by David Mason
Next morning it was after 0800 and we still had not moved off. The camels were tethered to mulga and browsing on the slim grey leaves. After another heavy dewfall, I dried out the swag and its contents. It was cold too, so over my greasy hair I pulled on my woollen beanie.
When I tilted my head to the sky I could see a trailing white fanion and its silver cause headed south, perhaps on the way to Melbourne. Would I rather be up there? No flies, no dirt, no damp, no camels. Be clean and be served a fresh brew of coffee? Even with my greasy shirt on my back, not at all. I loved being on the ground, with the red dirt, the animals and the sunrise a promise of hope in the east.
Passing rivulets and creeks not far out of Adavale I could see from the water-marked bank that the levels from the flooding of a few weeks ago had only recently dropped. We were fortunate to pass the concreted flood ways. In the washaways to the side of the track the fine silt had already formed dark parchment scrolls, leaving lighter brown coloured clay underneath.
On the track just outside the six-house town of Adavale I met Gracie Woods, self-styled Queen of the town. Gracie told me there was to be a barbeque that evening in my honour. People from stations all around were coming to see me and the camels. As Gracie said, ‘Any excuse for a get together to talk and drink something. And yeah, we heard you are a good bloke.’
An hour or so later I set the camels loose in the police house yard where there was plenty of feed for them. Geoff, Rhyna, Sam and Tina the dog met us at the gate and even had lucerne bales under the house, which I gave to the camels next morning.
The barbeque was held at the local hall and attended by more than 30 people. Some even flew in from Charleville for the event. After a warm introduction from Geoff I spoke briefly about the trip, the work of the Fred Hollows Foundation, and thanked everyone for coming. The Landsbergs from Milo Station stood next to the fire drinking rum and told me that at one time Milo was a station of a million acres fenced and a million more unfenced. Now though, due to time and taxes, it was much reduced. There just were not the people to manage it, so sections were sold off or simply handed back to the state government.
The barbeque finished up late, well after I excused myself from overindulgence in a potent home brew to write letters home. I finally packed up, with letters written and all farewells complete at mid-afternoon next day. Among the letters I wrote two were especially important. The one to the Fred Hollows Foundation included further donations and a brief outline of how the expedition was doing. The other was to Amber, to tell her how sorry I was that I could not speak with her. Due to some localised flooding, the phone lines out of Adavale were down and were expected to be down for days. Geoff used radio to keep in touch with the outside world.
Langlo Crossing bridge west of Charleville.
Geoff went to Quilpie so I hoped Amber would have the letter the following week. Otherwise, given routine collections, the letter would not be collected until the week after, and probably would not reach her until the end of the following week, if not later. It was an odd thing that a letter posted in Washington or London would arrive in Canberra well before a letter posted in the very same country. Maybe that was the point. Being out here was like being in another country. It was a place few Australians ever thought about and fewer came to see.
Leaving Adavale the camels carried 60 litres of water, more than enough if there was a problem. I let Geoff know that I would stop in at Araluen Station in four or five days and call him. The camels were doing well and for this part of the trip Kabul had 40 litres of water and food, Chloe 20 litres and Kashgar as usual carried little except a camel smile. I was a little concerned about a slight limp in her offside foreleg but she seemed to be okay. The work in Charleville had seemed to have paid off and we had no problem with rubbing or chaffing. I wanted to keep it that way.
As I wrote my diary at the end of the day I could hear the sound of the ‘river on its banks’, the Bulloo River. The next day would mark the three month anniversary of leaving Byron Bay. In some ways it seemed close, in others so very far away. Sure we had come a long way, around one-third of the way across the continent. But there was a long, long way to go yet; including the first solo east–west crossing of the Simpson Desert.
