Authors: Niall Griffiths
The long running road out of Eucla, and the view of it from the top of the hill, both my brother and I remember it, clearly; it, too, is now as it was then. This place has hardly changed at all; the units of the Motor Hotel are the same ones that we slept in as children, the hotel’s sign is the same, the shop. Time has passed this area by. It remains untouched. It just stands still as the world whirls around it. My expectations – that I’d feel old on this trip, in a place like this, sadly remote from the child I was – are confounded here; I don’t feel a great distance from that boy at all. He’s me. I’m him. I’ve just sprouted from him. The acorn’s in the oak. It’s not like he’s standing next to me or anything like that, he’s just simply here. There’s a kind of comfort in this realisation; a peace, even. I feel something settling down inside.
And we drive on. The endless road, parts of which bear strange markings on the tarmac; they double up as airstrips, for flying doctors and other airborne emergency services. It
goes on. Every judder of the van begins to bang in my head. My ribs ache. The cabin becomes a fetid moving coffin. Rancid pie-gas leaks out of us both. I read the roadsigns; the next large settlement after Eucla is Norseman, 712 km away. Seven fucking hundred and fucking twelve fucking
kilo-fucking-metres
. The Nullarbor map and guide that I’ve brought with me tells that Norseman, once a gold-mining town, is so called because a prospector named Laurie Sinclair tethered his horse called Hardy Norseman to a tree overnight sometime in the 1890s and by morning his pawing hooves had unearthed a big nugget of gold. Since then, ‘over five million ounces of gold have been taken out of Norseman’. The town contains, apparently, the Beacon Hill Lookout and Walk Trail, the Tin Camels and the Statue of Norseman, the Dundas Coach Road Heritage Trail, gemstone fossicking (sigh) opportunities by the ancient Dundas Rocks and Bromus Dam picnic area, and a Tourist Centre where you can get your Nullarbor Crossing certificate.
We pass a garage and an adjoining motel.
–When will we reach Norseman?
–That was it.
It just goes on. Madness starts to cling to the radiator grille. How did my parents manage this journey? In a car, with three screaming childen and an unknown fourth on the way? I’m hungry I’m tired I need a poo mum tell him. Needing food and water, sleep, looking after? God knows. I’m barely keeping it together myself. I let the boy in me entertain himself, construct tunes out of the rolling rhythm of the van, absorb the passing landscape. It just goes on.
Madura. The car’s overheating. Steam hisses from the bonnet and the gauge is right in the red.
–Dad, stop! We might blow up!
They pull into a garage and the children jump out and run across the forecourt, away from the huge fireball that the car is about to turn into. A mechanic looks under the bonnet and fiddles about for a bit and removes something.
–It’s ya thermostat, mate. All blocked up. I’ll fit another one for ya.
He does, and the car cools down. The mother’s leg pains get worse. They stop at Cocklebiddy, where there are, apparently, interesting cave systems, but a sign warns of many dangers so they don’t explore. The Baxter Cliffs are nearby, too, but it’s getting dark so they drive on to Caiguna and sleep there in the car. The dad looks for this place on the road atlas and cannot find it.
Some of these places aren’t even on the map,
he says, and the boy wonders if they really exist.
As if in sympathetic memory, my legs start to hurt, being cramped in the same position for hours at a time in the van. I worry about deep vein thrombosis. You hear of people getting DVT on the flight to Australia but not whilst in a van driving across the bleeding place. They ache, my legs. Quite badly. I rotate my ankles to boost the circulation but that does no good at all.
Madura. Great views over the Roe Plains from Madura, which was settled in 1876 as a horse-breeding station for the
British army in India. Christ, and the colonisers disdained the aborigines for being nomadic and unsettled? How blind and
self-deluded
is it possible to be? And outside Madura, on the plains, my God look! There’s a bend in the road! We start going up a little bit of a hill! I don’t know if I can stand the excitement.
