Australian outback grand magazine

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T R AV E L O U T B A C K

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Adventures in the Outback Smoking hot temperatures, lethal critters and a chance to get up close and personal with sharks: surely this is the ultimate opportunity to build family bonds

“

This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. If you are not pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking Outback. It’s a tough place.

”

– In a Sunburned Country

by American author Bill Bryson A curious koala welcomes the visitors as they set up camp under its tree in the Australian Outback.

Fortunately, it is not on the list of dangerous creatures.

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By Nancy Harper

W

The rental vehicle was too old to have air-conditioning, but somehow it did serve a family well as they toured through heat and rugged terrain in Australia.

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e’re standing around the bargain car-rental lot in Sydney, Australia’s western suburbs — me, my husband and our two teenage daughters — about to drive into the Outback in the height of summer for what I like to call some good old-fashioned forced family fun.

At 10 a.m. the mercury is already pushing 40 C, and with creeping dread I realize that when people say you get what you pay for, they’re not just saying it to be annoying.

They’re saying it because it’s true.

Clearly what we’ve paid for this time is a dubiously appointed, bottom-of-the-barrel, 20-year-old lemon. (Our 16-year-old came up with a more colourful description within seconds of us pulling away from the curb.)

Despite being advertised as fully air-conditioned, a quick test drive proves that this vehicle is nothing of the sort.

And it’s hot right now. Damn hot. Dare I say jungle-hot, and likely to worsen the further we get from the coast.

We point out to the rental guy that whoever is sitting in the back won’t feel even the tiniest pffffft of air con, but he is unmoved.

So, as I say, you get what you pay for.

But maybe things will still turn out OK. Maybe things will be amazing! Or maybe this will be the WORST TRIP EVER — and proof that we are, indeed, terrible parents.

When it was still in the planning stages, the Australian Outback as a destination — big sky, red earth, picture-postcard wildlife, hardly any people — seemed just the ticket for a cool family adventure.

Now that we’re actually about to go, I’m no longer so enthused.

After all, who are we to think we can swing a 4,000-kilometre camping odyssey in a vehicle like this? Might our wifideprived teenagers crack? Will they tear each other’s hair out after two weeks in a tent, in a different place every night, in the middle of nowhere?

And wouldn’t we be better off staying put in Sydney, that nirvana of a city replete with comfy digs and magnificent harbour views?

Certainly the lure of a coastal holiday, were we to head north instead of west, is undeniable. But alas, The Lemon is booked and paid for, and having purchased no cancellation insurance, we are at its mercy.

(There’s also a bit of “damn it, we can do this!” about this particular trip. After all, tourists come to Australia in droves, but how many of them venture into the interior with plans to sleep rough?)

And then there’s the matter of a certain “adventure experience” thousands of kilometres away at the turnaround point in South Australia — one that involves me, my daughters, a cage, the Southern Ocean, and one of the four places in the world where you can view great white sharks up close.

Just like The Lemon, this shark thing has also been booked and paid for, although surely in one of my fits of drunken bravado.

In any case, I’ve got two weeks to dream up a good excuse not to do it, so now there’s nothing to do but drive. And drive we do, loaded to the gills with camping equipment as we head west out of Sydney

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Inselberg rock formations rise from the earth like ancient monuments.

and into rural New South Wales.

••• I consider myself very fortunate to have lived in this wonderful country for the better part of a decade and to hold an Australian passport.

But like most Aussies who tend to stick close to their urban comforts, I don’t really know the country properly.

I know there’s a world of difference between the Australia most tourists see (the Great Barrier Reef, the Sydney Opera House, Bondi Beach, Uluru) and the reality (pretty much everything else).

I also know that the late, beloved icon Steve Irwin was that rarest of creatures: an Australian truly at home in the wild.

Because for all its rural sensibilities and vast expanses of untouched land, Australia is a nation of urbanites, most of whom won’t ever get closer to Irwin’s world than what they see on TV. And while that iconic 1980s character known as Crocodile Dundee is often credited with bringing Australian culture to the world, Paul Hogan’s cheeky Dundee is nothing more than an exaggerated take on the “bush” qualities Australians hold so dear.

Modern Aussies cling fiercely and proudly to the idea of rural life and the wild colonial spirit that it entails. But the truth is that few of them actually want to live that way.

And I get it.

