The plane is waiting. The pilot emerges from the shade of the wing. His epaulettes are crisply aligned, the fuselage gleams behind him. We climb out to greet him but I haven’t quite reached his timezone yet. There are still wings inside my shirt, legs in my hair. I’m spitting green ants and ladybirds, like a traveller from another world entirely.
* In March 2015 Rio Tinto and Alcoa announced they were relinquishing their joint-venture plans to mine bauxite on the Mitchell Plateau. The West Australian government declared it would reserve 5 million hectares there, making it ‘Australia’s largest national park’. On that short and surreal journey in 1993 I could never have imagined this outcome.
The steel cocoon
For a few summers when I was a kid we used to drive from Perth to Greenough, just south of Geraldton, to stay near the mouth of the river in a beach shack that belonged to relatives. In February the trip was so hot we took to driving it at night. We never had a car with airconditioning – we travelled with the windows down. Mum made a nest of sheets and pillows on the back seat of the FC Holden and the three of us kids snuggled down and saw nothing until we arrived at dawn. Even now there are towns on that Midlands road that I don’t know at all – Carnamah, Three Springs, Mingenew – because I only ever passed through them at night. In those days before the Brand Highway was built it was a long, roundabout trip that could take up to seven hours and in memory it often feels as if I smelt my way there, because I can still smell all those freshly harvested paddocks, the treacherously dry wild oats at the roadside, and the baked desert wind blowing across the domestic scents of upholstery and clean linen. Eventually, as light leaked into the sky, the telling aroma of sea salt and Olearia axillaris (the coastal daisy we grew up calling saltbush) heralded our arrival.
My own kids seem to cavil at the prospect of a long drive – too many weeks spent bouncing in the back of a troopy, I imagine. Even the dog needs to be coaxed aboard these days. And the grandkids are still at the age when a car journey sends them to sleep in minutes. But as a boy I looked forward with enormous excitement to a proper road trip. And without doubt, the biggest adventure of my childhood was the trek we made across the Nullarbor in the summer of 1969–70 before the road was sealed. During that Christmas holiday we crossed the continent, coast to coast. It was a season like no other, an insight into just how big and strange our country was. But the highlight for me, with all its peculiar initiatory ordeals and sensations, was the treeless plain itself. It was a 1200-kilometre leg, most of it flat and straight, and more than half of it done on a limestone track rough enough to shake the fillings from your teeth. There were wrecked cars and exploded caravans at the roadside. Vehicles blew by with shredded tyres lashed to their roof racks, and before they were swallowed in chalky white dust, fellow travellers gave us a jaunty thumbs-up as if to stiffen our resolve. Because it was hard going. But groan and growl as we did, jouncing around in the back of the Hillman Hunter station wagon, a part of us welcomed the discomfort. It made us feel like intrepid expeditioners, as if the trials of the journey were making us more ruggedly authentic, more Australian.
Of course, though we were pummelled from dawn till dusk, coughing and sneezing all the way, we spent the bulk of the trip literally sealed inside the shell of the vehicle. Acting on a tip-off at Eucla, Dad taped the doors and windows shut. Even so, the dust was unstoppable, and in a sense this was the only part of the landscape we really engaged with. It wasn’t until we pulled over at day’s end that we truly felt the singularity of the place. From inside the car the scale of the landscape didn’t seem so freakishly big, but outside it I felt my mind struggling to keep up with the endless openness. It was exciting, and a little frightening. Set free from the vehicle we were like hens released from a battery cage, cautiously testing the ground underfoot, uncertain of our parameters, sniffing the bluebush and tasting gravel dust on our tongues. I remember standing over the weird mesmerizing vortex of a blowhole as it siphoned the distant sea air into the desert. Some evenings as we sat, road-stunned, to eat our baked beans and Rice Cream, a great stillness settled upon us and for a while it sounded like silence. Until the cryptic sounds of the plain made it past the fading roar in our ears. Tiny birds spritzed about in the saltbush, skinks and marsupials stirred unseen in the darkening mulga. What had seemed empty and desolate was actually alive, twitching, chattering, sighing and questing high and low. It had been all day, of course. The difference was we’d stopped moving long enough to hear.
