G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 5. We’ve arrived at one of my favourite places in Australia: Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges National Park. It’s one of those places where everything is so old - there is a place called Brachina Gorge where you can ponder 600 million year old rocks - that it makes you feel really small.
For those of you for whom this is your first letter, welcome! Good on ya for signing up. 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 are the journal entries, and the rest is me filling in the gaps.
And if you’ve just joined us, you’re not that far behind - the first four letters can be found here amongst the wrappers of vegan meats that the boys eat in the back seat while we’re on the road.
Let’s get to your letter!
It doesn’t take long to be alone in Australia.
Two nights ago we left Mildura. It’s a six hour drive northwest from the second largest city in Australia, Melbourne. It’s a drive you can make after lunch, if you really wanted to. And it’s an easy one too, very smooth and cruisy, passing through farm lands and country towns with names like Woodend, Charlton, and Neds Corner.
Keep pushing north out of Mildura, however, and things change quickly. The landscape is drier and the names of the towns get weird - you’ll come across places like Orroroo, Oodla Wirra, and Quorn. You have to hand it to Australian country towns, their names are so good they could be mistaken for characters from a 1980’s kids cartoon or lesser moons of Saturn. Or vegan meat pieces.
The other thing is that the world gets really empty.
Australia is good at a lot of things, but it is particularly good at being empty.
Consider this for a moment. There are 25 million people in all of Australia, a population smaller than Shanghai (upwards of 27 million people) and far smaller than that of California, which is home to around 40 million people. The U.S. as a whole has over 300 million folks living there. However, those 25 million Australians occupy the 6th largest country in the world by area, over twice the size of India (and its 1.4 billion people) and not too far off of Brazil, China, and the U.S.
A small number of people sprinkled about a huge country puts Australia on par with bustling places like Mongolia in terms of population density. And sprinkled is probably the wrong word. Some estimates have 80% of Australians living near the coast and nearly ⅔ living in major cities. So Australia’s empty as a whole, but the middle bits are especially desolate.
It did not take long for us to experience first hand what the numbers are saying, as we could see it happening out the windscreen. The farmland outside of Melboune dried up once past Mildura, and the distance between towns spread out. Some towns became nothing more than a roadhouse selling expensive petrol and bad coffee.
5th October 2019 - Wilpena Pound, SA
One hour packup in Broken Hill this morning. Beautiful weather at 8 am in the desert.
At Woolies to buy more shit. Always buying shit. Never a day shall pass that we don’t go shopping.
Oscar asked Katie just awhile ago: ‘do you think we’ve had enough together time yet?’
5.64 km/litre, our current fuel consumption rate. Useless.
We’re passing angry trees, that look like they’ve been recently on fire but they haven’t.
Setup at Wilpena Pound took longer. 1 hr 15 minutes. I was dead inside when we finished. We tried so hard and the results were such shit. The tent is all wonky. Doors and window covers don’t line up, and I couldn’t get the bins inside the tent to open. Doing this for one nighters hardly makes sense.
The kms went by slowly on the drive, with a stop at Yunta needed for some shitty overly milky coffee that cost $9. We talked about birds and roadkill and what was happening over the next few days. Oscar told us stories he learned from god knows where, about the band on the Titanic being Australian, and about a couple sailors from the HMS Bounty who settled on an island off Australia, and the island to this day celebrates Bounty Day in memory of the event.
They have a sign at the Yunta petrol station, saying ‘BP Yunta never close!’.
I’ve always been a fan of bad signage, and the BP Station in Yunta was a treasure.
I like to imagine the arrival of the new “never close!” sign went like this, with two blokes from the Yunta Roadhouse staring at it while leaning against something in the shade.
‘Your sign, it’s shit,’ the bigger one of the two says after considering it for a while, not bothering to take his cigarette out of his mouth.
‘Shit?’ the other responds, slightly hurt, sweaty shoulders sagging a bit within his singlet. He was the signage manager at the BP Yunta, among other things, his other responsibilities being broom handler, chip packet stocker, and the guy who filled up the window washing bucket with water when the old water had evaporated from the heat.
‘Yea, shit. Did you see the one the boys down in Mannanerie put up?’
‘Yea, she’s a cracker,’ the signage guy acknowledged, nodding.
‘Bloody oath it’s a cracker. So why didn’t you get one that says ‘BP Yunta, open 24 hours!’ like I told you to?’ the big one asked, still staring at the sign, lazy smoke coming from his ciggy.
‘But we never close, yea?’ the singleted one, asked, confused.
‘Yea, nah. Maybe. But it doesn’t make any sense. ‘BP Yunta never close’, I reckon it sounds like you’re saying that we’re not close to anything. It’s hopeless, get a new one, mate.’ In this case, it was a hard ‘mate’, like when you mean business and throw in your kid’s middle name for emphasis, not a soft ‘mate’ like you’re greeting a friend that you’ve not seen in a long time.
‘No worries. This one cost $75…’ the signage guy said.
‘Nah, leave it. No worries.’
In any case, “never close” is more than appropriate, considering the location of the BP Yunta is far from anything. It was 200 kilometres from Broken Hill, and we still had nearly 300 to go before arriving at our next stop of Wilpena Pound.
You have to want to go to Wilpena Pound, the resort and campground that sits within the Flinders Ranges National Park. It’s a 5 hour drive from Adelaide, the closest major city, and nearly 13 hours from Melbourne, so not someplace you head for a quick weekend camping trip.
