bases with his hands looking like six shooters. I always thought it was pretty cocky and tough, saying ‘take that, motherfuckers’ without saying anything at all. I tried it a couple times with approaching cars, but only got the finger in return.
I finally landed on the point, a gesture which clearly acknowledges the other driver while also asking ‘You good?’.
Eventually I started missing the timing altogether and gesturing after the driver had already passed, so left it to Katie to handle.
We keep passing signs reminding us that ‘in Australia, we drive on the left’, and ‘Watch for cattle!’ signs hand painted on the hoods of former cars.
While some artists work in clay, others canvas, Outback artists make great use of the hoods of former cars, and then put them on display by the side of the road.
So based on the signage, highway dangers consist mainly of tourists driving on the wrong side of the road and wild animals… and passing out from the monotony.
There’s also the danger from the nerve-racking effort required to pass road trains, the extra long trucks that are long when sitting in the parking lot, but seem like they are a couple hundred metres long when you’re on the road and trying to pass them.
Then nothing will happen for hours, until you come across something that wakes you up again, like when we spotted a woman dragging a dead kangaroo by its tail down the side of the road. Apparently it is customary in these parts to clear the highway of kangaroo roadkill. Customary or not, I’ve never felt compelled to clear the road of dead things. I also did not feel the need to stop and help her drag the beast, even though she seemed to be struggling a bit. I don’t tend to be a ‘not my job’ type of guy, but I have to draw the line somewhere.
It’s possible that this woman was not just a highway good samaritan, perhaps she was taking this kangaroo home for herself. It was a big animal, big enough that she was struggling to drag it, so maybe there’s some good eating there? I don’t know this for sure, but I would guess that Australia’s no different than in some parts of the U.S., where possums or deer on the side of the road are fair game, especially if they haven’t been lying around for too long.
It might surprise you to hear that Australians eat kangaroo meat, but it’s true. Kangaroo is not as popular as beef or pork, and you can hardly stop Australians from talking about ‘spring lamb’, but most grocery stores will have some kangaroo around. Our family is not big into game meat, however I will surprise them every now and then by bringing home some kanga bangas - kangaroo sausages. I can imagine I would do the same if we lived in France by throwing some horse on the grill, or if we lived in Peru, by bringing home a rotisserie guinea pig if I was working late and needed to whip up a quick dinner to feed the crew.
Just after leaving South Australia and crossing into the Northern Territory, we also left the excitement of the Bitch-O-Mine, turning left at the Erldunda Roadhouse to head west. Travelling that direction, I was still in the direct line of the 40 degree sun, and despite running our air conditioning at full whack, the sun melted me into something resembling a piece of bread left out in the rain.
Charles Stuart’s 5th expedition failed largely because he set off in the middle of summer, a time when the inhospitable land in the centre of Australia almost impossibly becomes even more inhospitable, due to the heat. We hadn’t started our journey in high summer, but mid-October put us not far off. Hopefully we’d get some respite from the heat?
Time passed as we drove - it could have been 20 minutes, it could have been 2 hours - and then all of the sudden all the miles and dampness and fatigue were forgotten, when a big red rock rose from the flat desert to dominate the skyline. Uluru.
This rock - Ayers Rock, as it used to be called - one of the most recognisable sights in Australia, has never failed to make me stop and stare, an issue when driving because of the wild camels that like to run out onto the road.
Spotting the rock also meant that after two long weeks of driving, enduring road damage and being stranded in Coober Pedy, that we’d finally made it somewhere. We’d finally made it to the red centre.