by Lorna Hendry
I didn’t want to risk their joy of reading by turning it into work. I put a red line through the reading exercises in the schoolbook and wrote a note to the teachers to explain why we weren’t doing them. They wrote back, saying that reading for comprehension was a skill that had to be learned and practised. I tried for a while, asking the boys questions like ‘Who was your favourite person in that book?’ and ‘Did you like the ending?’ Mostly they ignored me and I couldn’t blame them. All my questions sounded fake, and for good reason. I hated talking about books. ‘What’s that you’re reading?’ was one of the worst things anyone could say to me when I was lost in a story. If the questioning continued – ‘Good story, is it? What’s it about, then?’ – my heart filled with hatred. Reading was an intensely private experience for me. Writing book reports in high school had been excruciating. I could only ever do them if I was indifferent about the text.
There wasn’t a lot the Distance Education teachers could do about it anyway. We were thousands of kilometres away.
By ignoring half of the workbook, school was only taking us about an hour and a half each day … on the days we did it. It took three weeks to get through each package, which meant that we spent, on average, an hour a day on school. When I thought of it that way, it worried me. I added up the hours they spent reading, the time we spent in national park centres looking at the displays and talking to rangers, and the maths skills they were getting as they checked out road signs to see how far we still had to drive each day. They were also picking up a lot about Australian nature, geography and history. Not to mention life experience. Other campers, particularly the older couples we met, kept telling us that the experience we were giving our sons was the best education they could get.
‘They’ll learn more in a year on the road than they would sitting in a classroom’, was something we heard over and over again. I hoped they were right.
Chapter Eight
Dylan was bursting with excitement about the caravan park in Alice Springs. ‘It has two jumping pillows. That’s one for me and one for Oscar. And three pools and a BMX track. And,’ he paused for suspense, ‘you get free pancakes on Sundays!’
We hung out in Alice for a week and Nannette flew down from Darwin to spend the weekend with us. We set up the two-man tent for the first time and put the boys in it. Nannette slept in our tent, her first camping experience for decades. Growing up in a small village in Scotland, she had spent lots of her holidays camping. They had been cold, wet and miserable, made worse by clouds of biting midges, and she had vowed that when she was grown up she would never ever camp again. This was why I had never been camping as a child. She had spared me the same misery.
We visited the Reptile Centre, where James draped a huge snake around Dylan’s neck as Oscar and I shuddered in horror. We’d wandered around the dry heat of the Desert Park and seen a huge wedge-tailed eagle swoop down in a demonstration of its hunting skills. We stood in Standley Chasm in the middle of the day and saw the sun make a very brief appearance overhead. Another evening we went to a didgeridoo show that made very enthusiastic use of a smoke machine, sombre voice-overs and aerial photography of the iconic Red Centre. James, with his theatre background, found it excruciatingly kitsch and couldn’t bear to watch it but Oscar joined the performers on stage to bang a bongo drum in the finale. The next night Dylan discovered his inner performer too, getting up in front of a crowd of campers at the singalong to tell a long joke about three bank robbers who hid in sacks to evade the police. On our final evening in Alice, we lined up with the rest of the campers to look through a telescope at the craters of the moon and the rings of Saturn.
Packing up took a lot longer than usual, as the two-man tent proved to have inner dimensions roughly equivalent to the TARDIS. Out of it came books, pens, toy cars, balls, clothes, shoes and very tiny Lego pieces. A small mountain of stuff piled up that then had to be packed into the right boxes to give us a fighting chance of finding any of it again. James had insisted that the boys set it up and take it down themselves. When they started crying, we gave in and helped them.
All the other tourists were going north, chasing the warmth but, after dropping Nannette back at the airport, we went south. Our plan was to drive to Western Australia across the Nullarbor Desert.
Four hundred kilometres south of Alice Springs, we saw a Japanese cyclist pedalling along the highway. All I could see on his bicycle was a small pack, a blue tent and three water bottles. He smiled and waved as we passed him.
