GEOFF HILLis in the heart of the Outback, where one can quickly become little more than prey
THE ROAD through the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia is, says the guidebook, “world-class boredom through a dreary plain of spinifex and mulga”.
It’s not wrong. After six hours – the highlight of which was a herd of at least 1,000 cattle being mustered by three horsemen and a helicopter – we arrived at Pardoo Roadhouse, which didn’t even merit a mention in the guidebook but turned out to be perfect, with cosy Portacabins and even a pool. I languished in the water with a beer and watched the sun go down before dinner.
At the next table was Trev, a builder the size of a small planet who had previously been working on ore trains to the south.
“There’s so much demand from China that they’re running constantly out of Port Hedland, with 292 carriages loaded with ore. The first two cover all the costs of buying the land and mining; the other 290 are pure profit.”
Having sorted out the economy, Trev demolished most of the small bones in my right hand and went off for a good night’s sleep.
The next morning, we stopped at a level crossing by one of the trains he was talking about. We waited an age and a half for the behemoth to trundle past.
Port Hedland itself lay to the right, an industrial sprawl whose only claim to fame is that its Pier Hotel once had the highest death rate of any pub in Australia.
As for the rest of the day, there was little to report as we sped south through an unrelenting landscape of red sand and thorny spinifex, mitigated only by the occasional tree or corner or by fantastical visions of mountains and lakes which rose shimmering from the horizon to seduce us.
By nightfall, after a long day, we pulled in to Fortescue Roadhouse, the only place to stay for hundreds of miles, only to find that it wasn’t, since all the cabins were taken.
I had been reading the diaries of Ernest Giles, one of the unluckiest explorers going, after which I would have been glad of a razor blade to sleep on.
Giles decided to become an explorer after he was sacked from the Post Office and, undeterred by the disappointment of discovering Ayer’s Rock two days after another explorer, set off in 1874 to explore the Great Sandy Desert with his assistant, Gibson.
They set off in good spirits with four live horses and a supply of smoked horse (presumably dead). But before long, they had set two horses loose, another died, they ran out of food and found themselves at their last pint of water.
Sending Gibson off to the nearest waterhole with the last horse, Giles walked on alone, and within days was reduced to crawling, his head so light from hunger and thirst that he fainted every time he tried to stand.
At last he lay down to die but, just as he was losing consciousness, he heard a faint squeak and looked down to see a baby wallaby, fallen from its mother’s pouch.
“It only weighed about two ounces, and was scarcely furnished yet with fur. The instant I saw it, like an eagle I pounced upon it and ate it, living, raw, dying – fur, skin, bones and all. The delicious taste of that creature I shall never forget,” he wrote.
Revived, he crawled on and eventually staggered into a camp at the nearest waterhole. Gibson was never seen again.
As for us, we tucked into beef stew and pasta, Paul the cameraman crawled into Matilda, since he had a paranoid fear of insects and refused to sleep outdoors, and Colin and I threw our bedrolls on the grass beneath a handsome oak and fell asleep under the stars.
I woke a few times during the night to see, a few inches from my nose, an army of ants marching resolutely west towards the sea, watched by a family of bemused cockroaches.
They were, I assumed, German ants – on their way to stake an early claim to the beach with tiny towels.