Wrong Way Round

by Lorna Hendry

  It did look beautiful, though. The pictures I had seen showed sand dunes rolling for miles under a bright cloudless sky. Tiny white wildflowers somehow managed to grow amongst the ripples of the bright red sand, and lizards left tracks that scuttled across the face of the dunes and disappeared into clumps of pale spinifex. One solitary track carved out a straight line between the dunes and then went up and over each one, as if a child had pushed a toy car from point A to point B with a single-minded disregard for the terrain. But it also looked very lonely. And lonely was not a place I was eager to return to in a hurry.

  Dylan wanted to send the salt he had collected at Lake Eyre back to his classmates. As James packed up the tent, the boys and I went to the roadhouse, which doubled as the post office. Oscar stayed outside to kick dirt and Dylan and I went inside.

  A group of campers came in, bursting with enthusiasm for shopping. I watched as they scanned the souvenirs and examined the prices on the boxes of Barbecue Shapes. As they raced around, looking for something to buy, they reminded me very strongly of home. I decided to test my theory.

  When Dylan asked how long the package would take to arrive, I answered a fraction too loudly. ‘Maybe two or three days to Adelaide, then one to the post office in Melbourne, then another day to get to FITZROY.’

  A head snapped around. The woman examined Dylan and me, then looked outside at Oscar, who was trailing a stick in the dirt.

  ‘Is that Oscar?’

  I was shocked by my powers. But I had been right: these were my people.

  ‘He went to kindergarten with my twins. That’s them over there. Bill and Ted. Remember?’

  I did, vaguely, but out here casual acquaintances were practically family. A vague memory was more than enough. Within ten minutes I was back at the tent.

  ‘James, you’ll never guess who I met in the shop. Bill and Ted’s mum. Remember them? Of course you do. Those twins from kinder, the blond ones. Anyway, they’re travelling with a group’ – I had to rush through this part, James had developed the lone travellers’ disdain for tour groups – ‘but it’s just them and some friends and a man who knows the area. They’re going to Dalhousie today. Won’t it be nice for the boys to have kids to play with!’

  James glanced up at me and continued to roll up the tent ropes. ‘I’m not barging in on a tour group.’

  ‘It’s not really a tour group. And we were going there anyway so it just means we’ll have people to talk to tonight.’ I was developing a flounce. ‘For a change. Besides, they said that last night they met another family who were doing a trip like us and they might turn up as well.’

  As we bounced along the road to Dalhousie Springs, my spirits were as jaunty as the car. The road was a barely discernible imprint of two tyre tracks running through a field of gibber rocks the size of baseballs. James said the only thing distinguishing the track from the landscape around it was that the rocks were marginally smaller.

  Dalhousie is famous for its thermal springs. Water seeps underground somewhere in Queensland, travels slowly down through layers of earth and is warmed by the heat from the earth’s core. Millions of years later, it emerges back through the crust. When it comes out, it can be as hot as 40°C. Driving through a field of rocks, it was impossible to imagine there was any water out here until we passed a grove of palm trees. The Afghani men who had helped to build the first railway line had planted date palms wherever they found water.

  Dalhousie Springs turned out to be a beautifully maintained campground with running water, showers and a brand-new toilet block.

  ‘Flush!’ reported Dylan happily.

  We raced for the river and hit the million-year-old hot brown water with shouts of delight. Within seconds, I could see the boys’ faces turning bright pink and felt a deep lethargy leaching into my legs. I knew we should get out and drink some water – this heat was the very last thing we needed – but it was so nice in there. If I stayed very still the water around me seemed to cool slightly. It was only when I moved that my arms and legs tracked through warmer water and beads of sweat formed on my forehead.

  Soon the water was full of bodies. Kids with floaties strapped to their arms splashed happily. Adolescent boys discovered the thick black mud on the riverbed and painted their arms and faces with it. Bearded men reclined in inflated inner tubes, balancing cold tinnies on the dusty black rubber. Pudgy women slid quickly out of their sarongs and into the murky water.

