by David Mason
DIG
3 FT NW
Burke recovered the cache and, overruling Wills and King, left a note in the tin outlining his intention to follow the creek to the south-west, believing he had no hope of catching up with the main party. He would take the two men 240 kilometres to a cattle station near Mount Hopeless. Having carefully filled in the hole, Burke failed to mark the tree or leave any indication he and his men had been there.
A little over two weeks later, while Burke, Wills and King were just 65 kilometres away, Brahe returned to the depot site in the hope that the party had returned. Seeing nothing to indicate Burke had done so he did not dig up the cache to check its contents and rode away.
Two months later Burke and Wills were dead. The sole survivor, John King, had been cared for by Aboriginal people and a relief party reached him in mid-September 1861. Edwin Welch, the relief party’s second in command, reported finding King. As he rode toward a group of Aboriginal men they retired: ‘leaving one solitary figure apparently covered in with some scarecrow rags and part of a hat, prominently alone on the sand. Before I could pull up, I had passed it, and as I passed it, it tottered, threw up its hands in the attitude of prayer, and fell on the sand.’
Thinking back on Burke and Wills I knew I had to take care. So for those few days in Birdsville there was much that had to be done. For me though, there was too much noise and movement. There were people to call and radio interviews to do. It was good to be on the track again, to sit before a small fire with brew in hand and camels contentedly chewing their cud.
I called in to see Warwick, the town policeman, in the station on the other side of the airstrip from the Birdsville Hotel. I outlined what I had planned. I said I had a mobile-sat phone and an emergency locator beacon. He took down the number of the phone and I assured him I would be checking with Amber in Canberra once a week. He also took Amber’s number, and then I showed him my proposed route and projected time of arrival at Dalhousie Springs.
Warwick leaned on the bench in the station and asked, ‘You got a rifle for them feral camels out there?’ I told him that I had, including the various State, Territory and National Parks permits. He grunted and said, ‘Probably won’t be seein’ ya again,’ which I took to mean that the planning I had done met with, if not approval, at least his tacit ‘okay.’ We shook hands.
Warwick was the last Queensland police officer I expected to deal with on my trip. Not once had I had any problems. On the contrary, every policeman I met was efficient and even friendly. They went out of their way to be helpful. Maybe they thought I was reasonable sort of person, or maybe they wanted me out of their hair as quickly as they were able. Probably both.
Camp 2
It was a gentle stroll to our camp, which included lots of camel browsing, next to a gravel borrow pit some 500 metres to the east of Nappanerica, local Aboriginal name for Big Red, the 40 metre dune that marked the eastern edge of the Simpson. From the gravel pit I filled another three jerry cans; water for the camels that they would drink on the crossing.
Earlier, just before we arrived at the gravel borrow pit, Selwyn Kirstenfelder pulled up in a large white Toyota. With its antennae and spotlights it looked a lot like a four-wheeled insect. The tray of the vehicle was full of welding gear, eskys of food and jerry cans of water. From the bullbar three beach fishing rod long antennae extended, still trembling minutes after he had stopped. He was working on some yards out at Hertzols Tank, near Eyre Creek, for David Brook, owner of cattle stations, part-owner of the Birdsville Hotel and mayor of one of Australia’s most remote towns. ‘Got to do it on me own. Can’t get blokes to come out and work for me,’ he said as his 50-year-old gnarled face creased into a frown.
It was a good year. At the gravel borrow pit just short of Big Red.
I asked him why he worked in this country so far from towns and their pleasures. The corners of his mouth almost gave way to a smile and said that of all people I should understand.
Not far from the shallow borrow pit, I sat on my swag watching the camels feed and looked west to Big Red. I thought more about what lay ahead. The Simpson Desert is the driest region of the driest continent, other than Antarctica. Over an area of around 160,000 square kilometres, the desert’s temperatures rise over 50ºC in summer and drop to -5º. Over 1100 parallel red sand dunes roll across the desert, some up to 200 kilometres in length with heights between 10 and 40 metres. The dunes are aligned in a NNW/SSE direction, generally static with crests and sides continually shaped by the winds from the south. We would have to cross them all. On foot. Our task would be much harder from the eastern side, as the dunes are not symmetrical. The western slopes are a gentle 12 degrees while the eastern sides are at least double that. This explained why most people who attempt a crossing of the desert approach it from the west.
