G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, letter number 58. Good on ya for reading!
Letters From the Road is the story of the road trip around Australia that I took with my wife Katie and boys Henry and Oscar back in 2019.
The story comes to you in weekly installments, featuring the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the Letter.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 57 letters here, driving 115 on the highway.
Let’s get to it!
Luke
No sooner had we left Norseman and turned onto the highway did I look in my rearview mirror and see flashing lights. The highway patrol. I got that sinking feeling that comes with seeing those lights in your mirror, even though I was pretty sure that I’d done nothing wrong. I tried to pull over in the most polite and respectful way possible, just to show the officer that I wasn’t going to cause any trouble.
I rolled down the window as he approached. The heat of the day blew in the window. The temperature had already pushed past 30 degrees (86F) and it was not yet noon.
‘I pulled you over because you were speeding,’ he said before I could ask. I was certain that this was not true, as I’d had my cruise control dead set on 110 kilometers per hour, the limit on most of the main highways in Western Australia.
‘I’m pretty sure I was not driving over 110,’ I told him.
‘The highway speed limit when you are towing a trailer is 100,’ he rebutted.
‘Really?’ Katie and I both said, in shocked surprise. At this point, we’d spent upwards of 60 hours on the road and driven nearly 6,000 kilometres since crossing the border into Western Australia nearly 9 weeks ago. We’d be leaving WA and crossing back into South Australia in the next 24 hours, and only now do we find out that we’ve been driving too fast the whole time?
We explained this to the officer, which I quickly regretted because it meant we were essentially admitting to having been not only habitual law breakers, but also morons.
Luckily, he was feeling generous and only gave us a warning.
‘Just slow down the rest of the way,’ he said, then adding, ‘you might have heard that there have been bushfires burning near here?’
We had heard. We’d gone shopping the day before, and the local grocery store was out of stock of many things, including basic staples like fresh milk. This, we were told, was due to trucks not being able to get through from the east because the highway we were on had been closed until today due to fires.
‘Currently the fire is only burning on the north side of the highway, so the road was able to reopen,’ he said. ‘But you never know what’s going to happen. The wind could change, blow the fire south, and the road would be buggered again. So you best get moving.’
I wanted to point out to him that he had in one breath told me to both slow down while also implying that I should hurry my ass up unless I want to have to turn around and be stranded in Norseman for the night, or longer.
We thanked him for the tip, and carefully pulled away from the shoulder. Bushfires had slowly moved from being a novelty to an annoyance to a bit of a worry, between the fire that kept us from visiting the National Park in Esperance, to this one that had closed the only paved road between the states of South Australia and Western Australia.
And now we had fires potentially blocking the only road home. Maybe all the little fires were normal out here, maybe it was weather related. It had been very hot, and it had been dry. Rain was a rare occurrence on our trip. We felt the dryness in our bodies, with red dirt ingrained in our skin like a full-body tattoo, finding its way into every crevasse of the car.
But after time passed, we grew used to it, the heat and the dry and the red became commonplace, we became part of the landscape as it became part of us.
What we didn’t realise at the time was that 2019 ended up being Australia’s hottest and driest year on record*.
We also didn’t realise that this would not be the last time we would have a run in with bushfires.
I thought back to Norseman, the town we’d just left. It had been a nice enough town - the tourist information centre had free pens and coin operated showers - but we had no interest being stranded there.
Once the highway patrol had receded from view, I was back up at 110 and pushing beyond.
*You can see a larger version of the BOM’s map of 123 years of Australian rainfall here. It’s surprisingly wonderful to look at. You can even download the full collage as a poster if you’re into that sort of thing.
We’d finally made it to the Nullarbor. The name is Latin, meaning ‘no trees’, and judging by the scenery out the window, the name is apt. It’s largely a treeless landscape of grayish red sand and a low scrub of saltbush and bluebush, as far as the eye can see.
We’d been looking ahead to this portion of our trip for a while, because crossing the Nullarbor is considered one of Australia’s great drives. You could also argue that it’s one of Australia’s worst drives, a journey of 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) from Norseman, Western Australia to Ceduna in South Australia, across some of the most foreboding desolate land in all of Australia, and that’s saying something.
