Retrospectives

 

It’s been a long time between pixels. The car's fault was quickly analysed once I finally got it to a Mitsubishi mechanic in Adelaide. Previous mechanics had, somewhere in the debacle, refitted the exhaust recirculation hoses the wrong way round.

Two hundred bucks and I was mobile. Heart in mouth, but mobile. Three days of suburbia, but the compensation was the hospitality of friend and Godsent host Nick, and a few hours catching up with a colleague from my ABC days a quarter of a century ago. Catching up with reading too … devouring long chunks of a biography of Caroline Blackwood.

No, I hadn’t consciously heard of her, either. The serendipity of op and second hand shops. I encountered her biography and bought it for two well spent dollars back on that day when I road tested the Triton (it failed). 

Whittlesea Op Shop. I recommend it.

I found a bookshop, too. Dillons, in Norwood. I now have Kerry O’Brien’s autobiography, nearly a thousand pages of insight, and useful as a wheel-chock if I need to change a tyre.

Then North., at first. Retracing the steps I had taken on the original route in from Melbourne. Those and the road of defeat as I made for Adelaide. 

But in the reverse direction, now.

Up, up, up, back past Parachilna, where I had turned back days before, and on into the realms I had heard of but places I had never been.

Places I had heard of and longed to see.

Leigh Creek: refuel. Maree: Refuel. 

Night fell as I passed into the nowhere lands, North and West of Maree. The sealed road had long since turned to 600 kms plus of dirt. The dirt that makes up most of the iconic Oodnadatta Track.

Stars so close I could pluck them, but I was used to that from living on the edge of the outback at Charleville, and from my frequent travels across the wide lands of Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory. Familiar intensity of outback skies and endless, harsh terrain.

Apart from one car, driving around the caravan park in William Creek, I did not see another vehicle, and human beings only in my brief time in the William Creek pub.

No I didn’t have a drink. I had discovered I needed permits to (legally) head up to Lake Eyre. I was supposed to scan one of the blobby-splotchy code things that young (and intelligent old) folk use these days.

I pointed my camera at it, took a pic, and hey presto! I had a picture of a blobby-splotchy code thing. Nothing else happened.

Nothing else ever has when I’ve pointed and clicked at those things. I even had one on my work car back in the day – back when I drove a sort of sewing machine on wheels.

Point. Click. Picture of a blobby-splotchy code thing.

The customers chatted, asked questions, suggested I fly over Lake Eyre but yeah, nah, not on my budget. I said goodnight, ate a can of tuna, and moseyed onward and westward.

So I skipped Lake Eyre – it was night time, and I had seen inland lakes filled with water twice before. Not Lake Eyre, but still. Mind-blowing, but not this time. Two hundred midnight kilometres of dirt avoided.

Onward, westward.

The corrugations for the next 200 kms were as bad as I’d ever seen.

Well … a couple of times I’d seen slightly deeper, spaced-outer ones that were worse. The worst I recall were out at Kata Tjuta. But I only covered 20 kms of them. This was 200 kms of spleen shattering, brain liquefying demons. First gear stuff. Selecting sidetracks, as Anne and I had on the Strzelecki years earlier. Gentler than the road. 

The occasional dead car on the roadside lay as reminder there’s no room for error. These roads devour sedans, sewing machines, drunks, speeders. I inched along for 180 kms, grabbing a sleep or two beneath the crushing God-filled presence of the outback sky.

Not a human soul in sight. 

I passed, over the hours of day and night, intersections with those other two iconic tracks, the Strzelecki and the Birdsville. Anne and I had covered a few hundred kilometres of the Strzelecki – also in the night – en route from Arkaroola to Tibooburra. On honeymoon, as you do. The Strzelecki and its sidetracks. Now it was the Oodnadatta and its sidetracks.

I was a frequent visitor to Birdsville back in the day, though I took the Track only as far as Nappanerica. Did that  a few times (even baptized a child atop of Nappanerica / Big Red).

This was different. Officially 620 kilometres of unsealed road. No time for wandering minds. Focus, manoeuvre, accelerate, decelerate. Occasional stops to ease cramp or pluck a star from the sky.

Night faded as I approached Oodnadatta – I even saw a vehicle, a roadtrain – as I approached, but he or she disappeared down tan alternative road, the direct road to Coober Pedy. 

Dust trail fading in the distance.

I headed on, into Oodnadatta. Refuelled, breakfasted. Then on, daylight now, to Marla. 200 more kilometres, and though the road was smoother dirt, it also hid the worst patch of corrugations of the entire track. My mirror jumped off the windscreen in protest. 

At Marla I intersected a previous life of many travels. The Stuart Highway. Sealed. I was a prisoner of the white lines again. Yet I was still in the vastness, the comforting, God-filled vastness of the Red Centre. As I turned south once more I set cruise control on 110. South, south to Port Augusta.

My heart was creeping slowly out of my mouth, now. Still apprehensive, but taking a peak around. The mice were asleep. The road was sealed. Kangaroos were sleeping. Occasional vehicles appeared and disappeared. Fuel was available from time to time.

Day Two of the revised-revised schedule, stretched on. 770 kms of what the Americans call black top. With white lines. As night fell I was still 100 kms north of Port Augusta. Ironically, as I intersected the Eyre Highway, I was only about half a dozen kilometres from where I had been when I limped south to Adelaide four days earlier.

Refuelled. Turned right. Travelled a few kilometres down the road, then grabbed my first sleep of Night Two.

Ceduna and the Nullabor lay ahead.