I looked at the map and told my camel friends next day we would move to the now disused Old Windorah Road and follow what was the Cobb & Co. coach route to Windorah. From 1854, when the coaches first serviced the route to the Victorian goldfields from Melbourne, until 1924, Cobb & Co. coaches provided timetabled transport for mail, passengers and parcels throughout Australia. In early 1900 they were using almost 9000 horses each week in Queensland alone. There were changing stations at regular intervals where tired coach horses were replaced with a fresh team. For a time, until the arrival of the petrol engine, coaches bearing the name Cobb & Co. carried passengers and the mail in every mainland state of Australia
Far from being the six houses it was now, Adavale had been a flourishing centre of 7000 people and the hub of western Queensland. According to Geoff, the decision to build the railway from Charleville to Quilpie, and not to Adavale, killed the town. Not that I was convinced Adavale had much to offer as a commercial centre. It was built on a claypan on the banks of an overflow of Blackwater Creek. The heat in summer must have been extraordinary. There was no shade on the claypan as trees could not grow, and even on a late autumn day the reflected heat and light from the hard clay surface bit at the back of my eyes.
Sandra Newland from Bull’s Gully Station pulled up in her Toyota. She asked me why I was doing it. I thought of a pat, too smooth response like, ‘Well, if you’re not Shirley MacLaine or James Bond, you only live once.’ It was late in the day and there was not enough time to explain a burning desire, an ache and a need to move, especially to someone who may not have them. Even so, I tried and Sandra was quiet and gentle with me. She wished me luck and smiled as she drove away.
Some people called me a misanthrope. They believed I travelled on my own because I did not like other people. The fact was that I loved to travel with other people and share the experience, the pleasures and the pains. But the thing that you lost when you travelled with other people was a sense of vulnerability and exposure to the world. It can be harder to meet local people and to enter into their world. It can also be intellectually and emotionally easier when there is another person. When you are on your own, your internal world and the way it interacts with the exterior is the means by which things are understood. There is no distraction, only you. It means that you are responsible for the way in which you respond to the world; there is no filtering or testing. For a lot of people this can be intimidating and very frightening. It was what I sought, it was unashamedly unambiguous.
I woke in the morning to a sound I had not heard before. It was a scratching, accompanied by an occasional liquid bloop. I gently raised the canvas flap of my swag to see improbably skinny long legs pass not two metres from where I lay. When I poked my head out further I could see more of the remarkable legs moving through the camp. The camels did not seem concerned by emus; and the emus not concerned by the camels. There were two adults and six chicks. The liquid bloop, like cognac being poured from height into a crystal glass, was the noise made by the adults as they moved behind and shepherded their chicks.
One emu came very close to the swag, possibly interested in the round thing (my head) that stuck out. It looked at me and turned its head, a green-feathered bulb with a beak on a very long neck. Then it shook itself as if it was not quite sure what to make of the thing with shiny eyes sticking out of the green slug of the swag. It put its head a little closer, its face almost comical in its curiosity, very dark brown eyes looking into mine. I winked and it drew its head back on its long neck, gave a half flap of short green wings, trotted off five metres and continued to search for seeds on the ground. I put my hand under my head and watched the family group move off in a slow and measured way into the surrounding mulga scrub.
The Old Windorah Ro
ad was marked on my map as a secondary road but this was very much an overstatement. From the deeply eroded state of the track, where gullies up to a metre deep and wide had been ripped through the surface, there had been very good rain in recent times. I was pretty certain the track had not been used for weeks or months, and not by a vehicle. At the barbecue in Adavale, Les Landsberg had said many parts of the track were impassable after rain. As it was we were just able to work our way through. A week before the area would have been an impassable bog.
The previous day we climbed a shallow escarpment from the eastern edge of the Grey Range and were greeted by the sight of a sweeping plain, of grey-green mulga to the horizon, interspersed with three or four orange-red claypans under a line of crystal blue sky. With its patina of green it was like looking at an ancient Persian carpet.
