Authors: Niall Griffiths
We eat our noodles and ribs and get back in the van and drive on. Hypnotic, this – driving the desert in darkness. The world shrunk to two twin cones of light and the small slice of tarmac they illuminate. Trance. Trance.
Nullarbor Station to fill up on petrol. The car’s covered in thick red dust, banks of dead insects in the grille and under the wipers, heat rising in a shimmer off the bonnet. The boy likes how it looks. He goes with his father into the shop to pay for the petrol and recognises the man’s accent and his father and the man talk for what seems like hours.
What you doing here? Which part of Liverpool you from?
The boy gets bored. Outside, his mother honks the horn.
–One thing to watch out for, the man says, –on the desert. The abos, like. They’ll come running out of the bush towards you, waving for help. What you won’t know is, they’ll have a spear between their toes, dragging it, like. So whatever you do don’t stop for them.
And, indeed, a few miles before Ceduna, this happens; an aborigine with a wiry grey beard down to his belt buckle crashes out of the roadside bush, waving his arms. The children shout. Their father doesn’t stop or even slow.
–He might be in trouble!
–And we might be ’n’ all if we stop. Not taking the risk. You heard what that feller said back at the garage.
The boy thinks about this. Ambush. Spear. Robbery on the highway. He’s been warned many times in Oz to look out for the ‘abos’ but he can’t help but find them fascinating. They’re so strange, to him. They have such kind faces. There’d been Afro-Caribbean kids at his school in Liverpool but they weren’t like the black fellers here, in Oz. There’s something intriguing about them, here. Back home, they were the same as him, just with a different skin. But here… he likes their voices. When they speak he likes their voices. And he sees them in Ceduna, lying in heaps on the pavements, sees his father exchange cigarettes for a boomerang and he finds the boomerang absolutely captivating. Loves the feel of it in his hand. It’s a beautiuful thing. The old feller who made it smiles toothlessly at the boy and gives him a wink and the boy is confused further. This bundle of stuff: Deception spear robbery ambush dirt drunkenness artistry no teeth friendly wink asleep in gutter kind faces nice voices watch out for the abos, boy. What’s he supposed to do with such a tangle of information? All will come clear when he’s older, he thinks. All will be explained, some time.
They leave Ceduna and head for Cocklebiddy, but before they reach that they see a motel at the side of the road – the Mundrabilla Motel. Look okay? Let’s stay here. They do. Nice name, Cocklebiddy. Like an old shellfish.
We’re looking for somewhere to park up for the night and sleep. Somewhere off the Eyre Highway with its road-trains bellowing past, somewhere away from the eyes of bored desert coppers who might knock on the window and search the van just to make their lives a wee bit less monotonous. I’m in a kind of trance. Kind of asleep but with my eyes open. I open the road map on my knees and shine a torch on it and look. A turn off just before Nundroo will take us down to a wee place called Fowler’s Bay, right on the coast. Looks interesting. Let’s go there.
–Wonder why it’s called Fowler’s Bay?
–Cos Robbie Fowler owns property here. As well as most of Merseyside.
We turn off. Tarmac stops. Turns into dirt-track. ‘16 km’, a sign says. 16 km! Christ, it’s a mere millimetre on the map. As if we’re a submarine wobbling through black ink, thick ink, the dirt-track goes on. And on. Fowler’s Bay itself is a few lights and a sign on the outskirts saying ‘NO CAMPING IN TOWNSHIP’ so we turn off and find a layby just behind the ‘WELCOME’ sign. Park up. Climb into sleeping bags. Sleep. I wake at sunrise and go out for a pee and
look
where I am – huge dunes to the left, a vast bog to the right, a cold and whistling wind. I explore the tiny village, walk out on the pier over the sea, watch the sun rise. I see holiday flats advertised. A sign for a bar. For a caff, too, but that’s closed. Here I go again, thinking about spending a winter in this place, huddled up against the storms that would come crashing in off the sea. Looking out for whales.
I go back to the van.
We drive on. Just past Nundroo, we make a stop to look at the dirt-track that’s been running parallel with us since we
entered the desert and on which, as a family, we made the original journey, all those years ago. Tony can recall the tarmac road being built at the same time, on our right, then, as we drove down the track. For all those endless miles. I don’t remember that, but the thought of doing this drive on that potholed and dusty interminable ribbon of a scrape in the desert floor… Jesus.
