Wakefield Press author Elizabeth Hutchins’ recently released Troop Train is a coming-of-age novel set in the chaos of the Second World War. This guest post is a story of a different kind of chaos – camping in the Australian desert.

Elizabeth has been kind enough to share her story of being one of the first tourists to cross the Tanami Desert. In 2010, the story was a finalist in the Northern Territory Literary Awards. We’re thrilled to share Elizabeth’s ‘Tanami Tourists’.

‘Reckon you’ll be the first tourists to cross the Tanami.’ The manager of the Alice Springs Ansett office paused before adding, ‘That’s a bit of a worry.’

A worry? It was nearly a hundred years since the first intrepid explorers had faced terrible trials to open up this vast country with camels, by horseback and on foot. How could five responsible adults and some kids in two four wheel drives get into strife in 1967?

We waited expectantly.

‘You’ll have to do a detour out Mongrel Downs way, because one section of the track’s impassable after the rains,’ our adviser went on, sketching a triangle, some arrows and a cross on his desk pad. ‘That’ll take you past Balgo Mission – And Father McGuire who’s in charge out there says he’s going to shoot the first tourists he sees.’

‘Oh!’

‘Between the eyes.’

We agreed that we would definitely drive straight past Balgo.

***

Six months after we began teaching in the Alice, John and I were seriously addicted to Namatjira scenery, the enticement of untravelled roads and the stillness of lonely gorges.  More often than not someone on the staff would ask on a Friday, ‘Who’s heading out bush?’ By 4.30 a convoy of vehicles would head for a nearby gap, a little known waterhole or perhaps an abandoned station homestead. We kept the necessary equipment and a custom made wooden box of essentials in our Landrover, so that all we had to do was add water, fresh food and a change of clothes. Each journey was inked on to a map on our kitchen wall – a map I still have.

We had even made a memorable trip alone to Uluru (then known as Ayers Rock), the Olgas and King’s Canyon, visiting the station homes of students and friends of friends. Bush skills honed and now ready for a bigger challenge, we put up our hands quickly when Brian, our Principal, wanted company on a drive to Darwin in September – by a distinctly alternative route. Instead of enduring two trips on the long bitumen highway that links the Centre to the Top End, he planned to head there via Halls Creek and Wyndham.

A geosurvey team had graded the Tanami Track two years previously, and it was reported (by the few station owners who didn’t fly everywhere) to be usable, with new vegetation after recent flooding. I tingled in anticipation of traversing a desert – although the romance did fade a little when we heard that Ansett was planning a bus route across this one to the Kimberley; hence our visit to its office. (For the record, that idea was soon abandoned.)

After delivering the cheering news about Balgo, the manager was now pencilling some meandering lines on to an empty-looking map; they headed in a north-westerly direction, crossing a meaningless state boundary. This would be our route.

 

Fortunately there was also a mileage list to various landmarks, starting something like this:

‘34.7 miles – rocky outcrop.

51.3 miles – bore.

84.8 miles – track divides. Take left fork.’

And so on. If the landmark wasn’t there on cue, you’d have to backtrack and inch along another sandy or deeply rutted ‘road’.

‘Doesn’t sound too hard,’ John decided.

As word of our plans got around though, we were offered more advice and information than we needed.

‘Men’ve taken a wrong turn an’ died of thirst out there, y’ know,’ we were told; but no-one seemed to remember who they were. More recent was the story of someone who had taken weeks to make it back to his station from the Alice in January, when the latest severe drought ended. Then, in May, even seasoned desert adventurers Reg and Griselda Sprigg had got badly bogged. (Only now do I know that Griselda, the first white woman to cross the Simpson Desert, later called their Tanami expedition ‘a remarkable desert crossing’.)

‘We’ll be right,’ we told the doubters. ‘We’re getting a transceiver from the Flying Doctor and we’ll take food and water for two weeks.’ Privately I asked myself, But how will we know when we get close to Balgo?

With one spare seat in our vehicle, I wrote to my recent bridesmaid Helen, down south. ‘Feel like an adventure?’ I asked. She responded enthusiastically.

Brian’s Toyota would be overfilled by his reserved but good-natured wife Ruth and their three children, aged between five and fifteen. Little Barbara was shy, while Neil usually avoided my gaze too because he was one of my year eight students. I liked Russell best – head in the clouds, nose in a book and an eager beaver approach to helping when he did emerge from his inner world.

Our long wheel base Landrover (an ex WW2 Army vehicle) was fitted with long range tanks to ensure fuel for 700 miles, and we had installed water tanks in the back too. Packing was taken seriously, top priorities being spare parts, a spade and a first aid kit. We had the food choices down to a fine art. There would be fresh and frozen meat for the first three days while the ice lasted, along with bread, fruit and vegetables. On day four we’d eat cold sausages. Thereafter we would devour any sort of canned food, munch dry biscuits and spread jam on our Weetbix. Condensed milk came in tubes (I soon learned to like my billy tea black!) and of course there was plenty of dried fruit. Should the journey take longer than planned, we would make interesting concoctions from the emergency supply of canned goods.

Ruth took only one extra staple – a very large bag of rolled oats!

