Wrong Way Round

by Lorna Hendry

  Our site was a small clearing in the bush. It had its own fireplace with a blackened metal barbecue plate and a rusty tap with a ‘Not for Drinking’ sign on it. This felt like real camping. We had no power, no drinking water and nowhere to do any emergency shopping.

  After we got the tent up, James took the boys over to the nearby pine plantation to collect wood and I had a look around. I was relieved to find a wooden toilet and shower block but, as I wandered around the deserted campground, the only sounds were my feet crunching on the gravel, birds chirping and an occasional rustle in the grass. I hadn’t been alone like this for a very long time. On the rare times that I was at home on my own, I usually had the radio on and there were always people walking past outside.

  I couldn’t remember when I had become so used to having company. As an only child, I had spent a lot of time alone. It had never bothered me at all. One of my strongest memories was of coming home from a school camp overwhelmed by a week of constantly having other people around. I had gone for a walk in the suburban streets, perched on a low brick wall and sat there for an hour until the tumult inside me settled down and I felt like myself again.

  Now being on my own in the bush was spooking me, so I went to find the boys. It was easy; I just followed the sound of the axe. James had decided to cut down a dead tree on the edge of the plantation. The boys were ecstatic. They were running around, finding other trees and begging him to chop those down too. We took turns dragging the butchered tree back to our site and built our first campfire of the trip.

  It was a big fire, ridiculously big for cooking a few sausages. But for James, this was a symbol of our new freedom. A fire was what camping was all about, he told us. We slumped back in our chairs after dinner, the soles of our filthy runners melting in the heat, toasting marshmallows and watching satellites spin across the sky.

  That night there was a heavy blanket of silence hanging over us. It would have pushed me down into a deep sleep if it hadn’t been punctuated by the sounds of scampering wildlife and the faint roar of logging trucks. It was unsettling. And very different from the sounds of the city, muffled by walls and curtains, that had lulled me to sleep in our old life. I tried very hard not to imagine a crazed logger stalking down the track from the pine forest, trailing his chainsaw, seeking revenge for the theft of a tree.

  Early in the morning I was woken by the scratchy sound of tiny scuttling feet. A shadow play of morning greetings was being acted out on the roof of our tent by a family of tiny birds. As I watched them hopping about on the canvas above me I felt faintly ridiculous about being scared the night before. We were only about 300 kilometres from Melbourne, not exactly the heart of Deliverance country. I resolved to toughen up.

  I caught my first fish that day. It was a tiny little bream that I wasn’t able to touch. Some instinct deep inside my brain wouldn’t let my hands make contact with it. It was just like the time I had accidentally let the chickens out of their coop at the childcare centre. After chasing them around the garden and cornering them, I had been confused to find that I was physically unable to pick them up. Now when I tried to grab the fish, something more primitive was again overriding the order.

  This time, James was there to deal with the fish for me. He twisted its slick thrashing body around as he worked the hook out of its cheek, then held it in the water until it wriggled out of his grip and swam off. Oscar turned out to have a knack for casting but was squeamish about using bait. Dylan was happy to stick worms on his hook and took great delight in stabbing the one fish we decided to keep for dinner.

  When we got tired of fishing we went on a tour of Princess Margaret Rose Cave. The limestone formations were beautiful. It was amazing to think that underneath the ground was this huge chasm full of twisted pillars and globular mounds. In the yellow light, the rocks looked like the Mateus bottles dripping with melted wax that my mother used to drag out for dinner parties in the 70s.

  The guide told us about the young man who found the cave in 1936. He had lowered himself down a shaft to explore it, with only a candle, a box of matches and a ball of string to help him find his way back out of the darkness. Later, he and his friends carted down kegs of beer and threw parties where they played spoons on the stalactites.

  Over the next few days we settled into a routine of lazy breakfasts, half-hearted attempts at school, then a few hours of canoeing or fishing followed by illegal tree felling and bonfire building. James taught us to play spotlight. The boys loved skulking around the bush in the dark but I hated standing on my own at dark, waiting for them to sneak up behind my back and shout in my ear. I was too freaked out to enjoy it and begged for the game to stop after a few rounds.

  The nights were bitter. Every morning we woke up to find our blankets wet and cold. Water vapour from our breath had spent the night collecting on the canvas above us, condensing in the freezing air and then dripping back down onto our bedding. The days were getting warmer, though. It was so hot that the boys overcame their nervousness about brown water and threw themselves off the old wooden jetty and into the murky Glenelg River.

  When the long weekend arrived it brought more campers with their boats, generators, late-night drinking sessions and, curiously, a plague of flies that droned and buzzed around our heads. We discovered that flies really like being inside tents. If they couldn’t get in, they would hang out under the roof of the awning. Shouting at them, snapping tea towels and bashing the canvas awning with brooms didn’t bother them at all.

  When night fell, they did a quick handover to the mosquitoes. ‘Four humans. Two big, two small. The small ones have exposed legs and ears. The big ones use repellent, but you can usually get a nip in on their hands while they’re doing the dishes.’ Then they went to sleep under the awning. That’s when we could flick them and move them on, buying ourselves half an hour of fly-free time in the morning.