  ‘What do you reckon the rich folk are doing?’ someone said.

  We all laughed. We were all four days of solid driving on terrible roads away from any major city. This was our reward and it was priceless.

  Wandering back to our tent we saw a car drive in, loaded up with surfboards and towing a van and a boat. We waved casually to Sue and Tim, trying not to show how excited we were at the prospect of finally making some friends on this trip. We gestured towards our campsite and let them know that we had no problem if they felt like camping next to us and pretended not to care as they slowly circled the campground and then made their way back to where we had set up.

  When I worked out that they were the family that the other people had met, I was a bit disappointed. I had thought maybe there were more families out here. Sue agreed; they had expected to meet more people as well.

  It was actually so rare that when we did meet another family, the conversation inevitably came around to the topic of why we were out here doing this, and why no-one else was. So far, there seemed to be one common factor: just about everyone had experienced the early death of a parent.

  Between us, James and I had lost three parents in the space of seven years. James’s father had died from cancer when James was nineteen. When I was twenty-five, my father collapsed in his office during an asthma attack and died at his colleagues’ feet. My maternal grandmother died the same day on the other side of the world, and later that year my father’s mother had a heart attack. Two years later, James’s mother was gone, also from cancer. James and I had always known that we couldn’t count on being around to see our sons grow up to become adults.

  I floated my theory with Sue. She saw my point, but their reasons for travelling were different. When she and Tim were in their early twenties, years away from even thinking about children, they had met European backpackers in Darwin who had told them about places like Wave Rock and Ningaloo Reef and the Kimberley. They had vowed that, if they ever did have kids, they’d make sure they saw their own country before they started travelling overseas. This trip was the culmination of that promise.

  ‘Are you homeschooling?’ I asked her.

  Tim, out of sight under his van, snorted loudly and muttered something about a complete bloody nightmare. The four kids looked at each other and did a synchronised eye roll. They were in telepathic agreement that school was bad enough but school with your parents was worse.

  We swapped stories all afternoon. The kids’ words tumbled over each other as they argued about who had the right to tell particular tales and who had climbed the highest mountain or swum in the coldest water or endured the longest day’s drive. Our paths had crisscrossed for weeks. Sometimes we had camped in the same places just days apart. By the time the Fitzroy group rolled in with their tour leader, we didn’t even feel a pang of rejection as they set up on the other side of the campground.

  ‘They’re on a tour’, Sue said. ‘They’re nice, but real city folk. Not like you’, she added politely. My heart swelled.

  When the flies crawling on every inch of our exposed skin became unbearable, we went to join the other people in the hot springs. Sue and I were bobbing lethargically in the water when Tim came striding down the path with a huge grin on his face. He was dressed in boardies, dusty boots and had a green fly net draped over his face, and he was carrying a surfboard. He launched himself into the water with a whoop of joy and soon had kids climbing all over him.

  Later, I went to examine the toilet block, which was an elegant building with curved corrugated iron walls. A
s well as flush toilets and showers it had a laundry sink. It was being put to good use by a woman scrubbing out a sleeping bag.

  ‘Spew’, she said wearily.

  She told me she was travelling with her husband and their three kids, his two brothers, and their wives and kids. The men made an annual trek across the Simpson Desert and had decided to bring the families along for the ride this year. They had driven non-stop for three days to get here and were heading onto the desert at first light the next day.

  I mentioned that we had been out to Lake Eyre.

  ‘We thought about doing that’, she said. ‘We started down the Halligan Bay track, but we had to turn back. It was too rough.’

  We spent two days at Dalhousie, hanging out with the other families. The kids swapped books, taught each other new card games and ate their body weight in toasted marshmallows by the fire at night. James and Tim talked about cars and pored over maps, comparing routes to Western Australia. They had a different plan to us. They were heading straight to Alice Springs and then out past Uluru to drive to Western Australia on the Central Desert Road. We were going to Uluru next, and then making our way back down to cross the continent on the Nullarbor Plain. We all swallowed several flies a day, but it didn’t seem so bad when there were people around to laugh every time your sentence was cut short and you doubled over, choking and gagging.