‘We’re not in a hurry’, said James as he pulled over to the side of the road. The cyclist stopped and chatted in halting English, laughing the whole time, and showed us an old kangaroo bone that he had found on the side of the road. We offered him water, which he politely refused.
‘We’ve got Tang’, said Oscar.
The man’s face lit up at the thought of a sugar hit so we filled one of his bottles with the warm orange liquid and shared it with him. Using mostly huge gestures and the names of countries, he explained he was cycling across all the continents from north to south. He had already ridden from Egypt to Cape Town and was going to South America next. Australia was the easiest, as the sealed Stuart Highway covered the exact direct route he wanted to travel, but he was finding the road trains terrifying. He mimed the swooshing of the big trucks for us, still laughing even as he mugged an exaggerated expression of fright. We understood that he had to get off the road when they roared past so that he wouldn’t be sucked under the wheels by the wind they created. At night he camped 50 metres from the road, feeling much safer here than in Africa, where he had been worried about lions. When we waved goodbye and climbed back into the car, the boys said he was the happiest person they had ever met.
A bit further down the highway we drove past a group of Aboriginal men standing beside a broken-down car. They gave us a wave, but it was a token, dispirited one. Clearly lots of cars had already driven past and they weren’t expecting us to stop.
James kept going and I looked across at him, surprised.
We had been warned several times not to stop for Aboriginal people on the road. ‘Nine times out of ten’, we were told, ‘they’ve just run out of petrol.’ I’d never understood why that was a reason not to stop. Running out of petrol was a serious thing on these roads. Several hundred kilometres could separate the nearest roadhouses. James shared my discomfort. From his days working on cattle stations, he knew better than most people how deceiving distances could be out here. What took an hour to drive in a car was an impossible walk in the dry heat of the desert.
Now he looked back at me and shook his head. ‘I don’t know why I did that’, he said as he slowed down and pulled over. ‘I feel really ashamed of myself.’
He turned the car in a wide arc and we drove back. We stopped behind the dusty, burgundy Commodore. One of the young men came over. Another man stood by the car and there was a young woman in the back seat. James got out and, after a bit of discussion over the raised hood of the car, he slid into the driver’s seat and tried the ignition. Nothing happened.
The men were huddled over the engine. Oscar and Dylan had disappeared into their books so I got out, carrying what was left of our snacks. I gestured at the woman, offering the fruit and a drink, but she shook her head and looked away. I stood and watched as cars flew past us. They were going so fast I could only catch glimpses of the curious looks their passengers were giving us.
James came back. ‘They reckon the battery’s flat, and it is, but it’s because they ran out of petrol then kept trying to start the car again. I could jump-start it, but we’ve only got diesel in our jerry can so they need to get petrol anyway. We’ll have to tow them to the next town. Marla’s only about 50 kilometres down the road.’
As James wielded our heavy tow rope, tying one end to the back of the camper trailer and then crawling under the front of the Commodore to find a spot to attach it to, the Japanese cyclist sailed past us and waved. The Aboriginal men seemed to be having a q
uiet argument. Neither of them was helping James with the rope.
Within a few minutes, our strange road train was on its way: the car, the camper trailer, a length of rope and a Commodore with three reluctant passengers. Dylan looked up briefly from his book to wave at the cyclist as we passed.
It was late in the afternoon when we pulled into the roadhouse at Marla. James tried to stop the other car at the petrol pump but frantic waving from the driver made it clear that they didn’t want him to do that. He pulled up in the parking bay instead. One of the men went to the public phone box and the other two people stayed in the car. James untied the rope and had a quick conversation with them before coming back to us.
‘I don’t think they want to be here. They’ve got no money for fuel. He reckons they’ve driven from Docker River.’
I looked at the old Commodore. Docker River was in Western Australia, more than 700 kilometres away. ‘Who’s he ringing? Should we give them money to fill up?’
‘It’s not just the petrol, they’re going to need a new battery too. I think he’s trying to get someone to come out and pick them up. We probably should have just brought him in to make the phone call. I think they would have preferred to stay out there.’
