Authors: Bill Bryson
In every direction for as far as the eye could see the earth was covered with spinifex, a brittle grass, which grew in clumps so closely packed as to give an appearance of verdure. It looked like land that could support a thousand head of cattle an acre. In fact, spinifex is useless – the only wholly non-edible grass in the world apparently. It is also murder to travel through because its needle-sharp points, tipped in silica, break off when brushed and become embedded in the skin, where they fester into small but horrible sores. Scattered among the spinifex were turpentine bushes and man-sized termite mounds, which stood in the desert like ancient dolmens. And that was it.
After about three hours we passed through Katherine, a dusty, inoffensive little community, and the last town
worthy of the name for 400 miles. Beyond it, the landscape grew more visibly impoverished, and the traffic thinned out from little to almost none. For much of the way the highway was simply a taut line connecting impossibly distant horizons, the landscape on either side a monumental emptiness punctuated by spinifex, low bushes, lunar rocks and almost nothing else. The sky everywhere was huge, and brilliantly blue.
We had been driving for perhaps ninety minutes in a largely mindless silence when at last Allan spoke. He said: ‘How are you off for urine?’
‘I have all I need, thank you. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s just that I notice we’re nearly out of petrol.’
‘Truly?’ I leaned over to confirm that Allan could indeed interpret a petrol gauge – if not perhaps quite as frequently as one might wish.
‘Interesting time to notice, Allan,’ I observed.
‘This thing just seems to suck up fuel,’ he replied, perhaps just a trifle inadequately. ‘So where are we?’ he asked after a moment’s further reflection.
‘We’re in the middle of nowhere, Allan.’
‘I mean in relation to the next town.’
I looked at the map. ‘In relation to the next town, we are’ – I looked again, just to confirm – ‘in the middle of nowhere.’ I did some measurements with my fingers. ‘We appear to be about forty kilometres from a dot on the map called Larrimah.’
‘And do they have petrol there?’
‘One sincerely hopes so. And do you think we have enough to get there?’
‘One sincerely and, if I may just say, bloody well hopes so.’
We chugged into Larrimah on the last vapour of gas. It
was an all but dead hamlet, but it did have a petrol station. While Allan fuelled up, I went in and purchased a stock of bottled water and snack foods for future emergencies. We vowed that henceforth we would jointly keep a steady eye on the fuel gauge and not let it dip below the halfway mark. There were even greater stretches of emptiness to come.
Still, the very slight brush with crisis buoyed our spirits, and we were in a triumphant frame of mind when in late afternoon we rolled into Daly Waters, our destination for the day. Daly Waters – 370 miles from Darwin, 570 from Alice Springs – was off the Stuart Highway a couple of miles down an unpaved side road and over a small ford, which added to its already palpable sense of remoteness. If you were looking for a classic outback spot, you could not improve upon it. It consisted of a few small houses, a tumbledown and obviously long-closed general store, two petrol pumps unattached to any particular building beneath a sign saying ‘Outback Servo’ and a utilitarian pub with a tin roof. All the rest was heat and dust.
We parked outside the pub. It had signs hung all over it. One said: ‘Est. 1893. Australia’s oldest licensed public house.’ Nearby another sign said: ‘Est. 1930. Northern Territory’s Oldest Pub.’ The heat when we stepped from the car was stifling. The temperature must have been pushing 110 degrees. A tourist brochure I had picked up in Darwin hinted, without actually saying, that the Daly Waters pub provided accommodation. I certainly hoped so as we were 230 miles from the next town, with nothing but a scattered and uncertain assortment of roadhouses in between. Anyway, it’s dangerous to drive through dusk in the outback. That’s when kangaroos come bounding out of the gloaming and into the paths of passing vehicles, to the
frequent regret of both. Trucks sweep them aside, but they can make a mess of cars, and sometimes the cars’ occupants.
We stepped into the gloomy interior – gloomy because the world outside was so painfully bright and we had been out in it all afternoon. I could hardly see a thing.
‘Hello,’ I said to a face behind the bar that might, for all I could tell, have been a ping-pong paddle, ‘do you do rooms?’
‘Finest rooms in Daly Waters,’ responded the paddle. ‘Also the only rooms in Daly Waters.’ As the form spoke, it transmogrified before my eyes into a cheerfully sweaty, bespectacled, slightly harassed-looking man of late middle years. He was sizing us up with a look that was very slightly askance. ‘You want two rooms,’ he said, ‘or are you bunking up together?’