Even so, this would be our second time there, the first visit being several years back, around the time we’d first arrived in Australia, on a trip where we drove an RV from Melbourne to the big red lump of rock that used to be called Ayers Rock, but now goes by the traditional name Uluru. The highlight of that first visit to Wilpena Pound was the night I was assaulted by a friendly kangaroo.
Ahh kangaroos, that most iconic of Australiana. Kangaroos are nearly synonymous with Australia. They are the national animal and can be found - along with the emu - on the Australian coat of arms and on packaging of half the products in Australia. For new visitors to Australia, seeing kangaroos is high on the to-do list because they’re such an oddity - a giant rat-rabbit with a huge tail that hops around? That’s something you’ve got to see. And they are worth seeing - to me, it’s similar to going to Africa and wanting to see an elephant or giraffe or hyena chasing a wildebeest.
And yet, kangaroos are as common as the deer in Iowa that eat the bushes in my parents' yard. You can head out into the country and see kangaroos everywhere, and you can pick up kanga bangas - kangaroo sausages - at most local grocery stores. But as common as they are, I still can’t help but stop and watch one when she’s got it her head to get somewhere fast, and she’s leaning forward, back almost parallel to the ground, hopping like mad and almost floating across the ground.
Based on the education I received related to kangaroos back in Iowa, kangaroos are potentially dangerous, as they seemed to always be beating up on someone in Bugs Bunny cartoons. But they were also champions of Fosters, the exotic imported beer that was sold in oversized cans. So kangaroos were to be welcomed, but cautiously.
On that first trip to Wilpena Pound, we were sitting around a campfire when a kangaroo wandered up.
Kangaroos are victims of being fed by well-meaning rule breaker humans, thereby making the ‘roos a bit too comfortable in our presence. The one in our campsite was definitely looking for food, but we just sat and watched him slowly poke around. At that moment, I decided I needed to get up and fetch another chair from a compartment on the side of the RV. Our friendly kangaroo apparently thought I was going to grab him a sausage or maybe a s’more, because he quietly followed me over to the RV, stood up tall, and put his paws on my shoulders, like he wanted to start a congo line around the campground. I thought that maybe it was Katie who wanted to dance, so spun around quickly. I swear that the kangaroo was as surprised as I was to be face to face. I yelped, afraid I was going to get into a punch-up with a kangaroo. The kangaroo, surely worried about getting in a punch up with me as well, decided to leave, luckily without first goring me with its sharp claws.
Going to such a remote spot like Wilpena Pound more than once - and since 2019 we’ve gone back a third time - says something about us, that we gravitate towards the middle of nowhere. Or maybe we’re anti-social, though that might just be me and since I do most of the driving, these are the types of places where we end up.
But apparently we’re not the only ones who like the middle of nowhere, because the campground was full of families with kids.
‘I hate this camping trip!’ The scream came from a nearby caravan.
From the other direction, there was a round yurt that glowed from the lights of its many occupants. It had been a hive of noise all night, but then the chanting started. ‘Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!’. Fight Club for kids had just started, and it raged until 10pm. Wilpena Pound was not the most tame campground on this night.
Maybe it’s just the parents who like the middle of nowhere.
6th October 2019, Wilpena Pound, SA
We hiked today, had to drag the boys out but I really couldn’t blame them for balking. The forecast called for 37 degrees C (98.6F), so we tried to hike early. It was still hot at 9 am. We saw all sorts of wildlife early on, though, which raised the spirits - a pair of ringneck parrots, a shingleback lizard, and some feral goats.
What did we talk about?
Why doesn’t someone invent a mortar that shoots Hot Pockets?
We discussed the pluses and minuses of putting frozen embryos of all species into the doomsday vault.
Henry asked: ‘Any thoughts on why my feet are so big?’
I had a hard time relaxing. It all feels like work right now. All the setup, the driving, setup and driving.
Katie and I drank a bottle of wine with dinner, steak and salad with bacon. After dinner, I told everyone that I didn't want our trip to turn into a succession of camping set ups and take downs. They agreed. Of course they did.
But I’m not sure they were all feeling the weight that I had from looking ahead to all the one nighters - one night stands, I called them - that I knew were coming.
We’ve got a long way to go, and we can’t ( and don’t want to) stay every place for three nights. Just can’t do it. Is this whole 3 months going to feel like work?
Tyre pressures
Trailer
42 bitumen or posted rates (car)
32-36 on gravel or unsealed roads, more if heavily corrugated (10% to 15% lower than posted, or just 10 psi lower than posted)
25-27 rocks, potentially a bit lower on rocks
15-25 sand (hotter the temp, softer the sand)
24 mud
Lower if in trouble
The lower the psi, lower speed
The fact that I decided to write down tyre pressures prior to leaving Wilpena Pound was a sure sign of what was on my mind, a sign of things to come. A sign that while Wilpena Pound is in the middle of nowhere, the next day we’d be leaving even its comfortable confines. The security and comfort of adequately paved roads seems like something that should be a given, something you can count on. But not where we were headed. In the next days the paved roads ended, and as my friend Russell Bates and others had instructed us before before leaving Melbourne, you’ve got to put your tyre pressure down when driving on gravel, rocks, sand or mud. And put it down even further if you’re in trouble.
In two days we’d be leaving the road and starting an off-road fight with the ominous Oodnadatta Track. But first, a stop off in a town called Marree, to fight with each other.