Day 3 - Laverton and the Outback

No thumps of raindrops are hitting the canvas roof when we wake. It’s 6:30am and we decide to get an early start. We pack up, eat breakfast, and by the time we’re heading back to the highway, the sun is lighting up the Two-Up Club. It’s built like a cock-fighting pen, a circular concrete pad lined with handmade benches.  The patchwork of corrugated iron siding is covered in graffiti. 

Laverton is the official start of the Outback Way. A quaint dishevelled town, heavy black fellas loping around, women pushing prams. Johan fills the tank and chats with them while I sit in the car for another hour of work. Before they wander off they ask for cigarettes or money. I can’t do that, Johan says. But all the best.

The lady in the Visitor Centre recommends the White Cliff Road over the Great Central Road – less mining trucks, fewer ruts. Thirty kilometres in there’s a great camping spot, she says, near some breakaways. Since we’ve already done the Central Road, we’re keen to explore new things. We head out the White Cliff way.

The sun shines at last on the red craggy rocks that circle the camping spot we’ve chosen. The view all the way around is worth the wet 3-day wait to get here. And silence so intense it almost hurts the ears.

Day 2 - Just North of Kalgoorlie

 

Moving into the outback requires peeling layers - urban artifice, suburban parks, wheatbelt uniformity, the occasional nature reserve, small towns toggling remnant bush, much of it claimed by mines or the detritus of bygone days: empty wells, abandoned mine shafts, tattered homes missing roofs and doors, rusted fencing and ancient cow poop.

For us it means adding layers. The sting of the morning cold calls for six layers on the top half, two on the bottom, a wool hat, scarf and mittens. Welcome to winter camping.

 The beach umbrella keeps us dry during breakfast

Our experience with weather forecasts is that they usually err on the side of precipitation. In Australia it usually rains less than they say it will. Since Sunday, when the rain was meant to slow down to near nothing, it’s persisted with uncanny obstinacy. It drizzles and drags one. Looks like it will clear but the woolly sky holds firm and delivers another lot of light rain that ensures everything stays damp or wet.

We arrive in Kalgoorlie early afternoon. The streets are glistening and 17 degrees feels like 10 with the wind. We check out several 4WD stores to enquire about installing air bags on our rear suspension – the heavy trailer is dragging down the rear of the car. But all three shops say it’ll take a few days to get the part we need delivered from Perth. So we bag the idea and head to the Dome instead. We’d spent nearly every day in this salubrious two-story wood-panelled coffee house when we were stuck here for a week last October waiting for our Kia to get fixed. I flip open my computer and clock an hour of work. It’s past 4pm by the time we hit the road. This far east, without changing time zones, the sun sets at 5pm. And the drizzly rain persists. The land is covered in puddles and mud.

We find a spot just north of Kalgoorlie, a short distance from the “Two-up” club, where old-timers congregate in a ramshackle tin shed to play an once-outlawed gambling game. Fortunately on a wet Monday night nobody’s ventured out for a game. The silhouette of a gangly gum rests in the twilight while we share a glass of red. Before it’s half gone the rain resumes. So we head inside the camper to wait it out, hoping for a dry spell long enough to cook our dinner.

Day 1 – Karalee Rocks

 

The forecast for the day we were to leave was rain, continuing through the weekend. We switched gears and made Sunday our new departure date. Light rain in the morning leading to a reasonably clear and dry week ahead.

In Perth on Thursday for the New Norcia Studies journal launch, we talked again about getting vaccinated. I’m gun-shy when it comes to inoculations, so the jab hasn’t been a priority. Still, with quasi-plans to travel to the States later this year, necessity outweighs hesitation. On a whim, with Johan dodging traffic on the busy Perth streets, I check to see if it were possible to get vaccinated that same day. Amazingly, two appointments are available at a suburban medical centre for 9:05 and 9:10pm. “Book ‘em,” Johan said, so I did.

The journal launch finished at 8pm so getting to the medical centre by nine was easy. The doctor on duty was friendly and returned my smile when we entered his inoculation chamber, along with four others. When it was our turn, I expressed my anxiety, not about needles but my lack of trust in vaccines, particularly one that had been developed as quickly as the AstraZeneca. He looked me in the eye and asked if I was a meditator. “I thought so,” he replied to my affirmative response. “So just use your meditation and breathing skills and you’ll be fine, I guarantee it.”

