Across the Nullarbor

The night before we left for the Nullabor, we ran again into Jeff at Cape Le Grand National Park.  He is a landscape photographer from Minnesota, married to an Aussie girl, and travels this continent taking magnificent pictures of the grandeur.  I had introduced myself to Jeff at Cape Leeuwin as he was packing up to leave for another shoot location.  Traveling in a big Range Rover, he appeared to have the gear to survive for a long, long time in the Outback, including pretty good wine.

As we sat at a picnic table and ate nuts and bad Aussie jerky, I asked him about the Nullarbor.

“Can’t be quite as intimidating as it’s made out to be, can it?”

“No, but it’s not a minor thing,” he said.  “I can tell you this, there isn’t any cell service for a long, long time.  I carry a satellite phone.”

“Well, I’m looking forward to being out there for Australia Day,” I told him.  “I think it could be a great experience.”

Jeff ran his hand through his dark and graying hair and looked at me with narrowed eyes without speaking.  I ought to have realized he knew better from his years of travel in Oz.

I had romanticized the Nullarbor and timed the motorcycle trip to leave Jack and me in a roadhouse on Australia Day.  In my vision, I figured we’d be drinking beer and singing Waltzing Matilda with “truckies,” wandering backpackers, and a few well heeled travelers out for adventure.

The Nullarbor, geographically, is a limestone shelf that rises up from the bottom of the Australian continent.  Essentially, it is a treeless plain but not quite a desert.  Salt scrub and brush are the predominant forms of plant life.  Snakes, kangaroos, camels, and wombats are the animals in abundance.  Along the coast, where the Nullarbor meets the Southern Ocean, the Great Australian Bight is formed by eons of crustal upthrust and the working of giant waves against the limestone cliffs.  A visitor can look directly down on the sea below from more than a thousand feet above the water.  There are no railings to protect you from your own stupidity.

Depending on the traveler offering the description, the Nullarbor ranges from 500 to 1200 miles across just below the Great Victorian Desert.  The region is also known for an inordinate number of meteor strikes.  The beginning is in the town of Norseman and, fundamentally, it terminates at Port Augusta.  It is, in either case, a long and dramatic road.  The Eyre Highway, which crosses the arid plain, is named after the first Englishman to traverse the expanse with an aboriginal during the mid-eighteenth century.  The sealed road was not finally and completely paved until 1976.

As we left Cape Le Grand, I regretted again the speed with which we had to make this journey.  The cape is a grand sweep of beach with sugary white sand curving around until it meets the spot where Frenchman’s Peak climbs up out of the aqua sea.  No one was on the beach.  A few campers wandered over and at night in the tent I heard the relentless sounding of the sea.  There is no better way to enter sleep.

Less than an hour onto the Nullarbor, we encounter a roadblock.  Fire fighters are stopping traffic, which is only our two motorcycles at the moment, because they are concerned about a brush fire jumping the Eyre Highway and endangering motorists.  Rescue vehicles and a tractor-trailer with a giant bulldozer are parked on the edge of the tarmac, waiting to be summoned to duty.  A dark gray cloud of smoke wavers a few miles to the east.

“How are you fixed for water out here?”  The question came from one of the fire fighters.

“I think we’re good,” I answered.  “Got some bottles and not too far to Balladonia if we can get cleared through here.”

“Yep, yep.  We’ll see quick enough.  If the stay gets long, come on back to the truck and we’ve got ice water.  We’ll fix you up.”

“So, what happens next?”

“We’ll hear on the radio in a bit, mate.  If it jumps, I’ll get in the dozer there and cut a line in front of the fire and me mates will follow in the water truck and put out any little fires that might make it across my line.  No worries.  No worries at all.”

Within minutes, though, we were released to ride and rolled through a short smoky patch of air and saw the flames a hundred yards to the south of the road.  The fire did not yet seem contained.  Bush fires are a great danger annually in Australia and have begun to kill people and destroy homes where the wild land meets urban development.

