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Simpson Safari by Philip Game Article appeared in Australian Financial Review Magazine 27-07-01 CURLING UP EACH night in a cosy canvas 'swag' or bedroll, to wake as the stars fade into a dawn sky. Pulling on the same grubby clothes day after day and not giving a damn. Prodding life into the ashes of last night's campfire, and grabbing the shovel before trudging off behind a spreading mulga bush. After a week back in the city, the desert life feels like a distant dream; day after day spent ploughing on over the red sand dunes. The outback sets its own priorities. Weather reports aren't about what to wear, they're about avoiding disaster. If you get it wrong out here, you may not see home again. Crossing the Simpson Desert, a wilderness of wind-blown red dunes and eye-glazing salt lakes at the heart of the Australian continent, is no longer an extraordinary achievement, but still a satisfying one. The crossing also completes a circuit around Lake Eyre, which last year filled with floodwaters to create an inland sea that soon began to evaporate. Two men and five camels made the first successful crossing in 1936. Our own party came equipped with tyre pumps, winches and welding rods, radio tuned to the Royal Flying Doctor Service, satellite phone and geostationary satellite positioning system. Plus, of course, detailed maps, ample food, water, fuel and spare tyres. Today's 'bushies' must blend the skills of the 19th century with those of today. Andrew Dwyer, urbane television host and former hotelier, has led many journeys across this terrain. His colleague Steve Baird, who operates his own summertime pony treks in the Australian Alps, is as adept with his sketch pad as with stirrups or shifting spanners. Oodnadatta, once a railhead on the old route of the Central Australian 'Ghan' Railway in northern South Australia, is the last outpost before one enters the desert from the west; Birdsville in far southwestern Queensland is its eastern portal. A narrow strip of tarmac down the main street of Oodnadatta divides an expanse of dust; sheets of corrugated iron flap in the wind. Aah, aah, aaaarrrgh - the desolate crow calls reverberate, unheeded by stray dogs and a few roaming figures. Wherever you turn, the horizon beckons. In 1980 the last Ghan train entered town, bypassed thereafter by the new line which has been constructed away to the west. The station-master's house, the town's most imposing, has become a modest museum, collating fading images of townsfolk, nurses, Aborigines, racegoers, pastoralists and visiting researchers. The Transcontinental Hotel and the general store with their dusty windows and wide verandahs are now Aboriginal-owned, but Adam and Lynnie Plate retain a clear monopoly on entrepreneurship. Their Pink Roadhouse manifests itself as caravan park, general store, post office, cafe and garage, and as self-appointed markers of the desert tracks. A gaggle of good-natured children from the Aboriginal school sit up to table for their weekly hot lunch in the Roadhouse. Outside in the dust a steady trickle of vehicles comes to a halt, refuelling man and machine. Burst tyres are replaced. We drive north across Mount Sarah and Hamilton cattle stations to reach Dalhousie Springs, the western portal to the Simpson Desert, where rickety stockyard fences, crumbling walls and sprawling date palms recall the fate of so many European settlers. A spring flows where the waters of the Great Artesian Basin percolate to the surface: the site was home to the Southern Arrernte people for 30,000 years. The main waterhole forms a delightful natural spa - and our last chance for a dip for days to come. The French Line, the direct route east, is a clay-surfaced access track built by a petroleum company in the late 1950s. Flocks of zebra finches perch in the mulga trees at Purnie Bore, a wellhead which provides the last surface water before the dune country begins in earnest. Galahs, cockatiels, little corellas and brilliantly coloured budgerigars gather here too. At Lynnie's Corner, named for guess-who and sign-posted in trademark pink and black, we strike out on to the soft sands of the more southerly WAA Track - named from the grid references on some anonymous geophysicist's map. Time to deflate the tyres to 20 pounds. Good progress means about 100-120km per day. Tonight's camp is a claypan between two nameless dunes. Dinner soon emerges from the bushman's traditional Bedourie Oven, embedded in hot coals: kangaroo seared and roasted with quandong chilli glaze, Dutch shallots cooked in their skins, pumpkin, carrot and beetroot tossed in balsamic vinegar; topped off with macadamia tart. What better