The Outback is my happy place. It caresses me. Sure it can be harsh, and it is nearly always dry. But throw in some spinifex tinged slightly green with a rare rain and it becomes incredibly soft on the eye.
The first night we reached Ingomar five hours north of Pt. Augusta, just on sunset. The glorious red earth, sanctified by salt-bush and spinifex, spread as far as the eye could see – all under a coral and baby blue evening sky. And the incredible silence, as always, made me close my eyes and be thankful.
Day 2 we reached Uluru. Ayer’s Rock – truly one of Earth’s natural wonders. There is a palpable spirituality about it. No wonder the Aboriginal people hold it sacred. It’s like an enormous parent figure – whispering its wise and ancient authority over all who stand before it.
We set up our camp table and chairs, brought out some cold beers from the camper fridge and prepared to watch the monolith go to sleep. It erupts most nights in a blaze of red, for just a few minutes before the sun goes down, and then gradually darkens, becoming almost ominous and glowering. It makes you realise that every natural thing on Earth has life. And this is one of the most astounding, and arresting.
Spent two days at Uluru and on night four camped at the Temple Bar caravan park. This is not your standard caravan park. Apart from being immaculately clean, it is perched at the foot of a red craggy escarpment that is part of the West MacDonnell Ranges. We pulled camp table and chairs out of our cosy three berth motor home, and pulled the rings on our stubbies of beer. Birds set up their evening cacophony around us – parrots, galahs, butcherbirds, red-tailed cockatoos. A young man walked past our site – gorgeous Staffy Lab cross dog on a lead. We admired his dog and he stopped for a chat. Peter was an uncluttered sort of bloke. Lived there in the park with his canine mate Gypsy. He’d been a stockman on Milton Park station for many years and in response to our questions, burst forth with stories of his life out there. As these seemed to include another person we asked if he had a partner. ‘Nope. Just Gypsy an’ me.’ I hung on every word. Owners of Milton Park were mostly absentee and Peter and his fellow hands looked after the place. There was a roster of them to cater for passing visitors in the eleven bedroom homestead – supplies to be ordered and brought in by truck fortnightly, breakfast to be cooked for guests. There was mustering to be done, fences and water to be checked – across hundred kilometer arcs in every direction. Station life has always appealed to me. Don’t know how long I could live in that sort of isolation but there’s something very romantic about it.
Even before we got to Alice there were properties and homesteads to be seen that evoked memories of childhood – the homestead sitting on a dry saltbush landscape, made an oasis by sentinel gumtrees. Cactus gone astray. Old stone barns, assorted rusty sheds, free-range chooks, old slow dogs on missions we’ll never understand, cats, hay sheds. Rusty redundant cars – some of them fallen away to mere chassis. I imagined everyday lives lived in these dwellings. A perpetual wisp of smoke from the chimney, the smell of soot and roast lamb in the kitchen. Nothing but weeds beyond the vegie garden and the dahlias for church.
Just remembering Judith Wright’s wonderful poem ‘South of my Days’.
‘South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite –
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek leaf-silenced,
willow-choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple
branching over and under, blotched with green lichen;
and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.
O cold the black-frost night. The walls draw in to the warmth
and the old roof cracks its joints; the slung kettle
hisses a leak on the fire. Hardly to be believed that summer
will turn up again some day in a wave of rambler roses,
thrust its hot face in here to tell another yarn –
a story old Dan can spin into a blanket against the winter.
Seventy years of stories he clutches around his bones.
Seventy summers are hived in him like old honey.
Droving that year, Charleville to the Hunter,
nineteen one it was, and the drought beginning;
Sixty head left at the McIntyre, the mud round them
hardened like iron; and the yellow boy died
in the sulky ahead with the gear, but the horse went on,
stopped at the Sandy Camp and waited in the evening.
It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees.
Came to the Hunter, three hundred head of a thousand left –
cruel to keep them alive – and the river was dust. ………..’
There’s more but what a wonderful evocative poem by a woman with an intense observation, understanding and love of the Outback.
This account of my road trip has just begun and there’s so much more to tell. As I have written quite a lot this time perhaps I will leave the rest for the next blog.
I love my place on the planet – Australia. The stories, the culture, the history, the diverse landscape. Next time I will write of the rainforests and their dwellers, and of my yearning to find myself a clearing in one, and write a book there.
Till next time,
Warmly,
Sue