  We told the Fitzroy group the best stories of our trip, and encouraged them to pass them on to everyone at home. Oscar and Dylan quickly realised that their adventures were deeply impressing the other kids.

  On the third day we drove out to Mount Dare Hotel, the last fuel stop for vehicles travelling across the desert to Queensland. We filled up, paying the highest price so far for our fuel. Inside the hotel, the kids huddled round a tiny laptop in disbelief that they had internet access. The men were just as incredulous about cold beer. Although it was technically still morning, stubbies were ordered.

  When James overheard someone complaining about the prices he gave a short lecture on the need for travellers to support these remote businesses so they could continue to provide a valuable service. He made his point by buying a slab of beer that cost even more than the diesel.

  That afternoon we said goodbye to Tim and Sue and the tour group and were soon kicking the footy from South Australia into the Northern Territory. As we drove I caught a glimpse of a small sign pointing to the Lambert Centre. Bored, I checked my books to see what it was. ‘The geographical centre of Australia’, they informed me.

  We had no idea what that meant, but it sounded suspiciously like a landmark. We had already decided that we would visit the western, northern, eastern and southern tips of the country. Lake Eyre was the lowest point and we were considering adding ‘climbing Mount Kosciuszko’ to our to-do list. Had we known there was an official centre as well, that would definitely have been on our agenda. We did a U-turn.

  The Lambert Centre, we decided half an hour later, was quite possibly the silliest monument in the country. It consisted of a flagpole that was a replica of the spire on top of Parliament House in Canberra, flying a tattered Australian flag. The pole was surrounded by a single length of light metal chain that was hung at knee height and supported by short metal poles that had been concreted into the ground. Inside the fence was a plaque, on which were engraved the exact latitude and longitude of Australia’s gravitational centre of gravity. Apparently if you balanced Australia on a pin at exactly this point it wouldn’t wobble.

  We stared at the plaque, failing to imagine the entire continent suspended on a pin, and then spotted an old radiator nailed to a wooden stump nearby. Inside it was a visitors book donated by the Victorian 4WD Club and a red pen. We echoed the comments already made.

  ‘Very cool. Stoked to be here. Lorna, James, Oscar and Dylan from Fitzroy.’

  Back on the main road, the smooth dirt track stretched out in front of us. Silver shimmered on the horizon. I blinked and shook my head but it was still there. I couldn’t watch it. It kept shifting under my gaze. I looked across to the bare plain beside us instead. When I turned back, it was still there. I looked across at James. He was hunched forward in the driver’s seat, squinting.

  ‘Can you see that too?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Do you think it’s the highway?’

  ‘No, that’s at least 40 kilometres away.’

  Within minutes we worked it out. ‘Boys, look! It’s the Ghan!’ The new passenger train from Adelaide to Darwin was stopped across the road.

  We slowed down, stopping just metres from the train, and got out of the car. James and I sat on the bonnet and waved at the people inside. They couldn’t get off, but being stationary was enough of a diversion that they had lined up along the heavily tinted windows of the carriages to look out at us. They seemed happy to be trapped. I imagined the cool, clean air they must be breathing inside their metal box. Two little girls in pretty dresses stood with their father in his short-sleeved collared shirt and waved back at me. All these people were on an adventure to the Red Centre too. They were just bringing a little more city with them than we were.

  I was confused when I realised that the passengers were taking pictures of us. What was there to photograph? James had walked off to talk to the smartly uniformed man who had emerged from a secret door and was walking along the tracks. Dylan was clambering around on the roof of the car and Oscar was wandering along beside the train in bare feet, kicking stones. We were scruffy and dusty and dressed in our uniform of dirty shorts and baggy T-shirts. As I looked at us, through their eyes, I realised for the first time that my family had become ever so slightly feral.