While Aboriginal people moved across this country for thousands of years, the first recorded desert crossing was in 1936 by Ted Colson, Peter Ains and five camels. Since that time the desert had been crossed by vehicle and other means, mostly from the west and the easier slopes, or from the north moving in the swales between the dunes. There had not been a recorded crossing of the Simpson Desert by a lone person walking east to west. Until me.
Not long into the Simpson Desert.
As a bird flew, we had 130 kilometres to Poeppel Corner and another 190 kilometres to Purnie Bore. Of course the distance was made a great deal longer having to scale and descend the dunes. On our crossing so much depended on the going, the availability of feed, and the presence of surface water. On this last I had heard many conflicting stories so I planned on there being none. We would carry eight jerry cans, each of 22 litres of water, with two litres on me, and food for up to seven weeks, to last us until the small settlement of Finke. But everything depended on the camels, especially Kabul and Chloe who carried the water. The brutal, simple fact was that if the camels did not make it, nor would I.
The diary lay open on my lap as I listened to dingos, their calls a low cry from the heart. Camel heads turned to the sound and the chewing of cud stopped for a moment. I looked down at the page to my thumb where grains were black under the nail and grains of desert were gently blown across my page.
Camp 3
How could I ever forget crossing Big Red and entering the red dunes? Red ridges were soft walls, like battlements blocking our passage from the horizon of the future and the past. For those who sought it, quiet eternity waited in places like these and my heart beat hollow with knowing that there was now no past or future, just now. I had brought us to a place where we could disappear, where the sun would dry our skins and the dingos crack and crunch at our bones. We were but blood and bone moving across a surface of sand. No time but desert time, of sun and dark, of hot and cold.
Sitting on the swag in camp I looked between my feet to the fine red sand and leaned back to suck in the air from a sky turned dark with the setting of the sun. All around was silence that seemed to belong to a different world, a world where worry and nervous haste were intruders and did not belong.
We camped three to four kilometres from Eyre Creek where the flies were so bad I had to scrape them from my eyes. I tried to brush them away but it was useless. I reached in to the corners of my eyes and with my thumb at the top of my nose I dragged my fingers across my lids and captured five or 10 flies in my palm. I presumed they had grown from maggots in the carcasses of kangaroo and cattle drawn to the creek. Before long my fingers were grey and bloody from the buzzing bodies and I scrubbed my hands in the sand.
In 1845, on a quest to find the inland sea that did not exist, Charles Sturt moved along Eyre Creek until at last, his men weak and his horses close to failing, he retreated south. The Simpson Desert had very nearly killed him and his men. His story was another reminder that it was a place to take great care.
Sturt, almost 50 years of age, set out from Adelaide on 10 August 1844 with 15 men, including John McDouall Stuart, the expedition draftsman, whose path I would cross agai
n. The party also included a surgeon, stockman, bullock drivers and a sailor. The party took with them, among other things, a boat, bullock drays, horse carts, 200 sheep, two sheep dogs and four kangaroo dogs. Two months into the expedition Sturt wrote to a friend of his quest for an anticipated inland sea:
Tomorrow we start for the ranges and then for the waters – the strange waters on which boat never swam and over which flag never floated … We have the heart of the interior laid open to us, and shall be off with a flowing sheet in a few days.
He was very, very wrong. Later, having breached the desert ramparts, he wrote the land was ‘The most forbidding our eyes had ever wandered over’.
