Wrong Way Round

by Lorna Hendry

  About the author

  Lorna Hendry worked in graphic design for many years until she unplugged herself from her computer to travel around Australia with her husband and their two young sons. On their return to Melbourne she changed careers and is now a freelance writer, editor and proofreader, and teaches Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University in Melbourne. She lives in Fitzroy, but is still homesick for the Kimberley.

  For James, Oscar and Dylan

  Contents

  Title Page

  On the road

  School vs Pokémon

  Exploring the Coorong

  Climbing St Mary Peak

  Alone at Lake Eyre

  New friends and hot springs

  Easter at Uluṟu

  Camping underground at Coober Pedy

  Crossing the Nullarbor

  Swimming with whale sharks

  Discovering the Kimberley

  A Darwin break

  Shortcut to The Tip

  Time off in Mission Beach

  Back to the Kimberley

  Helicopter crash at Imintji

  Life on the Gibb

  Moving to Lombadina

  Whales and crocodiles

  Back to the east coast

  Home at last

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  ‘This is the most important thing we have’, said James, waving a small piece of black plastic in my face. It was a 12-volt triple adaptor. One end had a plug designed to fit into the battery of our brand-new camper trailer, the other end had three outlets. Six months before I hadn’t known such a thing existed. Now I was nearly as excited about it as he was.

  ‘We can put the fridge in the kitchen and run two lights off the battery at the same time’, James said. ‘That way we don’t have to leave the fridge in the back of the car all the time. Like this.’

  He plugged in the camping lights. They flickered, then shone a weak yellow light into the afternoon sun. He plugged the fridge in and we listened for the hum as it started up. Nothing happened. James peered at the plug and tugged on it. It refused to budge. He pulled harder and it broke off in his hand, the business end of the plug firmly wedged in the adaptor.

  We ended up hauling the fully stocked fridge into the back of the car, and James spent fifteen minutes prying the plug out with a screwdriver.

  It was an early lesson that when you are camping things often don’t go to plan.

  We were on our first day of a trip around Australia with our two sons, Oscar, eight, and Dylan, six. We had quit our jobs, rented out our house, enrolled the kids in Distance Education and left home to have an adventure.

  It wasn’t the first time we had been camping. It was the second. We had done a practice run at Hanging Rock with a borrowed tent a few months earlier. Just before dusk, after the rangers had locked the gates behind the last of the day visitors, we set up the tent, laid out our mattresses and sleeping bags, and settled in for a night under the stars. We drank wine around a fire with the rest of the campers and went on a guided bushwalk in the dark to look for owls, most of whom had sensibly deserted their usual spots before we tramped down the track with forty overexcited kids. The whole experience would have been better if we had taken pillows, torches, a gas bottle that actually fitted our stove and some bottles of drinking water. As a training run, though, it did the job.

  When we left home for real, we had an 80-litre water tank, self-inflating mattresses, a two-burner stove with a gas bottle that fitted and a stove-top coffee maker. We also had a laptop; a fold-up toilet seat; four packs of cards; an axe; four books of maps; a logbook to record our mileage and fuel consumption; an iPod with 6000 songs, a complete set of Spanish lessons and six Harry Potter books read by Stephen Fry loaded onto it; a 20-metre extension cord; a barbecue plate; a bottle of vodka in an unbreakable container; and a kitchen sink.

  That first day we had driven 233 kilometres from Melbourne to Port Campbell on the Great Ocean Road. Not a huge distance, but we weren’t in a hurry; we had a whole year to make our way around the country. That day we spent more time putting up our tent than we had spent in the car, even including an unscheduled stop at the base of the West Gate Bridge. We had to pull up to calm Dylan down, who was sobbing loudly in the back. The reality of our trip only hit him when he saw the bridge and realised we were about to drive out of Melbourne and not come back. James and I had spent three years planning this, but it wasn’t until that moment that it dawned on Dylan that he wouldn’t see any of his friends for a year.

  To cheer him up, James let both boys climb onto the roof rack and ride on top of the car while he drove it slowly around the car park of the petrol station. I was pretty sure that was illegal but I didn’t want to have an argument with James in the first half-hour. I fussed around on the ground, terrified that they would fall off and our trip would begin with a day at the hospital having broken legs set in plaster. But they held on tight and Dylan completely forgot to be sad about what he was leaving behind. I bundled them back into the car and when we reached the top of the West Gate all four of us cheered the start of our adventure.

  Setting up the camper trailer wasn’t as easy as we had expected. Despite being given a demonstration when we bought it, and having a practice go before we left, our first argument was about which way we should park the trailer on the site. We tried to keep our voices down and the swearing to a minimum, but the elderly couple camped opposite us vanished into their van as we bickered. I stopped arguing when I worked out that I had no idea which way the tent would be facing once it was set up.

  After unfolding the canvas from the trailer, we realised that we had lost the sheet of paper with the set-up instructions. James disappeared into the tent and, after half an hour of swearing and clanging of poles, he emerged – sweaty and flushed – and we had a fairly square tent. We laid out the beds, swung out the kitchen unit on the trailer’s tailgate, connected the gas, put out the tables and chairs and looked around for someone to show off to.