It is said that planning is half the fun. I only rate it at 30%, but the preparations were indeed absorbing. Eventually Helen arrived – straight from her last day of teaching in an exclusive Melbourne school. We would be setting off on our adventure at dawn.

‘Will half an hour be long enough for you to get dressed, have breakfast and pack your gear into the Landrover?’ I asked.

‘It takes me twenty minutes on a weekday just to put my makeup on!’ she exclaimed.

To her credit she was ready on time, and we headed off in buoyant mood to join up with Brian and family, who were waiting at the Gap. As we left town we briefed our guest on the basics of camping. Everyone shared the chores; we’d get a dish of water once a day to wash with; you took a spade and headed behind a tree or rock (if you could find one) when nature called. And no, we never used tents.

Helen was looking a bit shell-shocked by the time we explained how we buried the coals from the camp fire deep under our ground sheet, and had the luxury of warm swags even when the temperature was way below freezing. (I didn’t tell her that some of the station kids we taught thought we were crazy sleeping on the ground. ‘You should see what might crawl over you at night!’ they warned. ‘Six inch centipedes, scorpions as long as your thumb, huge spiders …’)

Conditions were good for a while, apart from the inevitable bull dust. I never ceased to marvel at the incredible redness of that ancient, worn soil – I keep a glass tube of it to this day – and found myself hoping that Helen would love it too. I must be starting to belong.

Our first stop was 180 miles away at Yuendemu settlement. (‘Think sheep and a cow – ewe and a moo,’ an old-timer had advised me when I had trouble pronouncing the word.) Here Aboriginal children greeted us eagerly. Alert and curious, they clambered over our Landrover.

‘Where you from?’

‘Where you goin’ to?’

‘You mob been to Melbourne? We went there – in a plane.’

‘I can ride a cow. D’youse ride cows?’

After visiting the school, its concreted undercover activity area and dingy buildings offset by colourful murals, (in years to come the Yuendemu doors would become prized artworks), we headed out again along a new stretch of the brick-red road that gashed through plains of tall bleached spinifex. We would see no strangers for days – a unique pleasure of the bush.

With the passing of many years the days’ minutiae have blended into each other, but a handful of events and experiences stand out like ant hills. The nights are particularly memorable.

It’s important to set up camp before dusk. You’d think that finding sand in a desert would be easy; but the ground, dotted with inhospitable bindii, was often hard and stony. However, discomfort was offset by sunsets as wide as the world and starry, starry nights. I wish them upon every Territory tourist… Recently I read a report about the setting up of Balgo mission (that name again!), which mentioned the first people brought in to live there refused to sleep in dormitories because they couldn’t see the stars.

I have subsequently learnt a little of the inspiring story of the German Pallottine monks who had set up a mission over the Western Australian border in just about the most remote spot in Australia in the 1930s. Their successor, the indomitable Father McGuire, still believed that he could protect his Indigenous flock from the ravages of European ‘civilisation’. You couldn’t blame him for trying.

Sleeping under those same stars, on Warlpiri land, we were also invading the territory of nocturnal creatures such as bilbies and marsupial mice. In fact, we had a silent visitor that first night.

‘Have you got my shoes?’ Neil came over to ask next morning as we packed.

‘Neil,’ I laughed, ‘why would I want your smelly sand shoes!’ Then we noticed tracks … A dingo had circled each groundsheet, examining us and our belongings before retreating into sparse scrub. Neil found one shoe fifty yards away. The other was never found.

(Yes, baby Azaria Chamberlain would disappear in the Territory a few years later. We had already been scrutinised by the Uluru dingoes, so I never doubted that one had taken her.)

On the second night we stopped at a creek bed, and after dismissing the possibility of unexpected flooding in the night we settled down for our usual meal around the campfire. The relaxed conversations that always took place could never be replicated between four walls.

When it was time to get our bedding organised we happily accepted Russell’s offer to dig a trench and spread the coals for us. We drifted to sleep easily on the soft, warm sand… But not for long!

Just as I whispered ‘I’m hot!’ to John, Helen, on my other side, squealed! Our ground sheet was beginning to smoulder: Russell hadn’t dug a deep enough trench…

The next two days were slow going, over sections of the track washed out by summer rains and left deeply guttered by heavy vehicles that had pushed through soon afterwards. Spots where someone had been bogged were bypassed by subsequent travellers, leaving a delta of tracks to choose from. Luckily our holdups only tallied one detour to nowhere, a couple of boggings (which involved letting down the tyres, digging ourselves out and laying branches on the mud), and a puncture.

There’s something different around every corner,’ Helen commented on the third day. ‘Did I tell you that people back home warned me the desert’s incredibly boring?’

Indeed, the vegetation varied from spinifex and hummock grass to shrubby acacias and tall desert oaks. We moved from sand plains to rocky outcrops and low, bare ranges, crossed deep creek beds and then occasionally encountered a man-made object – the most memorable being a tank in which we had a soapless dip, watched by wary cattle drinking from the adjacent dam.