We walked up a track to the Grey Range proper, where at 265 metres above sea level the view to the west was bright light and blue. In the east, the mulga sank away and melted into the horizon while in the middle distance a windmill with broken blades winked morse at me. A quick look at the map made me think we might reach Araluen Station late next day or early the day after.
As we walked along the track I thought about loneliness and particularly a book by Geoffrey Moorhouse titled The Fearful Void. In the course of his trip across the Sahara, Moorhouse reflected on the fact that the Point of Aries is the creation of man. There is no such point except that all the heavenly bodies are related to it. It enables navigators to cross the world as it is the point around which all the stars turn.
For Moorhouse, people are like the stars, spinning through life and God is the spiritual Point of Aries. Without God people are lost, spinning through what Moorhouse called ‘a fearful spiritual void of the spirit’.
I wondered about that. The Sahara was certainly not ‘the fearful void’. After all, how could we attribute an emotion or meaning that it does not have? There is nothing fearful in it. The fear there does not have a name. We cannot meet it because fear can only exist in ourselves. And there is certainly no ‘void.’ There is meaning wherever there is a human and there need only be fear if we give it life.
Just because we did not understand, did not seem to be able to find the connections or a meaning, or felt alone, did not mean we needed to feel unsafe. There were a lot of things we could never control. Places, whether they are inside us, or outside like the Foreign Legion or a desert, are not inherently strange or frightening places, just new or different ones where we must adapt, explore and try to understand. Most importantly, we have to understand that fear comes from within, and when the outside acts on us we may respond in a number of ways. The really difficult thing was to acknowledge that the way we view the world is a fundamental part of ourselves.
Some people I knew were fearful of new places, new experiences, new people and new ways of thinking. They were so fearful they tried hard to control every part of their lives, so that there was a sameness and constancy in their lives. A day would become stressful if something happened that was outside their control. Where there was no control some people reached outside, to God or money, to provide order or make sense of things.
To me, change and uncertainty were elemental, the stuff of life, and safety was an acquaintance who wanted to become too close. Why not embrace the fear, welcome the hollow feeling that comes with uncertainty and let your heart beat wildly for what the future might bring? I wondered if I would feel the same in the Simpson Desert when there would be less that I could control and the possibility of success far from certain.
I liked Moorhouse because he made me think. He made me realise that my journey was a reach for understanding. Did I really have to separate myself from the world I knew to get to know myself? Had I cast myself adrift like some religious ascetic to touch something inside myself? Did I really know what I was looking for, or was the looking for something enough?
Coming over the Grey Range, and just before a bleached rocky feature I saw on the ridge a number of weathered wooden posts next to an unusually dense collection of native scrub. To satisfy my curiosity I tied off the camels and walked over to the site. It seemed to have been a holding yard, and perhaps there had been a spring. An exposed miserable location, I thought it was most likely a staging post in the coach ride from Adavale to Windorah. I sat on the edge of the ridge and looked east across the sea of grey-green. Waiting on this sun-smashed ridge in summer for the coach to arrive must have driven some people mad.
The camels and I descended from the range and crossed Sandy Creek to where the land opened up to reveal the greenest country we had seen since Toowoomba. It was a country park, a green meadow to the horizon, starred with yellow and purple flowers and the occasional tall eucalypt to provide shade when resting. It was not easy to have the camels move along at the usual pace, all they wanted to do was rip up the green stuff and eat.
At the creek, just before moving up to the Araluen homestead, the camels baulked. Kabul started dancing, or maybe more accurately bouncing, lifting his fore legs and then his hind, trying to buck off the saddle or his fear. Chloe and Kashgar soon followed and I found myself holding a line with three prancing camels. Something had unsettled them but it was not obvious to me. A few minutes later I even had trouble unsaddling them. Perhaps it was the pigs kept in the pen not far from the house.