  No other campers were around. Neither were Oscar and Dylan.

  In celebration of our new freedom, we had told the boys to ‘go and play’ while we set up. Taking advantage of this unusually relaxed parenting, they had climbed to the top of the cliff at the end of the beach. Now they were standing on the edge, 80 metres above the crashing waves, waving frantically at us.

  ‘Help! Help!’

  James and I raced up the old wooden stairs as fast as we could. I couldn’t believe that we had been so stupid. Just one day out of the city, and we had forgotten how dangerous the world could be.

  ‘Look at us! Look how high we are! Did we scare you?’

  The boys – who were, of course, perfectly safe – laughed as we fell at their feet, heaving for breath, too tired and relieved to even swipe at them.

  That night I wrote in my brand-new diary that the boys had played tennis and football, jumped waves, dug holes in the sand, climbed cliffs, rode their pushbikes fast over speed humps, walked to the shop for milk by themselves, written a letter home, shared chocolate and found a dead penguin washed up on the beach. James recorded that we ate spaghetti bolognaise for dinner. Exhausted, we all fell into bed at the same time.

  The next morning I woke up slowly and peacefully. For the first time in years I hadn’t been jolted awake by an alarm, a crying baby or the boys’ demands for breakfast. The light coming in through the canvas was soft and gentle, I was warm and comfortable, and I had absolutely nothing to get up for. The boys were both curled up on their sides, reading. Dylan looked up and smiled at me, then went back to his book.

  I climbed down from the bed, put on the same clothes I had worn the day before, and went outside. The sun had just risen. The sky was clear and the air was cr
isp and cool. As the kettle boiled noisily on the stove, I opened up the big box that held all our kitchen supplies to find the tea.

  The entire box was crawling with tiny black ants.

  ‘I’m going home’, I said.

  But, of course, I couldn’t. Our home belonged to a family from Canada for the next year. They had seen our ad on the internet and decided our house was exactly what they wanted. Their daughters were the same age as our sons, they would rent our family car, and they were happy to look after the cat.

  When the Canadians found us, it was obvious that we were actually going to go through with this crazy idea of taking a year off to go camping. We’d been talking for years about the frustrations of juggling work commitments and not being able to spend enough time with the boys. Our lives had become a mad cycle of spending money more quickly than we could earn it. There was nothing to look forward to except a few weeks of holidays that we had to share out between us to cover the long summer break when school and child care were closed.

  ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ I’d asked James one night after we had put the boys, then aged two and four, to bed. ‘If we’re going to work this hard, let’s make it be for a reason.’

  ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought it would be great to take the boys around Australia.’

  This wasn’t entirely unexpected. After being asked to leave his private school in Year 11, James found a job, with the help of his father, as a jackaroo on a cattle station near the Northern Territory border. James was sixteen years old when he got off the bus in Mount Isa with his hair dyed jet black. The ringers on the station took one look at him and decided he was a wanker. But he learned to ride a horse, and the horse taught him to muster cattle, and after a few years of wandering the country he had come back to Melbourne with a love of the outback.

  To me, this part of James’s life was just something that made him different from most other people I knew. But as he talked about it again that night, in the context of taking our children to see those massive empty spaces, I realised that he had never stopped thinking about those years. He hated the idea of his sons growing up in the inner city, where the biggest outdoor space they knew was the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

  I was a city girl. My family had migrated from Scotland in the mid-70s when I was seven. I had never really felt at home in the suburbs where we had lived for all my school years, but I had fallen in love with Fitzroy the first day I set foot in it. That was in 1984. James and I now lived next door to the terrace house that I had shared with friends more than twenty years before. But my mother, Nannette, lived in Darwin, so I knew a little bit about northern Australia from visiting her. I had driven from Alice Springs to Darwin, I’d been to Uluru and Kakadu and seen the Devils Marbles. And I wasn’t a complete camping novice: I’d been on a school trip to the Flinders Ranges when I was fourteen.

  That night we decided we would travel for at least a year. We agreed we needed to quit our jobs and not have a definite return date. We wanted to feel free to wander the country and act on whims. It seemed sensible to wait a few years, so Dylan could finish his first year of school before we went. He would have basic reading and writing skills that we could build on during a year of homeschooling.

  We also needed time to save money. We would have to spend a lot on equipment and a car. James was adamant that we would be bush camping. Back then I let that slide, deciding it was a minor detail that we could negotiate at a later date. I wasn’t naive enough to think we could stay in hotels the whole way around the country, but living in a tent wasn’t going to happen. I planned to talk him round to something more suitable closer to the time.

  At the end of that night I made James promise not to tell anyone about our plans. In case we didn’t do it. In case we got too scared to throw in our jobs and run away. In case we started thinking like sensible grown-ups instead of impulsive teenagers heading to Europe with $1000 and a backpack.

  I don’t know why I was worried. James had recently gone out at four o’clock on a rainy, cold Melbourne dawn to strip naked and lie on the wet bank of the Yarra with hundreds of other people for a photo shoot by the American photographer Spencer Tunick. Exhilarated, he had been talking about the shoot later that day over a coffee at our local cafe.