Sturt arrived home in Adelaide on 19 January 1846. He had been carried much of the way south in a cart, sick with scurvy and unable to walk until he had consumed some wild berries. Even so, Sturt wrote that, on crossing the threshold to his home, his wife saw him and collapsed. He then, ‘raised my wife from the floor on which she had fallen, and heard the carriage of my considerate friends roll rapidly away.’
Sturt never again went in search of the Inland Sea. Instead of water lapping on shores he found a sea of sand and a blinding sun that seared his sanity.
Our evening camp was not as good as I would have liked but I wanted to have the weight of saddles, water and food off the camels early. With tired, resigned sighs they dropped to the ground more often as the day wore on. Their weights were heavy and if I found the going desperately hard, for them it must have been doubly so. Kabul would drop first, followed by Chloe and Kashgar. It happened at the first dune after Big Red and four times later. I rationalised that their dropping might be because of the change in activity, going up and down the dunes, and to the weight they were carrying, which was more than they had carried before.
We approached each new dune with some trepidation. They were high; challenging and confronting. I tried to crab my way across the faces, zigzagging as we made our way to the top. The only sounds were panting, the creak of leather, a slosh of water and a quiet crunch as feet and pads moved across the sand’s thin surface crust.
Camels carried what I had planned. Kabul carried around 200 kilograms, 88 kilograms of water, most of the food, the mobile-sat phone, the rifle and the steel-framed winged saddle. Chloe carried around 120 kilograms, including water, spare rope, food and miscellaneous supplies like books and medical kits, camel and human. Kashgar’s load remained similar to that which she always carried; the swag, the camera and the food for the day.
Early that day the camels seemed almost fearful of being in the desert. Kabul’s nostrils flared and his whimpering gave away his uncertainty. Was it the dingo loping off over a dune or the scent of camels on the breeze? I was unsure, so I unzipped the rifle from its case and carried it over my shoulder. On arriving at camp I fired it twice, just to make sure. I paced out 100 metres, walked back and settled myself in the sand. I aimed for a small log on the face of the dune opposite. I fired and the round struck just a fraction low. I turned to watch the effect the sound had on the camels. They did not take fright and resumed chewing their cud as I watched. I took up the same position and fired again.
I remembered that camels and rifles did not always go well together. In 1846 John Horrocks, the first explorer in Australia to use a camel, was shot by one. As Horrocks was preparing his gun to shoot a bird, Harry the camel lurched and caused the weapon to discharge. The ramrod took off two fingers and ripped through Horrocks’ face, knocking out a row of teeth. A few weeks later he died of an infection caused by the accident. In his will Horrocks ordered that Harry be shot.
I wanted to do more than 25 kilometres a day as the crow flew. This was a lot, given the amount of climbing and descending we had to do. But I knew we had to keep moving. I felt that if I lost focus and drive I would vanish in the emptiness, that my soul would dissolve and my flesh and bones would be nothing but dust. But it was not only because I felt I could vanish in the emptiness, it was because of a fear inside me. It was a fear not only of failure to complete what I had set out to do, or even death. It was a fear of failing myself. This was because I wanted to exalt in my own dreams and it meant I would hurt myself. Was I up to it? Could I do it?
As I sat on my rolled-up swag, sipping coffee from my old Foreign Legion steel mug, with headlamp on my head, I reflected on the day and reminded myself why I was there. We had been close to the QAA Line, one of a number of tracks over the desert created by geological parties using seismic survey in the 1950s and 1960s. The QAA Line headed west till at a point north of Poeppel Corner it turned south onto another track and then became the French Line, the only east–west track across the Simpson Desert. I wanted to contact a person who could reassure Warwick that he need not send out a rescue party.
Camels and I had a Toyota pull up to us on the track. A tinted window slid down to release mint scented cool air. The air brushed my face and the driver spat at me, ‘You are a bloody idiot,’ and with a rigid finger to the desert, to the camels and me, concluded with a ‘What a waste of time.’ Before I could reply, or even ask if he would pass a message to Warwick, the window slid closed, the vehicle forced into gear and the diesel engine took him away.