  Chapter Seven

  Yulara, Uluru’s tourist precinct, had a supermarket and pubs, the internet had been magically switched on, drinking water flowed from a tap next to our tent and for the first time in weeks there were no flies.

  It was also packed. There were tourists in five-star hotels, a campground full of school groups, European backpackers in beaten-up old cars, grey nomads in lace-curtained caravans, families in shiny white rental campers and young couples in brightly coloured kombi vans.

  We went to Uluru to watch the sunrise. At the first spot we found, the boys got upset when people around us ignored the signs asking everyone to stay off the vegetation. We had been getting Dylan to read national park signage out loud for practice. Even at six he understood the rules. But in their search for the perfect vantage point to photograph the sunrise, people were leaving the sealed road and trampling all over the plants. Feeling cross and strangely protective of the country the four of us had been driving and walking through for six weeks, we packed up and drove further along the road, forsaking a good view for peace and privacy. Five minutes later, as we were eating our breakfast on the bonnet of the car, a bus pulled up and disgorged a hundred tourists beside us.

  The sun rose to a muted and slightly disappointed welcome from the crowd. Within minutes the car park was empty. Many of the buses were on their way back to Alice Springs. Their passengers had booked an overnight trip into which they had squeezed an afternoon at Uluru with the option of climbing, a quick trip to Kata Tjuta and a viewing of the sun setting behind Uluru, then this sunrise stop on the way out. No wonder they looked exhausted.

  At least they had some idea of the landscape around them. In the supermarket, an American man straight off the plane from Sydney had ignored me when I suggested that one 600ml bottle of water might not be enough, given his plan to climb Uluru that afternoon with his eight-year-old daughter.

  ‘It’s really hot out there’, I said.

  He raised his eyebrows. In the heart of the resort, every building was fiercely air-conditioned and, even outside, kilometres of shade cloth held back the desert heat. He had been picked up from the local airport by a climate-controlled bus and dropped at a cool hotel lobby. This trip to the shop was his first venture outside and he had probably found it quite pleasant.

  He had no idea yet how quickly the hot breeze carried away ever
y drop of moisture from your skin. Sometimes it was hard to drink enough water to replace what you were losing. We were flavouring bottles of water with cordial so that we could stomach drinking 4 litres a day. On a long driving day, the water would be hot by the afternoon, so we tried to drink the flavoured bottles first. To start with I’d been a bit stingy with the sugary flavouring, but weak warm orange cordial tasted and looked disturbingly like urine.

  Stories abounded of tourists being caught out in the heat at Uluru. We heard about an Irish man who had decided to climb in plastic sandals. They had melted onto his feet and he had to be airlifted off the rock, along with his seven-year-old son. It was rumoured that an extraordinary number of older tourists died quietly in their hotel beds a few hours after climbing. The theory was that the exertion of a strenuous climb in the midday heat, often after years of inactivity, was too much for their hearts. These incidents were hushed up, the story went, and the deaths were put down to natural causes.

  James and I had talked to the boys about the issues around climbing Uluru. It was a tricky one. Both of us had climbed on a previous trip, more than ten years earlier. We couldn’t pretend that we weren’t aware of the traditional owners’ opposition to the practice back then: we had known and we had climbed anyway. We told Oscar and Dylan it was up to them, but said we wanted to go on the ranger tour first and walk around the base of Uluru before they made any decisions.

  The ranger was an Aboriginal man who found it hard to conceal his impatience with the tour group. ‘This is the Mala Walk. Does anyone know what “mala” means?’

  There was a long excruciating pause while twenty people gazed at their feet. He sighed. ‘It’s a small marsupial that used to live around here. They were pretty much wiped out but we’re reintroducing them.’ He looked around. ‘It’s called the Mala Walk. Didn’t any of you wonder what that meant?’ He sighed again and launched into his rehearsed spiel.