Automobiles are a boon. They have liberated us from drudgery and brought us an ease of movement once unthinkable. In a single week I can visit places my forebears might have spent two lifetimes searching out. Our journeys are largely free of the suffering and danger that were once bound up in travel. A suburb like the one I grew up in would have been untenable, perhaps even inconceivable, without the assumption that every household in it was supported by a motor vehicle. In the first half of the twentieth century automobiles augmented our settlements, now they shape them, determining where they’re situated, how they’re laid out. Our cities are built to accommodate the car as much as the citizen, and the outward creep of low-density suburbs is the unsustainable price we pay for our enviable new mobility. Even our homes, with their integrated garages, have been steadily modified – disfigured in many instances – to adapt to the primacy of vehicles in domestic life.
But the pity of this gift is that in the hinterlands, as in the cities, we defer too much to our machines. As with the mobile phone and the personal computer, we let cars master us. We don’t just let them determine what we’ll see by the speeds and routes we travel, sometimes the driving and the vehicle become ends in themselves. How often have you foregone a stop for fear of losing time or needing to make it up? I’m a shocker for this. A long trip gives me road fever; I’m forever anxious to press on, keep going. I can sit fourteen hours a day behind the wheel on an open road. There’s a kind of gorging impulse, as if I’m eating the distances, kilometre by kilometre, even if I’m on a journey without a deadline or a fixed destination. The not-so-funny joke in my family is the standard reply I offer a passenger dying for a pee. ‘What’s your problem?’ I invariably ask. ‘We stopped four hours ago.’
I’ve seen a hell of a lot of landscape through the car window, most of it viewed at speed in bleary, lazy glimpses, like all those drowsy hours of TV with the world running past in a one-dimensional format, segmented and edited for passive, casual and non-absorbent viewing. On the couch or behind the wheel I glance outward, but I’m not sure how much I really see. Thanks to airconditioning most of us no longer smell the peculiar scents of places; we hear no birds, feel no wind. We’re mostly oblivious to fluctuations in temperature. You register little more than the noise of the engine and the soundtrack you’ve brought with you. You travel too fast to notice many creatures. Sometimes you recognize a native mammal only the second before you reduce it to roadkill. Seeing the country by car, you may think you’re in the landscape but really you’re in geographical limbo. Enclosed in your steel cocoon you experience the car first, the place you’re in comes a distant second.
While for the driver the car is a personal fiefdom, for the passenger it may be another matter. That’s a lesson I learnt the summer of our great road trip. I was carsick at Glenrowan, hungry and miserable all along the Great Ocean Road, and I bickered incessantly with my brother through the Riverina. Like him and my little sister I was making none of the navigational choices. We were captives, as my own kids were hostages in their way along the bush tracks of the Dampier Peninsula and the Gibb River Road. That Christmas trip of 1969–70 I saw a fair bit of Australia. But I saw even more motor car.
Happily a lot of country is vivid enough to penetrate the shell of the vehicle and stir the driver from his trance. You notice grasstrees massed like warriors in their thousands. Half an hour later you’re in a plain of limestone pinnacles like a war cemetery and the conjunction sets your mind racing.
I was driving south from
the Pilbara one morning, keen to catch a radio signal in the minutes before the national news bulletin, when I noticed lines of ancient dunes stacked away to the horizon, huge and uniform as storm swells marching in from a distant sea. Stones glittered at their tawny crests like the sheen of sun on water and I drove and stared, so entranced by this oceanic mirage that when the radio finally came to life it startled me to such a degree that I swerved like a madman and nearly put myself into the mulga.
