Wrong Way Round

by Lorna Hendry

  Looking down at the beach twenty minutes later, I was horrified to see that the tide had turned and was coming in fast. Some of our tyre tracks had already been swallowed by the water. Shouting at the boys to hurry, we slid down the dune on our bottoms and jumped back into the car, spraying sand everywhere. I closed my eyes and gripped the dashboard. I couldn’t watch as James nudged the front wheels into the water to give us enough space to turn the car around. I felt the wheels sink into the wet sand and realised we had been incredibly stupid. I imagined us sitting halfway up a sand dune watching the car disappear into the sea. We took off down the beach in a race against the tide. It was only a few minutes before we reached the track but it was long enough for me.

  My black mood was back and so was the rain. It poured again all night.

  The next day we took advantage of a fleeting dry spell. We packed up our soggy tent, filled our damp bags with wet and sandy clothes and got bogged in a patch of wet sand as we drove out of the park. Earlier that morning, when I had stumbled through the rain and mud to the tiny toilet hut, I had disturbed a very damp kangaroo and her joey who were sheltering there. As she had bounded reluctantly off into the bush, she turned back to me. We shared a look, one mother to another, and the meaning was so obvious that I laughed out loud: ‘This is shit, isn’t it?’

  Before we left home, we had set ourselves a budget of $1000 a week. James’s cousin had done a similar trip the year before with his wife and their three kids, and he had worked out that they spent $800 a week. James and I are the kind of people that can’t walk out of the front door without spending $50, so we thought $1000 would be about right. We thought we might even be able to save up for a few special treats. We wanted to go on a helicopter flight in the Kimberley and a snorkelling trip on the Great Barrier Reef. I was secretly hoping that we could get out of the tent and stay in a hotel for a few nights as well.

  Nine weeks into the journey we were already $2000 over budget.

  Fuel was a big expense; one week we managed to spend $600 on diesel alone. We were also going through a lot of alcohol; when you’re camping, every night feels like Friday. And we were eating very well. I had a lot of spare time and I spent most of it planning meals. The boys would have been perfectly happy with sausages and two-minute noodles every night, but that wasn’t my idea of a good way to spend a year. We ate curries, risottos, steaks and lots of pasta. When we felt like a roast, we cooked butterflied legs of lamb on the campfire. We ate crayfish in Robe and oysters in Coffin Bay. They were great meals, but they weren’t cheap. On top of that, we had already spent $450 on blown and punctured tyres.

  ‘I don’t see how we can spend any less’, said James.

  ‘We could give up alcohol.’

  He looked horrified. ‘You can’t sit around a campfire without a beer. It just doesn’t feel right. We’re on holiday.’

  I tried not to worry too much. Even if we did overspend, it was unlikely that we would ever look back on this trip and regret a moment of it. Anyway, in a few days there wouldn’t be anywhere to spend money. We were about to cross the Nullarbor Plain. We were finally heading for Western Australia.

  Chapter Nine

  My proposal of a ban on alcohol fell over within hours of arriving in the tiny coastal town of Streaky Bay. At the local pub that night, the boys drank Fanta, James and I drank shiraz and we lashed out on a $10 roast dinner. For a few hours we were indoors, we were cosy and warm and there was football on the television. We were all glowing – we had showered for the first time in six days. Back at the tent the sheets were clean and so were all the clothes in our bags. The kitchen box and fridge were crammed with food. The boys had new novels to read, a stack of activity books and a box of new pencils, and we had hours and hours of Harry Potter books to listen to.

  I was preparing for the Nullarbor as if it were a three-day siege.

  When we were first planning our trip, people often asked if we were going to Western Australia. When we said yes, that was our plan, a look of concern usually appeared on their faces. ‘You know you’ll have to cross the Nullarbor?’

  There were two types of people: those who had never done it and never planned to, and the ones who immediately told us their number, either as a badge of honour or a warning.

  ‘We’ve been across six times now.’

  ‘I’ve done it once, and I’ll never do it again.’

