Gibb River and Beyond

 

If you happen to be in Derby (which to the horror of my Derbyshirian friend Lisa is pronounced to rhyme with Herbie) and to be planning to drive East, you face an existential choice.

I find such choices are often shaped by conversations in laundromats and
pubs. Søren Kierkegaard never mentioned that. Though to be honest I probably only ever digested one paragraph of his seemingly endless angst-thought.

Though did I tell you the story of a bus trip I took from Brisbane to Adelaide? Somewhere after Dubbo my next-seat neighbour could stand it no longer. The world’s most moebius strip, most Escher-esque question must be “is that an interesting book you’re reading?”

Admittedly it’s fairly pretentious to read Kierkegaard on a bus (as it is to mention Kierkegaard, or write “Escher-esque” in a blog, but moi?). At any rate I was reading The Sickness Unto Death because I thought Kierkegaard might say something useful for a thesis I was writing about universalist Christology and for heaven’s sake don’t even ask. Just a sort of word-salad, à la Trump perhaps, that I like to produce when I want to sound as if I know something.

As my Facebook profile indicates, I almost do, sometimes.

So the said woman spent from about Cobar to Broken Hill explaining why it was good that I was reading this book because remote Australia needs more doctors.

I drove that route many times, but never took Kierkegaard along again.

But existentialism? Which way East should I take from Derby to Wyndham? Nine and a half hours (915 km) via the iconic Fitzroy Crossing, or approximately eight hours (526 km) via  the equally iconic Gibb River Road?

Iconic, at least in my universe, because they are each often cut off by flooding in the Wet. I am not travelling in the Wet. Do not attempt this in the Wet.

I have not seen rain since those torrential downpours near the Pinnacles in WA.

Of course I took the shorter option, because, well, dirt. Red dirt. Five hundred kilometres of red dirt (plus one sidetrack). Because 600+ kilometres of red dirt on the Oodnadatta track was not enough red dirt.

So, just out of Derby, beautiful Derby, (rhymes with Herbie, remember?) predawn, I turned left. The next 45 kilometres were dead straight. The first 128 kilometres were sealed road – with white lines. (I once had an “electric typewriter with lift-off.” “Sealed road with white lines” is similar).

At kilometre 128 there was a bridge. There was the magnificent rocky outburst of the Napier Ranges. I could spend twelve lifetimes there. And then there was dirt. Dust. Corrugations. Flies. Dumped cars from time to time that, well, just hadn’t made it. One was a near-new Landcruiser. Walk away. That one was so remote it hadn’t even been stripped yet. But very un-alive. Very dead. I checked to ensure its occupants weren’t but they, it seemed, had left the scene, leaving only butts and empties.

Dead.

Silent Gorge (Dulundi) on the Bell River was not dead. That was a side-track. Oh, the multi-million or is it billion-year-old footsteps of the Creator. Very not dead … but one soon could be if stuck or lost there. The traditional owners, Ngarinyin have known that for millennia. They were not lost, they are not dead (despite the worst excesses of colonization).

The Dalmanyi Falls were not dead. They whispered eternity. They are not dead.

Yes, I did take a sidetrack. Corrugation after corrugation of corrugation. Well-travelled though – this was not a self-made sidetrack like that forged by, and nearly claiming the life of  Carolina Wilgahese a few weeks earlier, a thousand or two kilometres south.  

But yeah, it was a road loudly described as “a rugged, unsealed track suitable only for four-wheel-drive vehicles.” The Triton rattled mercilessly.

Then on, on, on. Photos beyond number, though it was dark by the time I descended the escarpment a hundred or so kilometres south west of Wyndham, so that one got away. I hauled the car over to the side of the road, where the two routes meet again, and slept happy with the existential, bone-shaking choice I had made.

A woman in the laundromat in Derby had told me, at length, how I needed to visit the Bungle Bungles. How she had been there and though the road was rough for her Amarok she had the tyres set at 50 psi and only burst one and the caravan lost something but … whatever. The Bungle Bungles weren’t on my 500 km dirt road, and I had seen Dalmanyi Falls and a dead Landcruiser. Next time, maybe?  

Wyndham was still eighty kms away but it would have to wait. My Triton settled down to sleep at the Kununurra Junction. It was a twenty hour day.