But it is a bit of an adventure and an experience. Australia is mostly empty, after all, and driving through 1,200 kilometres of nothing paints that picture very well. But it’s not something you’d want to do every weekend.
The highway we were on has two names: the impressive sounding National Highway 1, and also the Eyre Highway, named for explorer Edward James Eyre, the first European to cross the Nullarbor. Eyre received a passing mention back in Letter #7, Hot tubbing with MacGyver on the Oodnadatta Track.
Eyre’s first go at exploring was an attempt to find a great inland sea north of Adelaide, and it ended in failure such that he started naming things to suit his mood, like Mount Hopeless.
His second expedition had a similar goal, finding good passage to the interior of Australia, though this time by first trekking west. So it was that on the 18th of June 1840, Eyre set off west from Adelaide with a team of 5 men, 13 horses, 40 sheep, and stores for three months.
He was just 25 years old, and well ahead of his time. This was a full 20 years before John McDouall Stuart and the competing team of Bourke and Wills started their attempts at crossing Australia from the south to the north and back.
Before setting out, Eyre was full of wonder and anticipation, saying, “it will be … interesting to know the character of the … country between this colony (South Australia) and theirs (Western Australia), and to unfold the secrets hidden by those lofty … cliffs at the head of the Great [Australian] Bight … (the) vast extent of desert country … the scarcity of grass – the denseness of the scrub – and the … [almost] total absence (lack) of water”.
It didn’t take long for Eyre’s sunny disposition to wear off. It was an exceedingly difficult journey. The terrain was treacherous, and what he’d noted about a total absence of water was nearly spot on.
It also took longer than expected. Eyre and his team travelled through the heart of summer, motivating them to jettison additional clothes from their supplies. The journey then extended into winter again, making them wish they hadn’t.
By the time Eyre found water holes at a spot now called Eucla on 12 March 1841, the team had been travelling for 9 months and still had nearly 1,400 kilometres to go. Five of the horses had died and several of the men had retreated. Not long after, Eyre noted in his journal, “We now entered upon the last fearful push which was to decide our fate.”
With a statement like that, sounding like the beginning of a death march, when you’ve still got nearly 1,000 kilometres left to travel, it’s hard to believe Eyre was successful. But on 7th July, Eyre and his sole companion, an Aboriginal man named Wylie, stumbled into Albany, the only members of their party to complete the journey.
Eyre was awarded a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society for the effort, and eventually was given some plum jobs as leiutenant governor of New Zealand and then governor of Jamaica, where he got into some serious hot water for the violent way that he put down a slave revolt.
And of course he is memorialised by the highway that crosses the Nullarbor.
After completing his journey, Eyre called the Nullarbor a “hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams.” So he got his wish, to “know the character of the country”, and it’s safe to say that that he didn’t like it.
Today the Nullarbor is slightly more hospitable. There are at least 12 roadhouses along the highway, places with names like Caiguna, Cocklebiddy, and Mundrabilla, so there are small pockets of civilization that you can count on in a pinch, but aside from that there’s not much.
You always have to take into consideration, though, that roadhouses close, they’re impacted by bushfires, the weekly diesel truck might not turn up and they run out of fuel, all sorts of things can happen, so it is good to keep your wits about you.
This means filling up on diesel at any opportunity, and always keeping a few bags of chips and some drinks around. We stopped to top up on supplies and to make lunch at Balladonia, the first roadhouse you find heading east out of Norseman.
28 December 2019 - Roadside on the Nullarbor
For lunch, Katie made me a sandwich.
Henry came walking toward me as I exited the smoking hot Balladonia roadhouse, and asked if I wanted a sandwich like his. Sure, I said, not caring as long as someone made it for me. I also ok’d the use of the butt ends from an old loaf of bread, just to use them up.
My sandwich sat on the console of the car when I got in. The bread was old and tired, so the pieces had started to dry up and had taken on an odd curved shape, like they were attempting to curl inward on themselves. For some reason, Katie chose to make the sandwich butt-side in, so the ends of the sandwich bowed outward. If the sandwich was topped in ham or something that’d probably work out.