choice of wine than a Cockatoo Ridge sparkling red, its label adorned with the same red dunes which delineate our campsite? Morning dawns, cool and damp. Fresh tracks of feral camel, dingo and kangaroo have materialised across the sand. The chain of nine life-giving wells dug by the vanished Wangkungurru people is almost imperceptible. The last survivor, Irinjili Mick McLean, had said that in those halcyon days his people wanted for nothing. Dwyer leads us to the inconspicuous depression where a small watercourse fades into the sand. All around, the sands are strewn with fragments of bone and tiny stone tools, evidence enough to map the patterns of extinction of tiny desert animals. Near Poeppel Corner, where the Northern Territory meets South Australia and Queensland, we scramble in and out of the Land Cruisers four times in quick succession as the lead vehicle and its trailer are coaxed over the dunes. The fifth sand ridge is the most formidable: everybody out once more, break out the winches and the tow rope. Meanwhile, there is plenty to admire beside the track, like the honey-green flowers and olive-drab pods of parrot pea; weeping emu bush; colony wattle with its bright green seed pods; narrow-leaved hop bush; the Dead Finish which is an aptly named acacia, the fodder of last choice for struggling stock. Grass wrens skitter in and out of cane grass clumps, providing camouflage for the Gould's goanna and the painted dragon. In between the brick-red dunes the terrain varies markedly from creamy claypans and gleaming salt lakes to swathes of olive-drab saltbush country. As we turn east into Queensland's Simpson National Park the dunes become larger but fewer, interwoven with the tendrils of the Channel Country watercourses. Fine white silt billows as we dip down into the dry bed of the Eyre Creek, unsettling a flock of vociferous corellas. Queensland saves the best for last. Just 40km short of Birdsville we roll to a halt below Nappanerica Dune: Big Red. The Simpson's last stockade is an irresistible challenge to anyone equipped with a four-wheel-drive and a modicum of testosterone. Emus scurry up to the ridge crests, grey feather dusters counterpoised against a brick-red sand and an uncharacteristically leaden sky. Conversations pause for the weather report: rain could maroon us for days at a time. Dead flat, the flood plains quickly become impassible after rain, hence the hovercraft parked behind the Birdsville Hotel. We push through the doors of the historic hostelry, founded in 1884, and now the lodestone for thousands who descend on the town each September ostensibly for the horse races. Inside the main bar two extremes mingle like oil and water - the weekend warriors, chariots parked outside, and the real bushies, characterised by the marvellously contorted bush hats, the leathery faces and - sometimes - the Aboriginal blood. Birdsville seems almost prissy; our motel-style bedrooms behind the pub are decidedly 1990s. Outside town on the Diamantina Billabong, ibises, cormo-rants and pelicans browse placidly on the pools stretching away from the causeway which crosses the ephemeral river. But late at night, the phone box across the street shudders as a storm picks up and sends sand eddies swirling across the tarmac. Some delicate souls might opt for their first cappuccino, dispensed from the one-room gallery established by urban refugee and accomplished artist Wolfgang John. But no one should miss the more robust diversions of the Birdsville Working Museum, which stands apart from its many, equally homespun, peers as a delightful introduction to outback life. Wait until John Menzies, stockman turned folk historian, plays his hand-cranked cardboard record player and dons his barbed-wire hat. Birdsville had its genesis as a colonial customs station astride the notorious Birdsville Track, the cattle droving route which followed Cooper Creek down from Queensland to the railway, skirting the eastern shores of Lake Eyre. Today, under normal conditions, perhaps the most notable aspect to the long drive south is imagining the lives of the pioneering cattlemen and their families. At the Mungerannie Hotel, the only wayside halt in 514km, the rusting shell of a truck bears the name of mail contractor Tom Kruse, who negotiated the sand dunes for hundreds of kilometres each week. Kruse's routine was dramatised in the acclaimed 1954 documentary The Back Of Beyond. Diamantina Touring Company operates 13-day expeditions to the Lake Eyre Basin, featuring fine contemporary Australian cuisine. Priced from A$2,145 (about HK$17,000) departing from Adelaide.Web site: www.diamantina-tour.com.au; |
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