And we drive on. ‘Nullarbor’ is a Latin word meaning ‘no trees’, and up till now I’d thought it a misnomer; there are hundreds of trees. Thousands. Stunted and scrawny little things, yes, but trees nonetheless. Just before Nullarbor Station, however, the trees stop. Extremely suddenly, they stop. TreestreestreestreesNONE, like that. Flat expanse. We stop to take photographs. The sense of isolation almost overwhelms.
And we drive on.
The boy makes a moving world with his Action Man and books and pens and anything else that comes to hand that can be turned into a toy. He’s aware that a vastness is going on outside the confines of the car but within the little moving box he creates his own world to explore and explore it he does, every cliff and cranny and coast and cataract and city and river and lake and heath and marsh. They sleep in motels, and, on occasion, in the car. One morning the boy wakes up amongst his slumbering family and, as quietly as he can, creeps out of the car. They’ve been sleeping in a car-park behind a motel or bar or something; ‘NO VACANCIES’ on the sign. It’s hot, and still, and silent. The boy spies a long furry tail hanging out of a
dustbin so he approaches the bin and lifts the lid and before the rising cloud of whining flies envelops his face he catches a glimpse of carnage, koalas and possums and wombats all stuffed into the bin, con torted, rotting, boiling mass of slimy fur and gnarled claws and milky-filmed eyes and seething maggots. He drops the lid and runs.
At the eastern end of the Bight, the great scoop that dents the country’s southern coast, we see a hand-painted sign: ‘COME AND SEE THE WHALES’. We follow the arrow, park up, pay our ten bucks each at the turnstile, move down towards the sea on the grid of wooden walkways that overhang it and my God, there they are, just below us, a group of southern right whales, adults and babies, huge things, lolling in the waves, hanging motionless in the blue. Incredible, beautiful, awesome. The largest weighing fifty tons, huge animals. Through the hired binoculars I see their great grins and callosities and flicking tails. I am completely thrilled. I am breathless. My skin sings. Such incredible, impossible animals. I’ve seen whales before, several times, and at closer quarters, but I’ll never feel anything less than profound awe and wonder were I to see them every day of my life. Their sheer size. The way they play. And nothing prepares you for the sound of their blowing, the huge basso
roar
of it. And the smell of it, too.
We spend a couple of hours whale-gazing and even continue to squint at them through the binocs when they’re little more than black smudges, way out to sea. And then we drive on. Always we drive on. Approaching Nullarbor Station, we see a
young dingo at the side of the road, close by, unruffled, nuzzling the earth next to a sign that tells us not to feed the dingoes. The pub’s still there, the pub where my dad met the scouse feller, but it’s staffed entirely by Aussies, now. I wonder what happened to that man. If he’s still in Oz, or if he’s back in Liverpool. Another dingo is skulking around the pub and the petrol pumps. Pretty animals; like tall, white foxes.
It’s spelled B-I-T-E, the boy thinks, because that’s what it looks like, as if a colossal sea-creature has taken an almighty chomp out of the country’s underside. He studies the map, traces the contours of the feature, sees that it’s actually spelled B-I-G-H-T and concludes that the mapmakers couldn’t spell.
They enter another timezone on May 13th. The clocks go back forty-five minutes. They stop in the desert as the cover has blown off the roof-rack, exposing their cases and trunks to the searing wind and the fine punk dust. Luckily, everything stayed on, held down by the guy-ropes; losing the jerry cans of water would’ve been calamitous. The boy thinks of that, of thirst, of what it’d be like to die from dehydration. How it would feel, in the indifferent desert. He can’t imagine it. Can’t comprehend any kind of death.
They’re on the dirt-track for six hours. Jostling, bumping, rocking six hours of choking dust and heat. The children must cling to the seatbacks or the door-handles, anything they can, for six hours. They see two foxes and an eagle and stop to photograph the eagle which, when developed, will show a speck on a bright blue background. When they stop, the ground
feels unsteady and strange under the boy’s feet, like it did when he stepped off the plane back in Brisbane. He’s tired of this journey, now. He wants it to be over, wants to be in Perth.
Christ but this is getting boring. Pure monotony. Flat and featureless and seemingly endless. Stultifyingly dull. God how it goes on. No settlements between Nullarbor Station and Eucla, and a brief glimpse of the sea on my left is about as exciting as it gets. And Tony’s singing Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ for the fourth time. Every word of it, from ‘I was alright’ to the closing ‘OOOOH’. I’m going fucking mad. The landscape’s beginning to pound, pound me down. I can’t stop yawning. I’ve been getting intermittent twinges in my left leg for the past few hours, due, probably, to the unrelieved cramped conditions in the van’s cabin, and I start looking forwards, with genuine excitement, to the next one.