I was fine, until about midday the following day. Harvesting what I could from the autumn garden for our trip, my energy slowly flagged. My head felt thick and my body ached. I went to bed for most of the rest of the afternoon. By bedtime I felt feverish and fluey. Still, the reaction was nothing more than what the media was reporting as “normal”.

Next day my energy rebounded and we finished preparations in a flurry, just in time to relax in front of a Saturday night Netflix movie. I selected Walkabout, a 1971 Australian film by Nicolas Roeg. It seemed a fitting theme on the eve of our next outback trek. And it was.

Set in the era of our youth, we felt nostalgia for that time, which now seems so innocent compared with today’s world. “Walkabout” is a term Aboriginal people have for the initiation ritual used for their youth, when 16-year-old boys are sent into the outback on their own, with only a spear for survival. We were surprised then when the film opened with modern Australia (ca. 1970) as seen through the eyes of the European colonialists: concrete and cars, countless pedestrians pacing the urban streets with glazed-over eyes, luxurious riverside apartments stacked one atop the other. A Volkswagen Beetle (so sweet!) appears taking a typical Australian family to the desert so the father can do his geological research, the 8-year-old son can play his fantasy games, and the 16-year-old daughter can consume the well-planned picnic lunch packed by the absent mum. Alienation and disinterest characterise the family relations, until, in a bizarre twist, the father steps out of the car and starts shooting a real gun at his son, who’s playing war games with his toy gun. Dad discovers the jerry can of fuel in the boot, pours it over the car, sets it on fire and shoots himself in the head. Scared and confused the children disappear into the wilderness.

The rest of the story is about the two kids’ journey into the outback, guided by a traditional Aboriginal boy they meet, ostensibly on his own walkabout, who teaches the city kids the ways of the bush. It’s poignant, disturbing, quintessentially ‘70s in style, and heavy on the message of colonial imperialism and the devastation imposed upon indigenous culture.

This was the “story” I saw ten years ago when we took our first long trek across the centre of Australia: that the core of Australia is Aboriginal, raw, relentless in both beauty and harshness, and spiritual in essence. That the people who inhabited this land for millennia prior to European arrival had a different relation to the land, each other, and life. And that fundamentally it was spiritual and sustainable. And that the culture of these people was crushed to the point of near-extinction, its remaining inhabitants tired, drunk, dazed, and grumpy.

We set off Sunday morning amidst persistent rain showers and a woolly sky. We bump fists to wish ourselves a good and safe journey. We carry a weight of material possessions to protect us from too much discomfort and danger, but it still allows for a mostly outdoor life for the next 6-8 weeks. Our route is due east on the Outback Way, the gravel road that cuts across the red centre of Australia to Uluru, then north from Alice Springs to Darwin, west across the gravel Gibbs River Rd in the Kimberley, and the long southerly trek back home from Broome. Winter in the outback will be warm in the day, cool to cold at night, and stunningly beautiful with golden light kissing the land, wildflowers and water pools. So unlike the stinking hot, fly-ridden journey we took in the middle of summer ten years ago.

Around four in the afternoon we take a dirt road north off the Great Eastern Hwy just past the Yellowdine Roadhouse. Google Maps shows an intriguing cluster of open rock, and a sign points the way to Karalee Rocks. It doesn’t mention camping but when we arrive, a cluster of caravans spread out across a flat makeshift campground. Must be a well-kept secret or a tip on some free-camping website.

It’s been four months since we’ve had the trailer out and our set-up routine is hampered by our feeble memories, which leave out some critical pieces. Still, we have enough time before sundown to explore the rock face, which was used to collect water in a nearby dam in the region’s pastoral past, and enjoy a beer before dinner and an early bed.

Our expected route:

 

Day 17/18: Two Days in Darwin

Arriving back in a city again after 2-1/2 weeks in the bush was bound to be challenging. We walked the spritzy waterfront in Darwin just before sunset feeling lost and disconnected. The disorderly fullness of the bush was replaced by tall monuments of steel, a nicely groomed and protected swimming lagoon and a span of restaurants with seriously overpriced menus.