This, however, was a tuna sandwich, so half the crumbly tuna ended up falling out of the sandwich and onto my shirt. It was like filling up a bowl from the wrong side and then watching everything you’ve just poured in roll all over the place.
A decent tuna sandwich requires a decent amount of glue to stick everything together, mayo being the standard. I got some of that, but only a drizzle.
It also requires seasoning. We aren’t blessed with a full complement of spices on this trip, so a slathering of Franks Red Hot usually does the trick. The Franks was left off my sandwich. A little ageing spinach, rapidly decomposing in the heat, was the only topping.
What was left was one of the worst sandwiches I’ve had in a long time, perhaps one of the worst ever. It was messy, tasteless, and dry as a bone.
Fortunately, I don’t think Katie could hear my gagging and dry coughing over the radio. Upon choking down the final bites - one does need nourishment - I considered giving her my honest assessment of her lunch.
Instead, I thanked her and focused on the road while trying to massage the final bits down my esophagus.
Just outside of Balladonia, you pass a sign marking the beginning of the 90 Mile Straight, ‘Australia’s longest straight road’, according to the sign. Nearby, 150 kilometres or so to the north, lies a rail line that runs east-to-west through the Nullarbor. A section of it touts itself as being the longest straight section of railway in the world, at 478 kilometers (297 miles) long.
These are significant features of the Nullarbor, and achieve the distinction of being both impressive and quite boring at the same time. Their main role, I suppose, is to emphasize the vast, featureless emptiness of the place, something they do an excellent job of.
What a road! Well paved it was, rolling through the dry scrub that is typical of the ‘Australian’ outback. The stretch after Belladonia was littered with bodies, much like the Tanami or Oodnadatta tracks where we frequently encountered wrecked cars in various states of burnt-out disrepair.
These weren’t the bodies of abandoned or wrecked autos, however. These were kangaroos. They were everywhere.
It reminded me of the scene from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfus is driving up to the Devil's Tower and the dead bodies of cows are scattered across the fields alongside the road.
It’s hypnotic, the road, how it forever faded to a pinpoint ahead of you in the distance, never changing. Losing your thoughts or your mind could partially explain all of the carnage along the roadside.
We bought some diesel at the roadhouse at Madura, but did not stay long. It was getting late and we wanted to push on as far as we could before we lost the sun. We knew, as was evident from the animals on the road, that you did not want to be out driving at dusk or into the night when kangaroos or camels would wander out onto the road to challenge you to a game of chicken.
We spent most of the drive listening to an audio book called Cuckoo Song. The scenery was little distraction, so It turned out to be a good day to pound out some miles - close to 900k today, nearly 12 hours.
We pulled off as the sun was setting, just west of the town of Eucla, a short drive from the border between West and South Australia. The Nullarbor being a bit of a wasteland, there are numerous rest areas, homemade turn offs, old quarries and gravel pits that have since been abandoned and are used by travelers looking for a place to pull off for the night.
Katie picked one called Hearder Hill, which we saw as a dusty track that disappeared into the bush. Within moments you emerge from the bush into a large flat sandy area, surrounded by trees and sheltered from the road. It was empty, and perfect.
Perfect, however it did not have toilets.
Bush poop tracking
Oscar - 4 (plus 1 hole dug for a wet fart)
Katie - 2
Henry - 1
Luke - 0
After dinner and other pleasantries that required a shovel, we sat in the near perfect darkness, staring up at stars that were as bright and vivid as anywhere else we’d been. The road was quiet, though not gone from our minds. The fire danger had subsided. Aside from a little smoke we could see along one section of the road near Balladonia, we seemed to have outrun the bushfire and I could return to driving the speed limit the next day.
We were all tired. 12 hours on the road will do that to you. Then I thought about Eyre grinding through the same portion of the Nullarbor for four months, riding half dead horses and having no water to drink, and that made me feel a little better about things, even the sandwich I had for lunch.
The boys were tired too, Henry probably the most of the two. All day he’d been complaining about how both his arms hurt, though he didn’t know why.
Hearing this, Oscar said, “Henry’s like a plant that’s gotten too big for its pot and we need to move him to a new pot.”
Maybe so, but not tomorrow. We still had half of the Nullarbor to tackle.