  Despite being repeatedly told that the Eyre Highway was the most boring road in the country, I was still surprised at how dull it was. I knew that just a few kilometres to our left the sea was pounding on cliffs. To our right, about 60 kilometres away, the Indian Pacific – the world’s longest straight stretch of railway – passed through the ghost towns of Tarcoola, Cook and Loongana. But for hours after we left Ceduna all we could see was a perfectly straight road with orange dirt and very short, scrubby bush on either side. The view was almost familiar, iconically representative of the Australian outback, and I could easily imagine a family of kangaroos bounding along the horizon, emus racing alongside our car or wedge-tailed eagles feasting on roadkill. I had to make do with my imagination, though, as we didn’t see a single sign of life.

  After 300 kilometres we had a welcome break at Head of Bight, just like the southern right whales that come here to give birth to their calves every winter. We drove the 12-kilometre access road and paid the entry fee at the brand-new whale viewing centre.

  ‘Whales! Whales!’ cried the boys as they pounded along the shining, freshly cut planks of hardwood.

  ‘No whales’, I said, reading the brochure. ‘It’s the wrong time of year. They won’t be here for another month.’

  We walked to the lookout, letting the breeze blow the car smells out of our hair and clothes. I hadn’t realised we were so far above sea level. Below us, waves pounded against the cliff like fists on a locked door. Leaning against the railing, it was easy to imagine ourselves standing on the edge of the continent.

  Back in the car, a few kilometres further on, we noticed tracks heading off the road towards the sea.

  ‘Let’s take another look’, said James, pulling onto the track and parking beside a sign that read ‘DANGER. The high overhanging cliffs on this coast are very dangerous. The actual edge of the cliff is not readily seen. Approach with caution particularly in windy conditions. Children should be kept under adult control at all times.’ We climbed out of the car and ventured warily towards the cliff. My head swam as I looked down and I had to check that the boys weren’t anywhere near the edge. Another vehicle arrived and the people who got out started setting up their tent just metres from the cliff. I thought they were very brave. I wouldn’t be able to stay here overnight, for fear that one of the boys might choose that night to take up sleepwalking.

  Late that afternoon, we arrived at the quarantine stop. I had seen posters about it in Ceduna, but I had pictured it being like the fruit bins that used to sit on the highway between Victoria and South Australia. Those had worked on an honour system and usually just prompted a rush of orange-eating and arguments about whether or not avocados counted as fruit. This was more like a checkpoint separating warring nations. Uniformed officials guided the cars into a single-lane queue and handed everyone a plastic bucket and a leaflet. I remembered the huge shop I had done the day before and felt very stupid for not taking the information more seriously. Ahead, we could see cars being searched, all the doors open as quarantine officers poked around inside. As we waited I read the leaflet, which listed all the prohibited items that might carry pests, weeds or diseases into Western Australia.

  ‘It says we have to throw out all our fruit and vegetables, unless they are cut up. Nuts and honey too. Have we got honey in the trailer?’

  ‘No’, said James.

  ‘Yes we do!’ said Oscar.

  ‘No, we don’t. We finished it. This morning.’ James couldn’t have been clearer.

  ‘Hi there’, chirped the quarantine officer at my window. She was young and blonde and looked exce
ptionally healthy. ‘Carrying any fruit or vegetables with you?’

  ‘Heaps!’ said Dylan joyfully.

  I pulled out the esky from the back of the car and opened it up.

  She smiled. ‘Grapes!’

  The contents of the esky went into the plastic bucket: grapes, two oranges, a lettuce, a head of broccoli, beans, two corn cobs and a sweet potato I had been planning to roast in our next campfire. I wondered if she would notice the absence of onions and potatoes. They were stored in the cupboard that was built into the tailgate of the trailer. I looked around for sniffer dogs.

  ‘Anything in the fridge?’

  Standing on the tailgate, I opened the fridge and took out a punnet of strawberries and another of cherry tomatoes. Her smile nearly cracked her face in half.

  ‘And what about in the front? Any fruit?’