But a car can also render the outlandish mundane. The first time you encounter a saltpan the size of a city you may slow down and exclaim, but at the speed you’re travelling there’ll be three or four others along pretty soon; your gaze may well be outward and interested, but after that initial silver-pink shock you’ll barely notice them. Even the tortured river red gums on the Greenough floodplain become domestic detail after you’ve driven by a hundred times. Genuflecting grotesquely before the perpetual southerly, they are almost unrecognizable as representatives of their species, Eucalyptus camaldulensis. There’s something lurid and expressionistic about their growth patterns, the way they toil like hemiplegics, trunks bent at right angles, parallel to the earth, crowns kissing the dark soil before them. They were livid presences in my childhood, weird haunting figures amid the still-standing ruins of the floods of 1888, but these days, unless I’m travelling with a newcomer to the midwest, I can often pass by without noticing them at all. It’s not just repetition making things like these indistinct, it’s the inhuman speed at which we travel.
When I see long-distance cyclists grinding away at the roadside, their swags and billies strapped behind them as they pump and shine along the highway’s perilous edge, I find myself embarrassed to be moving so effortlessly. I can’t help but defer to the laborious authority of their progress. We’re each travelling through the same landscape, these mad bastards and I, but surely their experience is deeper, more authentic. They must absorb things I miss entirely: if I had any substance I’d be down there at the gravel-strewn shoulder, pedalling away with them. In the toxic gusts of diesel smoke and the slamming slipstream of roadtrains a hundred metres long. I envy these intrepid pedallers but my admiration is only momentary. It’s fine thinking of the journey itself as the destination but there’s a lot to be said for safe arrival.
Still, you’re not really anywhere much at all until you climb out of the car, and even a white-line-fever fiend like me will occasionally remind himself to break a day’s driving and pay attention to something memorable along the way. Headed for the far north Kimberley one winter I pulled up beside the vast tidal mudscape of King Sound, near Derby. I’d been on the road two days straight with a couple still ahead of me and I could feel my mind and body growing numb, so I stopped awhile to watch the tide go out along the delta. A spring tide is dramatic anywhere but there are few tidal events as spectacular as what you’ll see at Derby when the moon is full and all that chocolate water gets moving. From the car it was quite a picture but outside the vehicle it was a reeking tumult. I’m glad I spared the hour to take it in properly. The energy of the tide was colossal. The outward flow was so strong it wasn’t hard to imagine the last dampness underfoot, the very moisture of your body, being sucked out along with it. As slick brown water retreated from the mangrove ramparts it seemed to flee the land in a headlong stampede, flaying the trees that flashed olive green and then tawny and silver as they shivered and creaked, clutching at one another to survive the force of it. A million snarls of roots began to show and then canyons of mud, foetid and spidered with runnels and sucking pits. It popped and blurted, fizzing with skippers and the crone fingers of pneumatophores. Within minutes the flooded forest looked like somewhere you could venture into. But I knew better than to try. It wasn’t just the crocs giving me pause, it was the thought of foundering chest-deep in mullock, being tasted and swallowed whole, stuck there, unable to move and slowly sinking from view as the stereo pumped out Steely Dan up there behind me on dry land.
I stayed put. I gave up struggling to take it in visually and just listened. The place was teeming. I heard, far off, the wingbeats of a brahminy kite. Then, closer, the sudden ka-boosh of a barramundi monstering a mullet in a channel. And finally it was so quiet I caught something else, an unsettling chain of whispers, and when I opened my eyes I saw it was a leafball of green ants, suspended from a wild fig nearby. I leant in and there it was, plain and clear, a steady chickering noise like gossip.
IX
Cape Range, 2009
When the track becomes impassable I climb down, leave the vehicle and hike up beyond the eerie pink monuments of the termite mounds into the first ridges fanning out from the canyon mouth. Eventually there’s no red soil left at all, only red and blond marl and plates of shifty shale surrounded by spinifex. Because I’m alone and a great distance from help, I walk with the kind of elaborate care that inevitably renders a person clumsy. Just navigating is challenge enough. For the moment I’m not seeing much more than my evenly laced boots but I don’t want to twist an ankle on this unstable ground or step on a death adder coiled in the spinifex shadows. It’s hypnotic, though, the excess concentration. I follow my feet up the slope like a dolt who’s never seen his own boots before.