‘Two,’ I said at once.
This seemed to please him. He rummaged in a drawer and produced two keys with unmatching tags. ‘This one’s a single,’ he said, laying a key on my palm, ‘and this one’s got a double bed in it – in case one of yers gets lucky tonight.’ He bounced his eyebrows in a slightly salacious manner.
‘And do you think that’s likely?’
‘Hey, miracles happen.’
The rooms were in a separate block that stood alongside the pub, ten or so of them ranged on either side of a central corridor. I insisted Allan take the double as he was far more likely to get lucky than I was.
‘Out here?’ He gave a hollow laugh.
‘There’s eighty million sheep in the outback, Allan. They can’t all be picky.’
We parted to examine our rooms. Basic was the word
that leaped to mind. Mine consisted of an ancient bed, a battered dresser and a raffia wastebasket. There was no TV or phone, and the illumination consisted of a bare yellow bulb dangling from the ceiling, but the solitary window held an ancient air conditioner, which shook and juddered violently when switched on but did actually seem to generate a little cool air. The bathroom was at the end of the corridor and was a touch insalubrious, with rust stains in the sink and a shower that looked actively infectious.
I went to visit Allan, who was sitting on his bed grinning inanely. ‘Come in!’ he cried. ‘Come in. I’d offer you something from the minibar, but I don’t seem to have one. Pull up a chair – oh, no! There is no chair. Well, please make full use of the wastebasket.’
‘It is a little basic,’ I conceded.
‘Basic? It’s a bloody cell. I’d show you the light, but it’s burnt out.’
‘I’m sure we can get a replacement for you.’
‘No, no, no. I think I’ll like it better in full darkness.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Is it too early to start drinking?’
I looked at my watch. It was only four forty-five. ‘It is a bit. There’s actually something I wanted to see.’
‘An attraction? In Daly Waters? What can it be? Someone getting petrol? The evening sheep shag?’
‘It’s a tree.’
‘A
tree.
Of course it is. Please lead the way.’
We went out to the car and drove a couple of miles down a hot dirt track. There on the edge of a large, barren clearing beside the road stood a sign announcing that we had found our way to the Stuart Tree, commemorating John McDouall Stuart, perhaps the greatest of all Australian explorers. A Scottish soldier of bantamweight
dimensions (he barely topped five feet), Stuart led three epic expeditions through the interior, and all but killed himself in the process. The bright light of the outback severely disagreed with his vision, and on at least two of his trips he was soon seeing double – not perhaps the most encouraging affliction in someone choosing a route through an uncharted wilderness. (‘So, boys, which of those twin peaks do you think we should head for? I say we go for the one under the left-hand sun.’) Generally he would finish the trips effectively blind. On his second expedition, he also became crippled with scurvy, for which he seemed to have a particular susceptibility. His body became ‘a mass of sores that will not heal’. The skin, one of his lieutenants noted, ‘hung from the roof of his mouth, his tongue became swollen and he was incapable of talking’. Virtually insensible, he was carried on a stretcher for the last 400 miles and each day his colleagues lifted him down from his mount expecting to find him dead. Yet within a month of returning to society he was on his feet again and setting off once more into the punishing void.
His final attempt, in 1861-2, seemed fated to end in failure as well. His horses ‘were much distressed’ for want of water, and both men and beasts were tormented by bulwaddy, a treacherous shrub with thorny spikes. But at Daly Waters they found a stream with potable water. It was the moment that saved the venture. The men rested, rewatered and pushed on. In July 1862, nine months after setting off from Adelaide, they reached the Timor Sea and in so doing became the first to find a practical route through the heart of the continent. Within a decade, a telegraph line had been strung from Adelaide to what would eventually become Darwin, putting Australia at last in direct touch with the world.
In his delight at finding the stream at Daly Waters, Stuart carved an S into a big gum tree. It was this that we had come to see. The tree, it must be said, was not much – a fifteen-foot-high chunk of gum tree, lopped of its upper branches and long dead. Every guidebook tells you the S is clearly visible, but we couldn’t find it. Still, there was a certain pleasure in being at a famous spot that few Australians visit. As we stood there, a flock of galahs, a noisy pinkish parrot, came and settled on the surrounding trees. It was a scene almost entirely without feature – a barren plain, a fat setting sun, a scattering of ragged gum trees – and yet, in a wholly uncharacteristic way, I was captivated by it. I don’t know why, but I loved it out here.
