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Nullarbor
Image by milngavie01
Way out west
By Jim Taylor
Feral camels, ‘skimpies’, ghost towns and fridges for mailboxes… it’s all part of the eccentric tapestrythat is the Western Australian outback.
DAYS of unbending desert highway might not be everyone’s idea of a pleasant drive, but if your daily life feels like one big traffic jam, the endless road, open sky and unbroken horizons of Western Australia could be just what you’re looking for. Two of us decided to test our stamina, and our friendship, over the space of a week’s trip from Melbourne to Perth across the Nullarbor Plain in a camper van. For me, the experience has had some lasting, and surprising, benefits.
The westbound highway leaves Melbourne in a headlong rush over the Westgate Bridge, past the towering glass cliffs of the city’s waterfront, before ploughing into the ever-flattening farmlands of Victoria, then South Australia. Your eyes adjust to the increasingly bare landscape, so by the time you hit the real outback, west of Port Augusta, you’ve become alert to small details. Watch out for the odd improvised mailbox (disused fridges and plastic oil drums nailed to posts are popular) parked where a dirt track meets the highway, and wonder who on earth lives at the end of that track – and why.
After the aggressive lane-hopping of Australia’s urban highways, you’ll be delighted that, instead of being deadly rivals, the few others on the road are now your comrades, waving as they pass. There’s an etiquette to the Nullarbor wave, however. The more like your own the other person’s vehicle is, the more sincere the wave you can expect. Undisputed kings of the highway are the massive road trains and their drivers will not wave at you, though if you persevere you might eventually get one to raise an index finger from his lofty steering wheel.
And there is plenty of wildlife, not all of it native to Australia. A herd of feral camels grazing by the side of the road took us by surprise, though they are common enough to be considered a problem – over half a million throughout Australia. They’re descended from those imported as pack animals during the construction of the country’s telegraph and railway networks in the 19th century. You’ll also see goats, dingoes, emus and, of course, plenty of wallabies and kangaroos.
When it comes to camping for the night, you’ll probably have a target destination in mind, based on the number of miles you are willing to drive each day. If you can hold a moderate cruising speed, you’ll save a lot on fuel, miss fewer of the random wildlife sightings and have more time for a few interesting diversions, such as potholing near Cocklebiddy, whale-watching from the awe-inspiring Bunda Cliffs or a visit to the world-famous surf spot at Cactus.
Roadhouses are service stations, or “servos”, with a shop, a bar, a motel and a campsite. If you stop during the day, you’ll wonder where these places get the customers to sustain the nightlife of strip shows and country-and-western acts advertised in their windows, but from dusk the road trains start to pull in and, after a shower and a bite to eat, you might want to hit the bar for a taste of truckie culture.
The daytime population of places like Balladonia, with its museum of Skylab space station debris, might be in single figures, but in the evening it can swell to a hundred. As well as drivers, there are roadmen, ranchers, cops and the so-called “grey tide” of pensioners in their top-of-the-range four-wheel-drive vehicles and caravans. It’s a popular lifestyle choice for Australia’s retired couples – suburbia on wheels.
There’s no need to get paranoid about fuel, as roadhouses are no more than 200km apart. Still, we miscalculated near the start and found ourselves turning off the main road in search of petrol at a place called Iron Knob. Its service station was a rusting hulk, but the nearby visitor centre was staffed by two nice old ladies with a decent line in home bakes. They also knew a man called Jeff who could fill us up from a jerry can.
The ladies were happy to receive a small donation for the refreshments, provided we sat through a video about the town’s history as the iron-ore capital of Australia. On the wall, behind a display of iron-ore jewellery, was a fraying Union Jack, embroidered by some long-departed members of the Iron Knob Women’s Guild with the words ‘In Service to God and Loyalty to the Crown’. It might be just a day’s drive from Melbourne’s suburbs, but this is a million miles from the cultural maelstrom of Collingwood and St Kilda. Australia’s dash from British colony to Pacific powerhouse has left Iron Knob, and a thousand other outposts like it, well in its wake.
Australia’s mining industry works round the clock to keep pace with China’s insatiable hunger, but it’s a circus that moves from place to place, leaving ghost towns like Iron Knob behind. In these you’ll find a few stranded eccentrics, eking out a living from the trickle of wayfarers and tourists.
Another such is Norseman, named after a horse who turned up a nugget with his hoof and started the gold rush that brought the town into existence. A bronze statue of the horse stands proudly in what is otherwise a fairly sad town centre of boarded-up premises.
One of the few still open is an unlikely doll museum, where a sombre lady charges a couple of dollars to view her macabre collection. Goods trains plying from Esperance to Kalgoorlie pass through town, accentuating the eerie atmosphere with their ghostly horns.
Still thriving is the gold mining town of Kalgoorlie (known as Kal). There you’ll find a plethora of pubs, usually called hotels by Australians, advertising “skimpies” – barmaids in their underwear. Though you might expect a sweaty, testosterone-fuelled ogle-fest, the family groups and elderly men in the bar we visited seemed more interested in the Aussie rules footie on the telly than the contours of our hostess.
West of the gold fields, the landscape becomes tamer and, though you’re still 400 miles from Perth, it feels like the home straight. By the time the Indian Ocean does finally appear in the distance, you know that over the past thousand miles or two you’ve undergone a change.
For a start, you’ve passed through three time zones. Knackered? Probably. Calmer? Certainly. Can driving be a form of meditation? Possibly, if you don’t have to change speed or turn your steering wheel for hours on end (the longest undeviating stretch is Ninety Mile Straight, east of Balladonia).
There’s something about never having a fo
cal point closer than ten miles away that smoothes out your brainwaves. It also has the apparent effect of smoothing out your forehead, because everyone I’ve met since coming home swears I look about ten years younger.
And the friendship? You can’t cross a continent without going over a few bumps, and me and Willie certainly hit a pothole or two, but none big enough to throw us off course. Here’s to the next trip.
Flights to Australia with British Airways and Qantas start from £585 return. Britz (www.britz.com) offers a range of options for seeing the best that Australia has to offer, among them a two-berth camper van for a week from around £430. For more holiday deals, see www.australia.com. For reservations and discount hotel deals, see www.australiahotels.net.