I’m looking for black-flanked rock-wallabies. They’re a small, agile species with a racy tricoloured face. Their numbers have been decimated by foxes and in Western Australia only half a dozen robust populations still exist in the wild. They favour high, rocky country and here they have an ocean view with the coral sprawl of Ningaloo Reef at their feet. I like to come up into these red ranges to sit and watch them, but they’re skittish and I’m covering a lot of open ground with the wind at my back. I travel as quietly as I can but on loose pebbles it’s hard to be stealthy.
I choose a gully radiating from the main gorge and crunch slowly up its stony bed, climbing through vine snares and leggy nests of wild fig. It’s a winter’s day and mild for these parts but I’ve already sweated through my shorts and T-shirt. From here the incline only steepens. Up ahead the red-pink bluffs rise against a cloudless sky. The landscape is parched. All the plants are semi-arid miniatures, from the desert pea to the waist-high kurrajongs. There’s no suggestion of water anywhere and yet everything I see has been formed by torrents. The range is remnant reef and ancient uplift but the ragged surface is the work of cyclonic rains. The gouges and gutters I pick my way up are older than human time but the dams of shale that choke them could be as recent as last year. Underfoot, in silent darkness, mysterious stygofauna swim and bristle. The entire range is honeycombed with freshwater caves, forming an elaborate limestone karst system of a scale and richness that beggars belief.
Across the shin-high scrub a black-faced cuckoo-shrike flits past. Zebra finches animate the middle distance like midges. I’m elevated enough for the breeze to cool the sweat on my back. I try to resist thinking about water.
I stop a moment and scan the breakaway with binoculars. A white-bellied sea-eagle tips out over the canyon. A few euros prop and pitch along the ridge, bobbing against the pale spinifex like rosy stones hurling themselves uphill. No black-flanks are visible for the moment. At this time of day they seek whatever shade is offered by a small tree or a boulder. I’ll need to be patient. I’ll climb as high as possible to watch and wait. From here I can see the dark mouth of a cave beneath the brow of the bluff. I pack the glasses away and aim for it, following the narrow, winding pad and the telltale scat. In the end, faced with a crenellated barrier of boulders, I pick my way up niche by niche. Somewhere behind, a spinifex pigeon creaks away, startled. A stone clanks against a hard surface and I hang there, unsure whether I’ve kicked it loose or flushed something big from a hiding place. I see nothing, hear only wind. Finally I clamber onto a broad ledge beneath a sandstone overhang.
The cave is the size of a child’s bedroom. Its rear wall is tawny where the ceaseless southerly has reamed it. When I see the roos folded down on their joints in the chalky dirt I give out a little squawk of sur
prise. But they do not stir. They lie curved against one another, pooled head to haunch in a rest that seems regal, even holy. I pause a few moments, taking it in. Then I step up and squat before them, peering closely. They really do look as if they’re sleeping. But their hides are almost translucent, like the vellum of medieval manuscripts. Tan and grey, shapely even in death, their bodies have been mummified by the high desert air. There’s a musky smell but it’s not the scent of death, for all about them, like signs of tribute, are the scuffs and scat of the living. Clearly others visit regularly, hunker in the shade beside them and doze through the hottest hours with the breeze rifling through the scalloped chamber. The sun tracks across the cave walls where wasps have daubed candle niches and gargoyles but the mummies seem to lie in perpetual shade here on their soft bed of talc.
I can’t help but think of these grand creatures, emblems of our strange island, hauling themselves up here to die, sensing it in their bellies like the shapeless ache of hunger, coming as they’ve always come to rest in their eyrie above reef and plain. Here they are, still themselves, still beautiful, the wind in their faces, higher than the raptors, above the snakes of the spinifex and the turtles in their rookeries on the beaches far below, like an ancient, priestly caste keeping vigil even in death.