I looked around at the concrete forecourt of the roadhouse. There was a road train and a few cars like ours in the car park. Through the windows I could see a couple of men in singlets and big hats sitting at the bar and a woman and three kids clustered around the ice-cream freezer. A red arrow pointed to a grey concrete motel block and an empty dirt campground, both of which looked as unwelcoming as any I’d seen. The Commodore looked very out of place. The two people in the back had slid so far down in their seats that they were nearly invisible. The man in the phone box was squatting, gesturing as he spoke.
We ended up spending the night in the campground. We couldn’t get anywhere else before dark and, unlike the Japanese cyclist, we were too scared to camp alone beside the road. At that time, Nannette was very involved in the Darwin trial of Bradley Murdoch for the murder of Peter Falconio on the Stuart Highway in July 2001. Nannette’s job involved working with the witnesses and victims of the crime, including Falconio’s girlfriend, Joanne Lees, who had escaped from Murdoch after he tied her up with cable ties and forced her into his ute. We knew too much about that case for comfort and were seriously spooked.
We had a quick meal of pasta and bolognaise sauce and went to bed early that night, not keen to even go anywhere near the bar. When we packed up at dawn the Commodore and its occupants had disappeared. We hadn’t heard the car leave in the night, so we didn’t know if they had managed to buy fuel or if they had been towed by someone who came to help. Looking up and down the highway and seeing nothing but flat scrub in every direction, I couldn’t even imagine where they had gone.
‘Do you think we did the wrong thing?’ I asked James.
‘I don’t know. I thought we were helping. I guess we didn’t really ask what they wanted us to do.’
Coober Pedy, nearly 700 kilometres south of Alice Springs, was founded in 1915 after the fourteen-year-old son of a miner who had been searching the area unsuccessfully for gold came across pieces of opal lying on the ground. Eight days later the first opal claim was pegged. Since then its population has fluctuated as wildly as the price of opal. Now with 3500 residents from more than forty nationalities, tourist brochures often described the town as ‘cosmopolitan’. In reality, it seemed to be populated almost entirely by obsessive, reclusive, middle-aged white men who would have had difficulty fitting in anywhere else.
It is not a hospitable place. Temperatures reach 45°C in summer and plunge to below freezing in winter. There are almost no plants to be seen anywhere, partly because of the lack of rainfall but also, I suspected, because most of the town has at some point been dug up by prospectors.
Many of the houses are underground or in caves dug from the side of hills. These dugouts are often far more comfortable than above-ground homes. The temperature in the dugouts is always about 25°C and shelves, alcoves and even new rooms can be dug at will. Some even have swimming pools and billiard rooms carved out of the hillside.
The novelty of the dugouts was enticing so we booked into the underground campsite Tim and Sue had told us about. It was like a rabbit warren, with long underground corridors lit by wall-mounted lamps and punctuated by small alcoves that had been carved out from the rock. We dragged down our mattresses and doonas and pillows and lay them on the white, chalky ground. There was only just enough room for our bedding and James couldn’t stand up straight. As other people arrived, they politely looked straight ahead as they walked past the opening to our bedroom. Dust floated gently down onto our beds.
We spent most of that day in Coober Pedy noodling for opals in the tall, pyramid-shaped mullock heaps on the outskirts of town. Oscar and Dylan sieved through the piles of discarded dirt, looking for scraps of opal that the miners had missed. When they didn’t find any treasure, they gave up, running up and down the heaps instead. They were soon covered from head to foot in fine yellow dust. We brushed them down and went back into town to go on a mine tour.
According to our guide, who was also the owner of our campsite, Coober Pedy’s history was full of bitter feuds, lost fortunes, mysterious deaths and lives ruined in a fruitless search for opals. He told us outrageous stories that all had the theme of old-fashioned resourcefulness running through them. The tour ended with a detailed description of how to make explosives out of Vegemite and soap. I didn’t have to look at the boys to know that they were sharing a conspiratorial look and wondering about the contents of our kitchen box.
