Day 9 - A Dip into the Connie Sue

Monday, 7 June 2021

Over morning coffee, we do the sums on how long it will take to do this backroad v-jag up to Warburton on a ditchy road. We did 20 kms in 2 hours yesterday. If nothing improves, that’s roughly 50 kms a day. 230 kms with rest stops will take 5 or 6 days. And we won’t even be to the Western Australian border. For a proposed 5000 km trip in 6-8 weeks that’s a big chunk of time for a short distance gain. We opt for turning around, heading back to the Great Central.

Heading east, we hit a patch of bitumen (paved road), which is surprising – none of the Outback Way was paved when we did our first cross-country run in 2010. However, in the 2008 Outback Way guidebook we used back then, it said “plans were in the works for upgrades to the Great Central Rd”, which included either bitumen or high-grade gravel. I wrote in my travel blog back then that we were grateful we could do the trip on a dirt road. Yeah it was rough and bumpy, but it was real outback.

Cruising along the bitumen highway is smooth and pleasant. But something is lost. It hasn’t (yet) attracted many tourists as the road is still pretty empty. But it feels too neat, tidy, organised, civilised for the surrounding land. I become a typical tourist, watching the world whizz by in air-conditioned, smooth-riding comfort.

It goes on for nearly 100kms before giving way to high-grade gravel – still an improvement over the dirt and sand roads we traversed before, but a least it feels like driving in wild country again.

At a high point, still 50 kms from Warburton, the phones start pinging and singing. We pull over and check email, then find a campsite nearby, a kilometre or two off the highway. This is flat barren desert country with 360 views around a flat pancake land. A perfect invitation for star-gazing.

Johan and I get along pretty well we reckon for having lived the past 28 years together. But like any long-term couple, we can be prone to petty disagreements and squabbles at times. Tonight the argument is around whether the cosmic south poles changes (in our perception of it) with the season or is it always located in the same place in the sky. Perhaps we’ve never been good at high-level spatial thinking but our brains just can’t wrap around the 3D picture of planet earth and how things change as it revolves around the sun. We try using a dinner plate and knife to mimic the earth and its axis, Johan’s head for the sun. I walk the dinner plate, tilted at an appropriate angle, around Johan, convinced that this proves the celestial pole stays in the same place year-round. He’s not convinced, sure there’s another way of seeing it. The brain strain starts to feel too much and we resolve to look it up on Wikipedia when we get internet connection in Warburton tomorrow. If we remember, that is.

These are things we do know about the deep dark night sky in a vast and open desert: the view of our galaxy runs east to west, angled low in the southern sky; later in the night, when one is prone to get up for a midnight pee, the galaxy has shifted to north/south. Mars sits atop three prominent stars in the west. The eery zodiacal light shoots up from the western horizon where the sun set, shaped like a wizard’s hat, its tip ending at an indistinct point over our heads, its base making an intriguing v-shape with the western end of the Milky Way as it plunges into the horizon. The cause of this light is another point of debate between husband and wife – I looked it up on Wiki when we first saw it on our Pilbara trip this time last year, but can’t remember enough detail to win the debate. Amazingly, you can see the Big Dipper, aka Ursa Major, this far south on the planet. It’s upside down and the lip of the saucepan just kisses the northern horizon. But there it is, the same dipper I saw so prominently in the far north of the USA as a child growing up – the only constellation I really knew well. How can it be that we see it all the way down here?

We live in houses, cars, buildings, oppressed by massive artificial light that robs our intimacy with the night sky. How can humans know these details without access to a wide-open sky on a dark night? What have we lost without this source for awe and wonder?