As we motored eastward, I began to think about the mystique attached to the Nullarbor.  Most Australians have not crossed the odd expanse and likely never will even consider such an endeavor.  A kind of mythology manifested itself in association with the locale and people either fear the great plain or they wish not to have the dramatic stories be proven apocryphal.  Oz becomes more interesting if the stories have a germ of truth.

The most compelling one I heard was from Chris and Christina.  Political refugees from Poland and naturalized Aussie citizens, they were traveling from Perth to Melbourne after purchasing a used car.  About 100 kilometers from any phone or gas or humans, the vehicle shut down and would not restart because of electrical problems.

“We sit there in the dark,” Chris said in his broken English.  “I stop five cars.  Give them my insurance number and ask them to call it for roadside service.  But no one comes.”

The temperature dropped and their only light was the flickering overhead in the cabin of the car.  Unfortunately, Chris, Christina, and their 22 year-old son, who was also traveling, had made the irrational decision of watching a movie called “Wolf Creek” prior to venturing out onto the Nullarbor.

“You see this movie?” the animated Christine kept asking.  “You see this movie?  Oh my god.  I wish we no watch.  But we did.”

“Wolf Creek” is about two lovely backpackers, stranded in the Nullarbor Outback, who are befriended by a man determined to assist travelers on the lonely Eyre Highway.  Unfortunately, he turns out to be a bit of a serial killer that preys the needy and unsuspecting out on the Nullarbor.  Several Aussies mentioned the movie to me, unsolicited, as we crossed the Nullarbor.  There is no doubt it had engaged the audience of three sitting in their broken down 1980 BMW in the dead of an Aussie night.

“I see a ‘fice’,” Chris excitedly tells me.  “Right at the window.  In just a second, it is gone.  But I see a ‘fice.’”

After a second, I realize he is saying “face.”

“But first I see orange ball,” his wife explains.  “I see orange ball move out in sky, very low, come close to us, and then, poof, it go away.”

“And then I see fice,” Chris adds.

“What did it look like?” I ask.

“I don’t know.  Not human.  Big eyes.  Little mouth.  Can’t see nose.  But it gone very fast.”

Oh well.  I realize I have traveled half way around the globe to one of its most remote locales to discover yet another UFO story?

“We were afraid,” Christina told me.  “But nothing happen and 13 hours later Shane come from Caiguna and pick us up.  Nothing bad happen.”

Shane is the operator of the road house in Caiguna, a grim little spot on the Nullarbor where truckies and motorists stop for fuel and food and a cold, cleansing ale.  Caiguna’s caravan park, which is more like a patch of dirt across from a moldy laundry and rest room, is highlighted by a sign on each door warning that “all snakes in the area are poisonous and should be reported to the ‘mangerment.’ “ You are warned to keep the doors closed so deadly reptiles don’t slither in while you shower or do your laundry.   Inside, there is a dim bar, a few Formica tables surrounded by plastic chairs, faded beer posters, and a plastic poster of the numerous spiders that might be crawling into your tent while you sit inside and drink your 7 dollar bottle of beer.

Sadly, there was no drunken revelry to celebrate Australia Day in Caiguna.  I had a bad steak sandwich on dry toast and a cold beer and I headed for the hard ground beneath my tent.  On the way to the rest room to brush my teeth I ran into a camper from Esperance.  I had been talking to him earlier about the beautiful coastal city where he lived.  He was coming out of the rest room showers, shirtless, and walking to his camper as the cool evening wind rose up.

“Getting a bit nippy,” I said.

He looked quickly at me with some fright and put his hands up to cover his nipples.

“Oops.  Sorry.  I’ll just be puttin’ me shirt on then.”

Even in English, things can be lost in translation.

I laughed and headed off to a restive night contemplating spiders and snakes and listening to the great road trains roar past on the lonely Nullarbor.

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