That night we played cards in our alcove before going to sleep. Noise echoed through the corridors – we could hear every whisper, every snore and every rustle as the other campers turned over in their beds. When we woke up the next morning, we were covered in a thin film of white dust that had collected in our eyes and noses and ears. After weeks of being woken by wind or rain or the light of early sunrises, it seemed that an underground home really suited us. We were the only people left. When we emerged, blinking, into the daylight, we realised that not only had we slept through the sounds of everyone else packing up and leaving, but we had also missed the first rainfall for more than a month. I was glad we didn’t have to pack up a wet tent, but I wasn’t in any hurry to spend another night underground. Coober Pedy, I had decided, was the strangest place I had ever been.
As we drove south, dark clouds followed. It became a race between us and the weather. We were hoping to have our tent set up before the rain caught us but 60 kilometres from Port Augusta, with a road train lumbering up behind us, one of our tyres blew. The car lurched to one side and James cursed as he steered it off the road. As he changed the tyre, the first raindrops spattered down and sizzled on the bitumen.
It was dark and pouring by the time we eventually drove into town and found a caravan park. We made our way to the site we had been given to find a river of mud flowing through it. We didn’t bother going back to the office to ask them to try again. James just set the tent up on a neighbouring site that had the advantage of not being almost underwater. The boys and I huddled in the car until he had finished. ‘There’s no point in everyone getting wet’, he had said. When he was done, we drove straight back out of the park and hunted down a pizza restaurant.
It was still raining the next morning so, after a quick stop to have our tyre fixed, we drove straight past Whyalla and down the Eyre Peninsula. The coastline was supposed to be beautiful but we couldn’t see anything except rain, mist and heavy cloud. The rain finally stopped late that afternoon, just as we entered Coffin Bay National Park.
After an hour of very slow driving on soft sand we arrived at the Black Springs campground. It was deserted and looked damp and miserable. Despite the looming black clouds above us, we decided to try the next campground a bit further on, past Seven Mile Beach. Twenty minutes later we met a vehicle coming the other way. The driver was surpri
sed to see us towing a trailer. He said the track was soft and boggy and also impassable at high tide, which was in half an hour. We had to turn around. By the time we got back to Black Springs it was dark and raining. Again.
It rained all that night and most of the next day. James had to dig a trench to stop the water running directly into our tent. It was cold and I was miserable and my misery infected the boys. They went back to bed after lunch and refused to come out. James decided he was already wet and it couldn’t get any worse, so he wandered to the beach with his fishing gear. Oscar and Dylan sat in the tent and created comic books starring characters called Super Dood and Piranha Man. I photocopied them later and posted them back to the Distance Education teachers and called them that week’s schoolwork. James came back with whiting so we had fried potatoes and fresh fish for tea and the boys complained about the bones.
Again, it rained all night. We had to get up every hour to kneel on our bed and push the roof of the tent up with our hands to stop the water collecting and seeping through the canvas. The rain finally stopped the next morning, so we checked the tide chart and decided to have a look at Seven Mile Beach, a stretch of pristine white sand accessible only by boat or 4WD. I was nervous about driving so far along the beach alone, so I was relieved to see fresh vehicle tracks on the sand. Within minutes a car came hurtling past us and disappeared back down the track, the way we had come. We were on our own.
We parked at the base of the biggest sand dune I had ever seen, leaving the car doors wide open, and the four of us climbed up the hill together. The boys threw themselves down the slope, rolled down in a cloud of white sand then raced back up and did it all again. My mood lifted as I watched them have the most fun they had had for days. I walked along the narrow ridge of the dune, placing one foot carefully in front of another, trying not to slip down either side. The dunes stretched for miles along the beach, golden mountains smoothed out by the constant breeze. Their perfection was marred only by our footprints. I sat with my back to the ocean and looked out over the dunes, mesmerised by how far they marched inland.