I’m getting hysterical. We pass a sign for the ‘EYRE BIRD OBSERVATORY’ which has two crows sitting on it, and I’m delighted to see that. Bird observatory. Two crows looking. Signs for the Baxter Cliffs and Caves which once more we bypass, but I consult my guide and discover that John Baxter was the overseer for the pioneer Edward John Eyre and ‘tragically lost his life on 29 April 1841’, although it doesn’t say how, nor why his death was more tragic than anyone else’s. We plan to spend the night in Caiguna, sleeping in the vehicle as we did as kids, but when we park up and unroll our sleeping bags we decide that we’re not tired so we drive on, straight into the fresh hell of the 90 Mile Straight, ‘the longest straight stretch of highway in Australia’, ninety unrelieved miles, straight as a ruler, unbroken, a new depth of tedium. Trance. Trance. Just what you see in the headlights, that’s what the world has shrivelled to. Tarmac. Yellow light. Drone of the engine. At the end of this straight is Balladonia, where we’ll be off the plain, but that’s a world away. My brain shuts down, hardened by boredom like my arteries are by too many pies eaten quickly at garages. Trance. Trance. Drone. Drone. No thought but a big white block of air. Drone.
The horizon still lit a little by the rays of the setting sun. Shafts and sheets of lilac light shot through it like swathes of violet rain. Trance. Drone.
Did I find this journey as soul-crushingly boring all those years ago as I do now? Was it like wearing a suit of armour
then as it is now, stifling and airless, a weight on my flesh, an unpleasant almost physical presence in my skull? Probably not, no; I was a child then, nothing was boring, smells and sounds and tastes were awaiting discovery. I couldn’t imagine, then, what true boredom was like, how it is one of the worst insults that the world can dump on you; how even pain is preferable to it. Left to my own devices, I’m never bored, and rarely was as a child, until school and then work began their bleaching and bludgeoning. But what can we do, on the Eyre Highway’s 90 Mile Straight, but drive? Drive and drive and drive? Drone, drone. It never ends. I will never leave this road. I never have, in fact; I’m still on it. I never left it as a child. I’ll still be on it when I’m old and doddery. Let it end. Please let it end.
–What’s that on the road?
They squint through the dusty windscreen and, outside that, the dusty air, at three thin figures on the road ahead. The dad slows the car to a crawl and slowly approaches the figures which materialise, out of the heat shimmer and swirling
dust-clouds
, into emus, three emus crossing the road. The family gawp. The boy is agog. The birds walk with a peculiar gait, their feet delicate and high-stepping but their necks and heads slowly bowing and lifting. These are birds; like sparrows and crows and parakeets, these things are birds. What wings they have are folded behind their backs and their feathers more like shaggy fur. Impossible animals. Pillows on legs. Pillows with long necks. Something prehistoric in them, in their scutellated feet and tiny eyes, something that could only have come from
the ancient red sand and the sharp orange peaks of rock and the trees festooned with streamers of shed bark like sloughed skin. The boy has grown used to seeing mirages on the road ahead, images of water, and he wonders if these birds might be of a similar phenomenon. He can’t take his eyes off them. They have knees and ankles, and like starlings and seagulls they are birds. He wonders where they are going. Wonders what purpose draws them to whatever particular place they are aimed at in the colossal continent he’s almost traversed.
If I was outside, alone in the desert, with a pack and a tent, I’m sure I’d feel differently about it; I’d be more attuned to its smells and noises, more open to sensual stimulus, feeling its vast hostility like a throb in the blood. Its lack of land predators would, I think, mean that I’d grow tired of the place quite quickly, in comparison, say, to the Namib, but my experience of the Nullarbor would be an intense and exciting one, at least for a time. As it is, though, in the cabin of the van, confined, hot, bored, and tired, I just want the fucking thing to end. It’s nothing but a big beach, and without the sea. It’s shite. I want to be in Perth.
–We’re in Norseman, Tony says.
–What?
–We’re in Norseman. Just saw a sign.
–Thought we’d already been through Norseman?
–So did I.
–So that means we’ve still got one fuck of a way to go?
–Looks like it.
–Ah Christ.
Roadkill, a lot of roadkill; ’roos and wombats and wallabies, on their backs, bloated, front paws spread as if in surrender to the seared sky. Sometimes, as we pass, huge eagles rise up from these carcasses, flapping massive wings in what looks like a monumental application of will, lifting their great bodies up beyond the cones of the headlights into the outer darkness, ribbons of rotten and dripping flesh trailing from their clenched talons. It’s a mad world, out there. We don’t see any emus, either alive or dead, but we see plenty of these huge raptors; disturb many a frenzied and festering feast.
Drone, drone. Trance, trance. Drone. On and on and on.
We’re tired, now. We pull into a layby beyond Norseman and unroll our sleeping bags. According to the map, we’re now off the plain. The desert is behind us. We’ve crossed the Nullarbor, for the second time in our lives. I feel nothing but a tiny celebratory jolt in the stomach and then I’m asleep.
Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. Adjacent townships, but an Australian adjacency, which means many miles in between. Ex-mining towns, quiet and ghostly, like old towns in movie westerns. The boy imagines having a shoot-out in the main street, and being shot; this often happens in his mental fantasies – he’s often the loser, the one who comes off worst, but he delivers a stirring and moving speech at the point of death, supine on the dusty street, his precious life-blood spilling out, attended by weeping women and devastated admirers.
They stop for a while in Kalgoorlie and visit the mining
museum. The boy buys a tiny model wheelbarrow made out of what looks like lolly-ice sticks, with a nugget of nickel on it and a small chunk of quartz which bears a tiny fleck of gold, real gold, a wee twist of dazzling colour. He’s proud of this purchase, the boy. He keeps it for decades. He owns some real gold.
His mother makes an entry in her diary: ‘Kalgoorlie is a sad place with so much to tell and no-one there anymore.’
Back in the car, their father shows the children a page of the road atlas. Points to where they are, and then, a few inches away, to Perth.
–See? We’re on the same page.
–Will we get there today, dad?
–Might do. Let’s see.
They move on again. Again they move on. The boy holds his wheelbarrow in his hands and gazes at it.
Like Ceduna, and several other towns, Kalgoorlie is a metropolis compared to what it was in the seventies. It’s lively, and busy, and gives the impression of always having been so. I’m surprised. The Federal Hotel advertises ‘SKIMPY OF THE WEEK’ on its noticeboard, which is cut to the shape of a naked woman. ‘Skimpy’? What does that mean? A bikini-wearing contest or something? It’s Sunday morning, so much of the town is closed, but the place has that air of hiatus that busy towns on Sundays always give off. Apparently, the mineral industry in WA – nickel, mostly – is booming, and mining towns such as this one have been re-populated and re-energised. Mansions on the approach roads declare much money. There’s an airport. Several pubs and
restaurants, and many caffs, all busy with breakfasting and brunching folk, in one of which we order juice and coffee and eggs from a German waitress. Tony wolfs his then goes off in search of an internet connection. I order more coffee and have a read of the Sunday papers. Main news concerns the problems of child and domestic abuse in the aboriginal communities; booze and hard-core pornography are to be banned from the townships for six months in an effort to prevent this abuse. Policemen are to reside in the reserves to enforce this embargo. I read utterly harrowing stories of rape and neglect and addiction (one young guy, arrested several times for child abuse, says that he needs to drown out the screaming in his head by making others scream loud enough for him not to hear it). These are a people in despair. I’ve seen it worldwide; in Arctic Inuits, in native Canadians, even in Celts at home. It never loses its power to perturb, in whatever landscape it takes place. Here, letters to the papers insist that the current measures of prohibition are either patronising or are simply too little, too late; indigenous voices offer opinions as to how to remedy peculiarly aboriginal ills, and others declare that we shouldn’t heed indigenous voices simply because they’re indigenous (well, maybe, but when have aboriginal opinions
ever
been listened to?). An aboriginal novelist writes a fascinating article which applies cultural murder to individual lives, illustrating the horrifyingly actual and tangible human damage inflicted by institutionalised racism and
disenfranchisement
, and then states that self-respect must come from within; she directly addresses her people and tells them that
no-one
else can confer self-esteem upon them. It must come from within; within the communities, within the tribes, and within the breast. I find myself nodding at this, but then stop myself; it’s too easy for me to agree, here.
But dignity. Dignity is innate,
not
conferred, it is as much a characteristic of the human animal as is walking upright, but it
can
be forcibly removed. The drunken blackfellas in the gutters of these small and isolated towns, they’re like that not because they naturally lack a sense of dignity or self-respect but because they’ve had those qualities systematically and ruthlessly and mercilessly taken away from them, over centuries. A human being stripped of dignity and sense of
self-worth
is easy to ignore and brutalise (as, indeed, is an entire landscape; mining companies etc. back home work on this principle). The western suburbs of Sydney have similar problems, but they have access to all the grog and wank-mags they can afford, and why? Because they’re not aboriginal. So the ocker in his flip-flops and singlet in the Federal Hotel, drooling over the latest weekly skimpy through the last tepid and spittled inch of his tenth Toohey’s, feels superior to the blackfellas brawling and puking in the car-park outside because he believes that he has an innate dignity which the other man doesn’t. Of course self-respect has to come from within, but so does respect for others, and in a society like Australia’s, where institutionalised bigotry has its corrupt counterpart in many an individual marrow, I don’t see that happening. Not for generations, at least.