  We decided it was time to kick the footy over our first state border. It took a while to find a sign that declared we were driving out of Victoria and into South Australia, but when we did we all had a go at booting the ball from one state to the other and decided to make it a tradition. Our next stop was Robe on South Australia’s Limestone Coast, a popular holiday destination famous for its 12-kilometre beach, fresh seafood and excellent local wine. We knew all that, but we didn’t know about the prevailing winds and we had booked a site right above the beach. James and I battled violent gusts for an hour to get the tent up, shouting at each other and the boys the whole time. When it was finally secured, we had to leave the caravan park just to get out of the gale.

  I decided we should treat ourselves to some local crayfish. We asked for directions at the caravan park office and walked for an hour in the tearing wind. When we made it to the warehouse in the back blocks of Robe’s industrial estate, it was closed.

  When we got back, the tent had blown down. James put it back up, cursing the wind as it hurled sand into his eyes and mouth and hair. It was too windy to cook. The gas stove wouldn’t stay alight and, even when I hunched over the pot with a towel over it and my head to shield it from the wind, the water refused to boil.

  That night our beds were full of sand, the tent poles creaked and groaned as they bent in the gale and the canvas flapped noisily, but the next morning was calm and peaceful. The sea glistened under the clear blue sky. I shook the sand out of the sheets and we spent the next four days in paradise. James fished off the rocks every night and caught four more sharks. The kids and I didn’t bother to get out of bed to have a look; we just mumbled vague congratulations through the flywire and went back to sleep. We worked out when the warehouse was open and ate fresh crayfish two nights in a row.

  One day we drove out along the Old Coorong Road. All I knew about the Coorong was that one of my favourite movies when I was a kid, Storm Boy, had been filmed there. I was expecting wetlands and pelicans but instead there were only salt lakes that stretched for miles, bordered by sand dunes on one side and stubby scrub on the other. The
re was no sign of any birdlife. Long years of drought had transformed the region. Once there must have been mudflats teeming with life, but now everything around us was dry and quiet and still. We stopped and walked out onto one of the lakes. The boys didn’t believe that they were walking on salt until we made them taste it.

  James wanted to test out the car on the dunes. I didn’t really see the point. We knew what was on the other side. The road had already taken us within metres of the ocean at a spot where the dunes were smaller and further apart. Huge waves pounded into shore with such power that I banned any idea of swimming. The stories of shipwrecks I had been reading out loud from our guidebooks came alive for us as the sand shuddered under our feet with each breaking wave.

  But there was a track over a dune and James wanted to see what our car could do. I shuffled through the mess of books and maps and paper at my feet, looking for the notes from the 4WD course I had gone on before we left.

  ‘I can’t find them. But I think I remember most of it. You need to have low tyre pressure so the weight of the car is spread over a bigger surface area. Drive in existing tracks, where the sand is compacted and firmer. Go straight up, not on an angle, and don’t change gears as you go. You have to keep the momentum going, that’s what gets you up the dune. And you’re meant to have a flag at the front of the car so people coming the other way can see you.’

  James pointed out that we had only seen one other vehicle since we had turned off onto the dirt road. He thought a flag was unnecessary. I thought the whole idea was silly and pointless. He argued that it was important to see what the car was capable of before we got into more remote areas. He got cross, I got upset, and the kids sat in the back reading their books. I started to panic about the fact that we had no spare drinking water or food. James took this as proof that I was being hysterical and off we went, up the dune.

  Halfway up, anyway. The wheels dug into the sand and the car shuddered and stalled. He reversed down and got out to let down the tyres. On the second attempt we made it up the dune to whoops of delight from the kids and a triumphant grin from James.

  From the top we could see that this was just one in a series of sandhills before the beach. There was very little flat ground between the dunes – it was like a miniature roller-coaster made of sand. The boys were in heaven. Suddenly the car was fun.

  We made it over four dunes but we couldn’t get up the fifth. When we trudged over the last hump on foot and slid down to the beach, we saw that we had been lucky. There wasn’t enough room between the final dune and the sea to turn the car around. I wandered along the edge of the water for a while, but James was fidgety and on edge. The boys had taken off down the beach and he shouted at them to get back immediately.

  ‘What’s your problem? They have to run off a bit of steam after all that. I think we scared them a bit.’

  He confessed that, going down one of the dunes, it had seemed much steeper than the rest. When we didn’t make it up the last hill, he realised we might not be able to get back up the steep one. We gathered up the boys. After inching the car round and round in the dip between the sandhills until it faced the other direction, we took stock.

  ‘I’ve got no mobile coverage,’ I said, checking my phone. James’s phone was usually more reliable than mine but he hadn’t brought it with him today. ‘If we get stuck in the sand, we’ll just dig under the wheels and put down those planks of wood we’ve got and drive over them.’

  ‘I forgot to put the wood and the shovel in the back before we left the campground.’

  We had no recovery gear and no way to contact anyone if we got stuck. We had no food, very little water and we had only seen one car out here all day. It was 40 kilometres to the road and it was already early afternoon. The boys had no warm clothes. We did have an EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon), but I didn’t think this was a good enough reason to summon the armed forces. The EPIRB was a bit like Susan’s horn in Narnia: only to be used in times of desperate need or Aslan might get really, really cross.