We arrived at the homestead just before dark. The home of Annie and Colin ‘call me Collie’ Rae and their daughter Colleen, their youngest, who did distance education on radio out of Charleville. Over a beer Collie told me he and his father came out here in 1968, lived in tents, then a demountable and later another prefabricated house, building up Araluen Station to what it was now. And the yards on the hill? According to Collie they were part of the Jack in the Rocks Hotel, a Cobb & Co. stop. At one time the pub was run by Mrs Tully, a family name prominent in the history of south-west Queensland. She was found dead on the pub floor. Collie reckoned that her husband did it but was not sure how it all ended up. In answer to another question I had about the vegetation there, Collie said there had been a natural spring. In the 1960s some mining exploration blokes had tried to make the spring wider, but only succeeded in closing it and sealing it from the animals around that depended on it. ‘They rooted it,’ Collie said.
Headed west – and a tasty bush.
As to the open paddock, Collie told me that it had not been cleared by him. ‘Just natural,’ and he had a ‘good block’ – ‘three by three’ which was one part open country, one part mulga, one part stony and rocky. This meant that in a good season the land could give a good deal back, in bad the mulga carried the sheep, and ‘rock because everyone has to have some!’
I called Geoff in Adavale to let him know I was okay and then called Amber. We were gentle with each other, careful not to prickle at being apart for so long. As surely as I was making my way across the country I felt I was losing her. There was nothing to do but give up now or finish as soon as I could. For my own soul I chose the latter.
Later, over dinner, I admired Collie’s collection of trophies, mainly for boxing. ‘Amateur. Middleweight,’ was all Collie would say. I told him that I had boxed myself. ‘Amateur. Light Welterweight.’ He sniffed but I am sure he looked at me a little differently. He thought I was some soft bloke from Canberra on a holiday.
Along with helping Collie work the land, Annie was the proprietor of Quilpie Quilts, a famous company of western Queensland. I had an image of shearing sheds and ladies working hard at their machines. But there was only one hard-working lady, and that lady was Annie. She worked hard for the cash that such enterprise brought.
In single file, leather creaking, camels and I left Araluen around midday. Despite our late start we made about 20 kilometres toward Windorah. As we left Annie was bent over a machine, working on a quilt order, while Collie worked parts of the garden. Colleen came with me to the front gate and saw me off with a wave and a laugh.
That evening was so quiet I could hear the pulse in m
y ears again. There was no moon. No sound, bird or cricket. Nothing, that is, except for the occasional roll, fart or chewing of the cud. As the firelight shortened its reach, the stars seemed brighter still. The Southern Cross appeared almost directly overhead and to the west a sapphire planet invited me to follow.
It was a good day’s walk from the edge of Araluen to Canaway Station, through parts of Thylungra Station. We came across five young cattlemen from Thylungra setting up steel fabricated mobile yards, preparing for a cattle muster. It soon became clear that they had not expected anyone moving in from the east. After one pointed in our direction they all turned as if choreographed in a western revue, left hands on hips wrapped in tight jeans and primary coloured shirts, right index fingers pushing up the brim of their very tall hats.
As camels and I approached I said, ‘G’day’. Almost as one they replied, ‘G’day’ too, but each one with his own questioning lilt. I said, ‘Headed west’. A couple of them said, ‘Yeah, right’. And that was our meeting. Sometimes, even when there were very few people around, it seemed right to say little and not waste time or words.
We continued to Regleigh Station country where I met Russ. He pulled up in his white Toyota utility, put his red-capped, blotch-brown freckled face out of the window, shook his head and said, ‘The things ya see out in the bush.’ He told me he decided to inspect some bore sites as Jehovah’s Witnesses were visiting the homestead. ‘Can’t stand ’em,’ he said.
Russ told me that while Adavale had up to 10 inches of rain already this year, this country had only seen three. After I told him about the lads from Thylungra, Russ said thoughtfully, ‘Yep, Thylungra, it’s on bloody good country, lots of creeks and overflows. Old Man Durack, one of the first blokes out here, was no fool; he just fenced off the country he wanted. And then he went off to the Kimberley. What a family.’