  ‘We don’t eat much of that’, I said, for once wearing my family’s aversion to fruit like a badge of honour. Dylan stuck his head out from behind the woman, whom he had been following with an air of awed admiration.

  ‘Mum has more oranges beside her’, he said. Traitor. She looked at me expectantly.

  ‘They’re cut up’, I said. I could tell she was disappointed.

  Oscar looked into the bucket. ‘What happens to it?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, it all gets discarded’, she told him, beaming at her haul.

  As we drove off, Oscar sighed happily. ‘This has been the best day of the trip so far.’

  James reached deep down under his seat and pulled out a plastic container of dried fruit and nuts. ‘She missed this.’

  Twelve kilometres west of the border we stopped at Eucla. Eucla, with a permanent population under 100, is nevertheless the main stopping point for vehicles travelling on the Eyre Highway. At the campsite, all the cars and caravans were lined up in neat rows. None of the vans were unhitched from their vehicles – it was more like a car park than a campground and everyone seemed poised for a quick getaway the next morning. There were no campfires, no-one talking to the neighbours, no kids racing around on dusty bicycles or kicking a footy. This was just a place to refuel vehicles and grab some sleep. The woman behind the till at the roadhouse, which also served as the local store, motel and pub, looked surprised when I asked if they sold fresh vegetables. She reluctantly fetched a piece of limp cauliflower and half a capsicum from the kitchen for me. We didn’t even bother unhitching the trailer from the car and were gone well before eight o’clock Eucla time. Towns on the Eyre Highway between Eucla and Caiguna operate on the unofficial Central Western Time Zone, taking a halfway position on the ninety-minute difference between South Australia and Western Australia. We had put the clock on the dashboard back forty-five minutes when we passed the official road sign about the unofficial time zone.

  Back on the very straight road again, the monotony had some advantages. I found that I could read without getting sick and, although the logistics of folding the paper took a bit of working out, I managed to get through The Weekend Australian from cover to cover for the first time in my life. James was able to concentrate on our Spanish language CD and drive at the same time. By the end of the third track we had all mastered the very useful phrase, ‘No es posible para usted así’ [‘This is not possible for you this way’]. Oscar used the Travel Scrabble set to create a crossword and Dylan amused himself by very carefully covering every square inch of his body with a complex pattern of sky-blue texta dots. At Cocklebiddy we put all the clocks back another forty-five minutes to join the rest of Western Australia and, instead of feeling as if we had gained time, it was as if we had just slid down the longest snake on the board.

  We finally reached Norseman. Despite being a proper town with shops and a pub and a real caravan park, Norseman looked to be as much of a transit station as Eucla. The lady at the tourist information centre took one look at the boys’ exhausted, miserable faces and gave them each a certificate.

  ‘This is to commemorate that you have crossed the Australian continent on the Eyre Highway, following in the footsteps of Edward John Eyre.’

  Reading the brief history of Eyre’s crossing I realised that, despite the sketch on the certificate that depicted him as old and balding, he was just twenty-six years old when he led the eight-month expedition that opened up a land route between Australia’s eastern and western shores. And only twenty-five when he trekked to the edge of Lake Eyre and wrote so eloquently of his bitter disappointment.

  Much later I found out that at Eucla, only a few minutes’ walk from where we had spent the night, there were ruins of the old telegraph station, huge sand dunes and magnificent views of the ocean. The whole place was teeming with birdlife. I felt ashamed that we had raced along the Nullarbor so quickly. Next time, I thought. Next time we will stop and camp on the edge of the cliff and explore all the places that we dismissed as empty and dull.

  The next day we went to Kalgoorlie and stood on the edge of the Super Pit. This monstrous hole in the ground was Alan Bond’s idea. In the 1980s, he decided this would be a more efficient way to dig gold out of the ground than all the individually run underground mines that used to operate in Kalgoorlie’s Golden Mile. Four hundred metres deep, 3.5 kilometres long and 1.5 kilometres wide, the pit is almost too large to comprehend.

  ‘Are those trucks real?’ asked Dylan.