Anything
to break this flatness,
anything
. It’s crushing, this journey. Indescribably dull. And it never ends. Flatness, smoothness, on and on and on. Please, God, bring me a hill, a hummock, a bend in the road, anything to relieve this nothing world. What if I’ve died and gone to hell? What if this is my punishment, to travel this featureless road for all eternity?
There are no land predators in Australia, apart from the
saltwater
crocodiles in the north, and they don’t stray far from the water’s edge anyway. Plenty of harmful spiders and snakes, of course, but they don’t want to eat you; they’re not going to stalk you or ambush you or regard you in the way that you might regard a roast potato. Whereas in the Namib, or the Sahara, where I was hunted by a leopard and looked into the face of a
lion with nothing between our eyes but two feet of scorched air, in those places where I was nothing but a morsel for cats the size of cows, I felt all my aspirations and sense of who I am fall away, the position of myself on the planet was tattooed onto my soul and I felt a kind of religious awe and terror which grew quickly into something like an ecstasy, a sort of low-level but constant rapture, which settled in me and never quite left. Being awoken at night-time by the sound of roaring lions or the snorting and stamping of rhinos or the whooping of hyenas, knowing that, to many of the other living things around me I was nothing but meat, this, I feel, puts a wonder in the heart. It adds to the constant joy of discovery. You’re a child again, with the golden, murderous gaze of a lioness on you. Without such animals, such predators, however, the desert eventually becomes just a chore. It rapidly loses whatever magic it may have had; it’s just heat and dust and no shade or water, no respite, no joy. The Namib filled me with the awe of connectedness. The Nullarbor just pisses me off. I hate being bored. I want to be stalked; want all of my senses to atavistically and defensively sharpen and hone and clarify themselves. Want a huge and ferocious and spotted cat to see the van as a can of Spam.
The checkpoint at the border of Western Australia comes as a huge relief. Something to do, something else to see other than the horizon-to-horizon sheet of unbroken one-colour emptiness. This checkpoint wasn’t here in the seventies, but I’m glad of it now. Breaks the tedium, a little. It’s manned by very pleasant border guards, both with matching hairstyles and goatees. Maybe that’s a requirement. We have to give up all our fresh food, but we can keep the dried and canned. I eat some apricots and we get waved through, into WA, which is exactly the same as SA. Oh look! More treeless plain! For fuck’s sake.
Leaving the cafeteria of another motel after another huge breakfast of eggs and steak and toast and jam, the boy’s father gently touches the mother’s stomach and remarks that she’s putting on a lot of weight.
It’s all these big breakfasts, she says.
They exchange a look which the boy can’t read.
Further. They drive further. Into Eucla, on the state border. Here, in a layby, is a sign, the EYRE HIGHWAY sign, which tells the boy’s family that they’re roughly halfway across the Nullarbor. To the left is PERTH 895 MILES, and to the right ADELAIDE 809 MILES. Nearly 900 miles to go, still. From Liverpool to the Shetland Islands, or even further. The boy can’t really grasp these distances. They’re a slice of forever, to him. His world has become the moving car and motel rooms glimpsed for a night and his world to come will be the same thing. The journey has no end; the journey itself is the end. There is no destination but this constant forward movement.
It’s the same sign, look. Believe that? The exact same sign.
And it is, exactly the same, the only difference being that the distances are now given in kilometres, not miles. Thirty years of weathering have bleached the colours and cracked crazily the lamination and scaled the iron struts with rust but it’s the same sign. I’m amazed at this. All those years, through all that growing, this sign has stood here, waiting for the boy that once gazed at it to return as a man and gaze at it again.
Through all personal mutability and development and slipperiness and general dream-like insubstantiality, through sadness at the mortality of things, through fear at the inexorable tread of time and melancholic anxiety at the undeniable trend of people and things to change and veer and become quite else, through all of that, this sign has remained a constant, on the other side of the planet, waiting to tell me how far I’ve come and how far I’ve got to go. I’m halfway through the journey. Everything else has changed, but this sign has stayed the same. Thirty years. Almost a poet’s lifetime. Through war and heartbreak and weddings and funerals and everything else. I find this absolutely amazing and as I photograph it I realise my face is split in a grin. I’m halfway through the journey, the sign says.