  ‘I thought about doing that’, said our neighbour. His wife shot him a withering look.

  ‘That’s the difference between you and James’, she said. ‘You thought about it but he actually got out of bed and did it.’

  Although she might have been a bit harsh on her husband, she did have a point. Once there is an idea lodged in his head, James can be guaranteed to follow it through. It might not be perfectly well thought out or planned – that’s my job – but he’ll get it done.

  This wasn’t the first time we had run away from our jobs and home. Seven years earlier, James had been working for a courier company. He spent his days sitting in a glass alcove the size of a phone box and his nights dreaming of radio calls and missed deliveries, but what he really wanted to do was work in theatre.

  ‘Do some research’, I said one day. ‘If that’s what you really want, at least spend a few hours finding out how to make it happen.’

  The next year he was accepted into the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and we moved to Sydney. Three months later, I was pregnant with Oscar.

  I can’t remember when I slept, but I still have vivid memories of long afternoons lying on the grass in parks, hours spent pushing the pram up and down Sydney’s hills, and taking turns with another new mother to swim laps in the local pool. I remember James arriving home to our tiny flat on his motorbike for an hour of feeding and bathing the baby before tearing off again for an evening performance.

  When he had got through the second year at NIDA and we had survived our first year of being parents, we decided we were so good at it that we should do it again. Dylan was born a few weeks after we returned to Melbourne. For me, that year was a nightmare of sleep deprivation and borderline madness. James had launched himself into the world of theatre. He was never out of work and hardly ever home. Dylan wouldn’t sleep for more than two hours at a time, regularly waking three or four times every night. He and I even spent a week in a special hospital ward, where they put him in a sealed soundproof room at night and made me go to group sessions with other exhausted and depressed mothers.

  After one particularly bad night, I drove across town to take Oscar to a Wiggles concert. I was so tired that I couldn’t remember which way to turn the steering wheel as I reversed, and I scraped the side of another woman’s car as I tried to get out of the parking spot. As she shouted at me from high up in her shining 4WD, I clenched my fists and cried.

  The years passed. Dylan learned to sleep, Oscar started school and I was offered a full-time job. The money was too good to refuse but the juggling got harder. The more we earned, the more we spent. The weekend that I sat down and drew up a timetable for the month ahead to make sure there was someone – not always one of us – to pick up the boys every afternoon, feed them, bath them and put them to bed, I knew it had all gone wrong somewhere.

  Looking back, it’s not surprising that all it took was one crazy idea to get us planning our escape. Three years was a long time to wait, but we started putting money away each fortnight. Once a month we’d have a planning night, which usually just involved eating chocolate while we browsed the internet, reading about places we wanted to visit.

  We bought a map of Australia and started to think about what route we would take. We drew a route on the map in pink highlighter and stuck it on the kitchen wall to remind us that we were really going. We broke the news to the boys even though they had no concept of the distance and time we were talking about. And, despite our vow of secrecy, within a month we had told everyone we knew. We tried not to talk about it too much but, as everyone around us started renovating their crumbling inner-city homes and spent entire evenings discussing tiles and taps, we found ourselves launc
hing into monologues that started, ‘Well, when we go on our trip …’

  We didn’t do much research. We avoided having too much information in case it turned out that this was a stupid idea and we should resign ourselves to going to work every day, like everyone else. One day a friend asked me what we were taking: a tent or a campervan?

  We were still a bit stuck on that. I had assumed we would have a campervan with beds that folded out of either end. This idea was based entirely on the drawings in a children’s book we had bought the boys to get them excited about the trip. James thought camper-vans were nothing more than tricked-up caravans. He was determined that this was going to be a camping trip, not a caravanning one. We would have tents so we could go anywhere we wanted, no matter how rough the roads were. We were at an impasse. My friend’s husband rang a few days later and said that what we needed was an off-road camper trailer.

  I didn’t know what that was, so that night I looked them up on the internet. Basically, a camper trailer is a tent that is permanently attached to a heavy-duty trailer. The inside of the trailer could be used for storage and a kitchen was usually attached to the tailgate. When the tent was unfolded, a queen-size mattress would fit on the top of the trailer, and two single mattresses could go on the floor of the tent. We made a trip to a couple of showrooms the next weekend and a few weeks later we ordered our camper trailer from the first place we visited.

  Before it could be built, we had to buy a car. The trailers were custom-made to match the car’s width and clearance. Ideally, they would also have the same wheels so the spares could be used for both the car and the trailer.

  We had a car in mind, but it already had an owner. One of our best friends had a LandCruiser that he had driven all around the country for a year of birdwatching. He was back in Melbourne, so we decided he didn’t need it anymore. His new girlfriend agreed with us. His car had already been to most of the places we wanted to go and had survived. We wouldn’t need to drive around second-hand car yards and we wouldn’t need to pretend we knew anything about 4WDs. It would be a lot easier for everyone if our friend sold his 4WD to us. He eventually gave in, on the condition that he would get the first option to buy it back when we came home.