  Tiny yellow vehicles trundled along the tracks carved into the walls of the pit. It wasn’t a big stretch to imagine a huge, invisible toddler towering above us, pushing them along with his chubby hands. Two truck tyres lay on the ground outside the observation shelter, all black and fat and huge. We stared at them and tried to put both of these visuals together and get a sense of just how big the Super Pit was. We failed.

  After the Super Pit, we thought about going to the Crusty Demons motorbike stunt show but the prices were so steep that we couldn’t justify it. We satisfied the boys’ curiosity by hanging around outside the venue and watching the rehearsal. Young men hurtled in the air, spinning in full somersaults and clinging to the handles of their motorbikes. It looked as if they were flying and carrying the bike along with them.

  The story around town that day was that the Crusties had had a mishap on the way to Kalgoorlie. The road train holding all their gear apparently collided with a goat, causing the petrol tank to burst into flame and destroy several valuable motorbikes. Local gossip held that it was an insurance scam. Few people were prepared to argue with a group that reputedly had strong ties to the Hells Angels, but they expressed an interest in seeing the goat who could destroy a road train.

  At Lucky Bay in Cape Le Grand National Park, the beach curved for miles around a calm turquoise bay, protected from the ocean by hills and sand dunes. The fine white sand squeaked under our feet as we walked. Dylan pushed his arms deep into the damp sand on the water’s edge and when he pulled them out they looked like they were coated in cream.

  One morning, after the boys did schoolwork and I cooked a big pot of lentil dhal for lunch, we decided to walk to the end of the beach. In 1802 this was the spot where Matthew Flinders, who was circumnavigating the Australian coastline in the Investigator, took shelter from a storm. Forty years later the bay again lived up to the name Flinders had given it. Seven months into their expedition across the Nullarbor, Edward John Eyre and his last remaining companion, an Indigenous man named Wylie, were almost dead from starvation and thirst when they spotted a French whaling ship in Lucky Bay. The captain offered to take them on board, but Eyre was determined to complete the final 300 kilometres to King George Sound on foot and accepted only supplies of food and water. What Wylie thought of this decision can only be imagined.

  I was fascinated by these stories of early Australian settlement. The more we travelled, the more the huge distances and beautiful but harsh landscape impressed themselves on me. ‘Just imagine it!’ I would say, failing to interest the boys in the history around us.

  The day turned out to be hotter than we had expected and halfway along we needed to s
wim. None of us had bathers and we didn’t want to have to walk back in wet, sandy clothes, so we stripped off.

  This was our first skinny dip, but they quickly turned into a habit. The boys became experts at whipping off their clothes whenever James shouted, ‘Family nudie swim!’ We would all race into the sea, splashing and shouting to combat the shock of the cold water. This first time, it was such a warm day and the beach felt so isolated that James decided to continue on our walk completely naked. At the end of our walk, just as we were inspecting a plaque commemorating Flinders’s naming of the bay, an elderly couple appeared from nowhere and got a full frontal view of James. The boys and I nearly wet ourselves laughing as he hopped about, trying to get his pants back on. On the way back, we had another swim, but this time we stayed in the water when we saw the couple approaching. They pretended we weren’t there and marched on up the beach, eyes front.

  Back at the campsite, a neighbour told me that he had seen two kangaroos knock the pot of lentil dhal off our table and eat the contents. A crow had also discovered the eggs, which I thought I had hidden by putting a tea towel on top of them, and the empty shells were scattered through the scrub nearby. I knew that the loss of the eggs was totally my fault, but I was cross about the dhal. That would have been the basis for quite a few meals and it hadn’t occurred to me that any of the local wildlife would have a taste for lentils. The roos had been efficient, though – there wasn’t a scrap to be seen on the ground outside the tent and the pot had been licked clean.

  Our plan was to go to Margaret River next, but the boys wanted to go to Wave Rock. James wasn’t enthusiastic. He got out the maps and showed them how far it was. ‘Look, we’re here, near Esperance. And we’re going here, to Margaret River, on the coast. Now, here’s Wave Rock. It’s about 400 kilometres inland. It’s like going along two sides of a triangle instead of just one.’