  ‘We better not get stuck then.’

  James gunned the engine and it screamed in protest as the car powered up the dune. The boys screeched with delight as they bounced around in the back. I gripped the dashboard and leaned forward. I felt as if I was pushing us up the hill with all the psychic power I could muster.

  The tyres slipped on the sand and my heart dropped into my gut but the car recovered and we reached the crest and were up and over the dune. The next hill was smaller and the next one was firmer and the last one, the tricky first one, turned out to be easy and we were back on the dirt, laughing.

  I apologised to James for freaking out and he promised to put all the recovery gear on the roof of the car. We pumped up the tyres and drove back to Robe where we watched a pod of dolphins and ate crayfish for dinner again.

  We had been on the road for more than two weeks, but we had only gone a little over 500 kilometres. At this rate, it would take us years to get around the country. A friend in Melbourne, after learning of our itinerary, had taken James aside for a quiet word.

  ‘Mate, I reckon you’re going about this all wrong. For the first month, you’re only going to be a day’s drive from Melbourne. If it was me, I’d get her across the Nullarbor quick smart so she can’t nick off home.’

  We had a date, though. We were meeting my aunt, Jane, and Nannette at Port Willunga on the Fleurieu Peninsula, that point of the coastline south of Adelaide that kicks towards Kangaroo Island. We were celebrating our year of turning forty, fifty and sixty. Nannette was flying down from Darwin and getting a lift with Jane and her daughter to the house we had rented for the weekend. When we arrived in Port Willunga there was no sign of them. I rang Jane’s mobile.

  ‘Where are you?’ Hysterical laughter rang out from the phone.

  ‘We’re not exactly sure’, said Nannette when she could speak. ‘Jane got lost.’ There was more laughter in the background. ‘We followed the signs to Willunga, but I think that’s a different place.’

  ‘Bloody hell’, said James. ‘You and your family. Honestly.’

  I glared at him, but he was completely right. None of us can read a map without twisting it around until it faces the direction we are going and we are all perfectly capable of getting lost on roads we have driven for years.

  ‘I think we’re nearly there. We can see the water.’

  ‘Give me the phone’, said James. He guided them in. ‘The sea should be on your left now. That’s the side the passenger sits on.’

  The car pulled up and they fell out, clutching their sides and doubling over as the giggles got the better of them.

  ‘At least my family can laugh about it’, I said to James, who was watching with raised eyebrows. ‘Yours would be all grumpy and arguing about whose fault it was and the whole weekend would be stuffed.’

  Our weekend wasn’t stuffed. We slept in proper beds for the first time in weeks, shared a bottle of Grange Hermitage that had been bouncing around in the back of our car, argued constantly and laughed about nothing, as families do.

  In Adelaide the boys discovered the joy of the BIG4 caravan park chain. This one had two swimming pools, a jumping pillow and a games room. It was so good, Jane said, that a friend of hers booked in for a week every school holidays, even though she only lived a few blocks away. I felt like I could have stayed a week too, but so far this trip had been too tame. We were up for adventure and the outback was calling.

  Chapter Four

  Before we headed into the Red Centre, James had a bit more fishing to do. The east coast of the Yorke Peninsula was said to be a holiday paradise. We weren’t on holiday, we were having an adventure, so we drove down the west coast instead.

  Point Turton is one of the best fishing spots in South Australia so it wasn’t really surprising that the caravan park was packed. The sign on the office door said ‘Back in ten minutes’ so we wandered around the park to check it out. This was a new tactic we had adopted after rea
lising that caravan park managers liked to put us very close to toilet blocks and very far away from swimming pools, playgrounds and other families. Given the chance, they also liked to give us sites with lots of concrete and very little grass, even though we always told them that we had to peg the tent down. We couldn’t work it out. Perhaps it was because our camper trailer was still so clean, or maybe we had an invisible sign over our heads saying ‘city folk’. It had turned us into more assertive caravan parkers, though. Whenever we could, we drove around and picked out our preferred spot before checking in. If that wasn’t an option, we would park on the allocated site and then look at the alternatives. Often we would go back to the office and say, ‘Do you reckon we could go on 23A instead?’ This time the only available spot seemed to be squeezed between the toilets and a fibro shack.

  The manager, who was wearing a very short towelling bathrobe and plastic thongs, spotted us and wandered over to tell us the park was fully booked. I fought hard to pay attention and keep my gaze from straying below the loosely tied belt on his robe as he suggested we try the next caravan park along the coast.

  Forty kilometres of unsealed road later we got to Corny Point. A sign on the fence of the property next to the caravan park warned ‘Keep Out. Trespassers will be shot.’ There was no beach in sight. Even the kids, looking up briefly from their books, were worried.

  ‘Are we staying here?’ Dylan asked nervously.

  ‘No way’, said James.

  I hunted at my feet for the map. ‘We’re about 50 kilometres from Innes National Park. It says “Spectacular coastal landscapes, a diversity of wildlife habitats and a wide range of recreational opportunities.”’