In his vehicle, how could he see the value of what we were doing? The unanswered question was why did we get frissons of empathetic pleasure when we read about the ‘Worst Journey in the World’, go climbing, sailing or otherwise risk everything to achieve something that has no intrinsic value? Even without knowing the answers to these questions we recognise people who do these things are fascinating. Why do some people do these things without compulsion, without any exterior force being applied to them? Why do human beings go out of their way to push themselves beyond what is normally required of them by society, when society is at best ambivalent about the activity itself?
The answer was for me clear: because it is what makes us human. We look for challenges. I was sure the willingness to do this was in all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, hence the feelings of empathy and sharing in the fear and the cold and the hunger and the loneliness. Human beings are the only creatures to look beyond themselves. I believed it was what made us great and provided us with a remarkable ability to improvise, adapt and, ultimately, to survive.
For some reason this drive has been numbed in many of us, indeed actively discouraged in many people all over the world. Perhaps it is because people have become factors of production. Maybe this explained the little financial and social support we provide to poets, playwrights, performers and dreamers, those people who remind us that our lives, to be most economic and efficient, are regulated, managed, self-proscribed and, too often, directed by others.
I wanted to tell him, to cry out to the desert; there is value in passion, in touching the land and feeling a sunset touch your soul. But he was gone, and no matter what I said or did he would never hear me. I wanted to challenge him to look, and it became clear to me why I was in the desert. It was in seeking that I acknowledged my true self, a seeker of moments when my heart sang and my mind swam with colour.
As we camped on the western slope of a dune we were denied the sunrise until late in the morning. We were, however, blessed with sunrise on the facing dune, which described itself as a darkened line of shadow being pulled down into the sand to reveal a swathe of light. It was cold and as I left the swag I pulled on my woollen cap and curled the scarf around my neck. My lips were so dry I could feel the moist flesh inside wanting to split open the tight thin skin. The camels were just up and browsing.
Camp 4 Evening
I sat on the metal food box, the fire a long arm’s reach away, dinner warm in my belly. There was plenty of fuel in the swales between the dunes, where old stands of georgina gidgee had shed branches. In fact, across the Simpson Desert there was plenty of fuel among the pigweed and the flowers. I loved it here at night! There was probably no human being within 50 kilometres in any direction. The night was cold and the stars hard and brilliant in velvet dark. There is somethin
g profoundly elemental in being alone and self-sufficient.
The camels were tired. What a subdued trio they made after a few days hard work! Kashgar stopped prancing, Chloe continued to pointedly ignore me and Kabul manfully carried on. He sat down three times with a low groan and a sigh, Chloe only once. I unloaded the camels just after 6 p.m. and it was not until 8.30 that Chloe got to her feet and started to move around to graze. Both Kashgar and Kabul remained down and chewing. I knew these first few days had been hard on them so I watched them closely and checked them again for rubs and small hurts. If they were hurt I was finished here. I checked the bowline knots and the long ropes and left them to do camel things and think camel thoughts until the morning.
I watched Kabul, and the fleshy pink inside his nostrils as he tasted the desert air very closely as the days wore on. I reminded myself I needed to have the rifle handy in case we came across any bull camels. The distance between the dunes was only a few hundred metres and if I left it in its case I might not have enough time to bring it to bear, so I fixed up a sling for the rifle out of a spare length of rope and carried it on my shoulder.
Later in the evening, with a hot brew in my hand and the fire a whisper of embers, I turned on the radio to hear something completely unexpected. The last item of ABC’s PM reported on a pair of adventurers named Anderson and Gates from the University of Tasmania. According to the interviewer, the two were pulling a cart east to west across the Simpson Desert. They had made it across the fourth dune from Big Red and were complaining about ‘bush flies’ and a bent shaft on their cart. In the past they had arranged dinner parties underground and out-of-the-way-places to raise money for a scholarship fund. Good for them. Given the speed they suggested they were travelling, and their proposed time of arrival at Dalhousie Springs, I thought it likely we would meet.