Sixty dollars spent on two orders of fish and chips and two not-quite-ice-cold beers felt like an anti-climax to a fortnight of cooking for ourselves (mostly cold sandwiches and salads) -- a decidedly more thrifty, and healthy, way of feeding the body. But the walk around the waterfront at twilight was enjoyable, particularly with persistent lightening flashing amazing skyscapes in the storm clouds above the harbor.

Our last full day started with a cool sit in the Top End Windscreen customer lounge. The chip acquired on our second day out will cost $310 to fix. Still, it's cheaper than the extra $1500 they were asking for full coverage insurance. On this muggy day in Darwin, this isn't a bad place to hang for a few hours.

Fitted with a nice new windscreen, we head into Darwin for an afternoon of sight-seeing. We start out with another disappointing (too salty) meal at the Asian kiosk on the Stokes Hill Wharf. The view across the tropical bay at least provides some enjoyment. Constructed in 1895, the jetty was a prime target for the Japanese when they waged an intensive air strike on Darwin in February 1943. Few people may know that Darwin received more air strikes and greater loss of lives over an 18 month period than Pearl Harbor experienced. Much of the focus, however, was on American military ships in the northern port.

Next we visit the Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Arriving later than intended, we have only an hour to view this amazingly comprehensive museum, which showcases flora and fauna native to the Top End, indigenous art from local Aboriginal communities, a gallery on Alfred Russel Wallace (a colleague of Charles Darwin who contributed significantly to the 'evolution of species' theory), and a fascinating exhibition on Cyclone Tracy, which ravaged Darwin on Christmas Day 1974. The sound box (a 2-metre square room in total darkness) was sensational for providing a first hand aural experience of what a cyclone sounds like when you're in the midst of it.

The Darwin Military Museum was next on our list, but the day was getting on so instead we opted for a walk along the shores of East Point, a delightful nature reserve on Darwin's east end. The setting sun in the west countered by another billowing lightening cloud in the east provided a pleasing finale to our Darwin Day -- and a gentle, if somewhat sorrowful, ending to our eighteen day Kimberley journey.

 The only croc we ever saw in the Northern Territory...

Darwin skyline

Day 16 - Leaving the Outback

By now it's probably pretty clear that I love water. One of my principle pleasures of life in the hot outback is the freedom it affords this water-loving traveller to enjoy getting wet, repeatedly, without the threat of ending up shivering and having to don layers of clothes. Moving between wet and dry is effortless and a supreme pleasure.

Such was our last day in the wilderness. After packing up camp at Wongi Falls we drove back up the Litchfield Highway and stopped at Florence Falls. A one-kilometre track took us up and through a savannah (dry) forest and then down into a tropical rainforest along the river that fed the falls. Water flowed, gurgled and shimmied through curvaceous rock pools and meanderings through the dense dripping natural gardens. At the falls, yet another deep pool provided an excellent swimming spot for hot tourists -- of which there were a few too many for our liking.

We moved from there to the Buley Rockhole, a spot a bit further up the river. The span of rockpools spread wider here and so did the tourists, each finding their own little nook or cranny to take a delightful plunge in. We found one as close to perfection as you can get in the wild: spanning eight or ten metres across and lined with smooth orange flat rocks, perfect for lounging, the pool quickly dropped into an abyss maybe ten or twelve feet deep. Clear, cool, continuously fed by a soft-falling water source that kept it clean and pure. I turned into a water seal and swam deep and long in this watery bliss.

And that was the pinnacle and end of our outback journey. Though curious about Darwin, my enthusiasm for spending time in a 'cosmopolitan city' (which it advertises itself as, despite it's relatively puny size: 125,000 occupants) isn't high. Checking into the Hidden Valley Caravan Park just outside of town felt a bit like taking a child who's had a free reign in the glorious outdoors, back into the confinement of her home, with all its rules, regulations and orderliness. The grouchy lady who checked us in could have been someone's mother, tired of her relentless captivity in work and chores, silently resenting the child who has the freedom to play and be wild.