We regarded it for quite a time, then Allan turned to me and asked in a respectful voice if we could go for a drink now.
‘Yes we can,’ I said.
Daly Waters’ fame did not begin and end with the fleeting visit of Stuart and his band. In the 1920s a rather shadowy couple by the name of Pearce came to Daly Waters and opened a shop with a borrowed twenty pounds. Amazingly, they did pretty well. Within a few years they had a shop, a hotel, a pub and an aerodrome. Daly Waters became a stopoff point between Brisbane and Darwin on the run to Singapore and on to London in the early days of Qantas and the old Imperial Airways. Lady Mountbatten was among the first overnight guests at the hotel. Goodness knows what she made of the place – though I dare say she was just awfully glad to be on solid ground. In the early days a commercial flight from London involved, in addition to nerves of steel, forty-two refuelling stops, up to five changes of aircraft and a train
journey through Italy because Mussolini wouldn’t allow flights through Italian air space. It took twelve days. As well as the seasonal monsoons, the flights were subject to dust storms, mechanical failures, navigational confusion and occasional pot-shots from hostile or impish bedouins. Crashes were not infrequent.
The perils of aviation in the period are neatly encapsulated in the experience of Harold C. Brinsmead, the head of Australia’s Civil Aviation Department in the first days of commercial aviation. In 1931, Brinsmead was on a flight to London, partly for business and partly to demonstrate the safety and reliability of modern air passenger services, when his plane crashed on takeoff in Indonesia. No one was seriously hurt, but the plane was a write-off. Not wanting to wait for a replacement aircraft to be flown in, Brinsmead boarded a flight with the new Dutch airline, KLM. That flight crashed while taking off in Bangkok. On this occasion, five people were killed and Brinsmead suffered serious injuries from which he never recovered. He died two years later. Meanwhile, the surviving passengers carried on to London in a replacement plane. That plane crashed on the return trip.
Daly Waters claims to be Australia’s oldest international airport, though I suspect many other venerable airstrips make a similar boast. It is certainly true that it was used as a stopoff point on some international flights and more regularly on cross-country flights from Queensland to Western Australia, so it was a kind of crossroads. The airport stayed open until 1947. The pub opened in 1938, so it is not by any stretch the oldest in the outback or the Northern Territory, but it is certainly one of the most extraordinary.
As with most outback pubs every inch of interior surface
– walls, rafters, wooden support posts – was covered with mementos left by earlier visitors: college ID cards, drivers’ licences, folding money from many nations, bumper stickers, badges from various police and fire departments, even a generous and arresting assortment of underwear, which dangled from rafters or was nailed to walls. The rest was nicely spartan: a large but basic central bar, concrete floor, bare tin roof, an assortment of tables and chairs of different vintages and styles, a battered pool table. At the bar, seven or eight men, all in shorts, T-shirts, boots and bush hats, stood drinking stubbies – squat bottles of beer – served in insulated foam holders to keep them cold. They all looked hot and dusty, but then everything in Daly Waters was hot and dusty. The atmosphere in the pub can best be described as convivially sweltering. Even standing still, the sweat dripped off us. The windows had screens, but most were full of holes and anyway the doors were wide open so flies came in freely. The men at the bar gave me compact but friendly nods as I bellied up to the bar, and obligingly made space for me to stand to order, but showed no special interest in me as an outsider. Clearly, as the souvenirs attested, visitors were not a novelty.
I acquired a pair of chilled stubbies and conveyed them to the table where Allan sat beneath a bumper sticker commemorating a visit by the ‘Wheredafukarwi Touring Club’. Allan was suffused with a strange happiness.
‘You like it here?’ I said.
He shook his head with a kind of speechless delight. ‘I do. I actually do.’
‘But I thought you hated it.’
‘I did,’ he said. ‘But then I was sitting here looking out the window at the setting sun, and it was lovely – I mean really quite astoundingly lovely – and then I turned and
saw the bar with all these outback characters, and I thought: “Bugger me, I like it here.”’ He looked at me in the frankest wonder. ‘And I do. I really like it.’