Different scenery would soon delight us over the Western Australian border, including a salt lake surrounded by red succulents, the frontier town of Hall’s Creek, the fast-developing Ord River Scheme and a surreal landscape of bulbous boab trees and giant anthills near Wyndham. (Anthills crushed by graders carving a roadway become concrete chunks when the sand erodes, providing atrocious driving conditions.)

Meanwhile, people as well as landscapes enlivened our trip. One day Russell, unfillable, like most teenagers, ate a packet of prunes. Brian’s vehicle ahead of us made several unscheduled stops while Russell scuttled behind acacia or sand hill with spade and toilet paper. Neil’s consumption of a tube of condensed milk was less gut-wrenching, but thereafter his parents scolded him whenever they had to drink their billy tea black.

Then little Barbara gave us a scare when, on the fourth night, she suddenly began to scream and scream. She had burnt her feet in the campfire coals. We waited anxiously to see how they would respond to Ruth’s expert treatment. Should we use that two-way radio?

Someone nervously suggested calling in to Balgo, which was now nearby; but Ruth eventually calmed the little girl and rocked her off to sleep.

Remarkably, Barbara was much better next morning, our relief providing a second reason to plough past the dreaded mission after passing a group of Aboriginal men on the roadside, with scarcely a sideways glance. Well, real life stories sometimes just have to end in an anti-climax!

Wildlife soon featured again. When we reached Wyndham we had been on the road for a week. Imagine the boys’ excitement as we pulled up on an idyllic, deserted foreshore! They launched themselves towards the waves, shedding shirts and shoes on the sand before lunging into the warm, buoyant swell. Desperate to wash off a week’s ground-in grime, Helen kept pace with them, and I was not far behind. The others smiled at our exuberance.

It was the quickest swim I’ve ever had! Suddenly a scruffy looking man came belting along the beach, screaming obscenities at us. We got his message – a fifteen foot crocodile cruised along that spot every afternoon at five; and it was 4.55 … We didn’t stay to check its length!

My final memories of our journey are of a couple of other potentially dangerous predators and another night disturbance.

The highway from Kununurra across to Katherine was a bone-shaker in those days, both corrugated and stony. But I recall one soft patch where, as we laboured through sand, we met an angry local – a large buffalo that charged our vehicle. It lurched out of the dense scrub, massive mouth open in a sneer, curved horns pointed straight at us and wild eyes totally focused on our drivers’ side door.

‘Shut the window!’ I screamed as its horn practically gouged John’s right arm.

The buffalo thumped against the engine on its next onslaught, with John pumping frantically on the accelerator, swerving wildly. We took minutes to outpace it.

Hot and weary on reaching the outskirts of Darwin at last, I felt a little deflated, for soon we would become regular tourists again. Tales of pre-cyclone Darwin must remain in my swag of yarns for another time, except for one curious incident in the night.

At 5.30 am the earth moved!

Yes, while the eight of us lay in our sleeping bags, an earth tremor rippled under us. It was only just big enough to make the paper the next day – but a not-to-be-forgotten experience for recent city-slickers like us!

Soon it was time to head south in time for the new school term, much to Neil’s disappointment.

‘Can’t we break down or something?’ he begged.

The Stuart Highway is not fertile ground for travel stories, and there’s only space to list one of the interesting people we met along the way. The last of our notable Territorian wild creatures, along with the sly dingo, the belligerent buffalo and that unseen croc, was a very stroppy human. Well, we did warn Helen, when she began shampooing her hair in the Katherine River, that the residents wouldn’t appreciate bubbles in their town water supply.

On the first day back at school I overheard someone ask Neil, ‘Do anything good in the holidays?’

‘Nah,’ was the reply. Just more camping.’

***

In the tally of the satisfaction score of a journey (preparations 30%, travel 50%), there is about 20% unallocated. Most of it goes in the memories column of course, for the spirit of the Territory will never leave me. There’s a sense in which it’s now my country too.

We have dined out for many years on our outback stories. Discussions with ‘grey nomads’ and Google searches show that the trek we took is no longer a pioneering feat. But I imagine it’s all the better for being safer, more comfortable – and properly mapped. You can get petrol along the way, dine at roadhouses and pre-book a motel room at Hall’s Creek via the internet. Moreover, you can visit a goldmine, the Tanami Desert Wildlife Reserve and the Balgo Art Centre … It must still be a magic experience.

The final 5% or so of the rewards of travel is in the lifelong interests that ensue. This journey in particular eventually led me to a heightened concern for the environment, Indigenous people and culture – and to writing.

So it was that in 2002 I was invited to the Adelaide launch of four books vibrantly illustrated by Aboriginal children from ‘my’ desert country – including some from Balgo and others from Yuendemu! Watching the young visitors, I thought of the shiny-eyed kids who had greeted us thirty-five years before, and their artwork.

‘I’ve been to your country,’ I told the Warlpiri elder who owns one of the stories. She looked doubtfully at me until I explained; then her tense face lit up and we shared smiles.

Elizabeth Hutchins, former teacher and executive officer of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, is author of a dozen books, as well as prize-winning travel and environmental articles and many short stories. She lives in Adelaide with her husband and her constant companion Millie, an RSPCA rescue cat.