Going “bush” (basically anywhere outside urban areas) is one thing. Going full “outback” is quite another because Australia is quite possibly the most lethal place on the planet, and one that provides all sorts of interesting ways to die.

If while on the coast you haven’t succumbed to a deadly riptide or a box jellyfish (cardiovascular collapse in less than five minutes), a stonefish (death within a couple of hours) or a shark (no need to elaborate there), there’s always the funnelweb spider (deadliest in the country), the 50 C temperatures, the skin cancer, the

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Mining areas are eerily beautiful despite their moonlike landscapes. Above is an open-pit gold mine in Cobar.

There was lots to see in the rugged countryside, but the highlight was an opportunity to go cage diving among great white sharks.

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saltwater crocodile (death roll, anyone?), and all manner of snakes with venom at least as toxic, if not more so, than any snake on Earth.

Of course, it’s not all lethal. Australia may be a crazy-dangerous and smoking-hot country, but it’s also quite possibly the coolest nation in the world — one that gives workers a day off for a horse race, and provides such wonderful contrasts as AC/ DC and The Wiggles, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Banjo Patterson and Dame Edna Everage.

What’s also uniquely Australian is the irreverent sense of humour. Only here would people be OK with naming a swimming pool after a prime minister who drowned in the ocean.

••• As the miles peel away and the traffic thins to almost nothing, I’m happy to report that the state of The Lemon somehow matters less and less.

We’ve seen hundreds of kangaroos already (albeit many dead on the side of the road), and when we pull in to our first camping spot just west of the Blue Mountains, there’s a wonderfully cool pond that provides an immediate escape from the heat and the flies.

There are reportedly more than 20 million trillion flies in this country — that’s one trillion flies for every Australian face — but the heat and flies notwithstanding, things are already looking up. The kids are playing cards inside their tent, we’ve settled into our camp chairs for a cold beer, and that familiar feeling of freedom descends.

Happily, even though we’re still quite close to civilization, this is not the kind of camping where you are tent-to-tent with the neighbours.

Rather, it’s the way camping should be: roomy, free (and if not free, then incredibly cheap) and with plenty of opportunity to see, feel and smell a place in ways you just can’t when you’re sleeping indoors.

In the coming days, we pass through towns like Bathurst (home of Australian

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stock-car racing), Orange (with its incredibly low-key monument to Australia’s most famous poet, Banjo Patterson, of “Waltzing Matilda” fame), Dubbo and Nyngan, the latter of which is remarkable only in that it gives us the delightfully named Bogan River — a bogan being the Aussie equivalent of a trailer park slacker who spends his days drinking and fighting.

The mercury soars past 45 C in Nyngan, so there is nothing to do but swim in the Bogan, introduce our teenagers to gin and tonic (it’s that kind of trip), and watch the stars come out.

••• The further west we get, the more fascinated I am by the land and the people brave enough to call the Outback home.

To many observers it might seem there’s nothing out here but spinifex (scrub) and red earth, but the trick, I think, is to really truly look.

I haven’t read a word of a book or written a single postcard in all the miles we’ve put

on The Lemon. In fact, I’ve done nothing but sit and watch the world go by, hour after hour after hour, while my husband drives and my kids read and listen to music. (They’re actually loving it, so it would seem that maybe we’re not such bad parents after all.)

Being in the passenger seat has its own rewards. I’ve seen thousands of kangaroos (big reds and smaller eastern greys), hundreds of feathery emus, a handful of wedge-tail eagles. There are thousands upon thousands of birds — squawking cockatoos and corellas, pink galahs, laughing kookaburras — and dozens of lizards, although (thankfully) no close-up sightings of snakes.

It’s also a place full of stuff I’ve never seen, like the spectacle of an open-pit gold mine in Cobar, for example.

At one point, it’s so hot that we drive 100 kilometres out of our way to get to the opal-mining town of White Cliffs, where we’re told people live underground to

avoid the intense heat, which can reach 50 C in summer.

White Cliffs turns out to be a fantastic detour, partly because of the whitewashed underground motel we stay in (a pleasant 22 C night and day) and partly because it’s such a bizarre moon-like landscape pockmarked with hundreds of mine shafts.

Certainly the opal miners seeking their fortune in the late 1800s were made of tough stuff to be able to survive. But the modern-day Aussies who make a living out here now (mostly in agriculture and mining) strike me as just as tough.

Further west we come to the isolated iron-ore mining town of Broken Hill, the birthplace of the world’s biggest mining company, BHP Billiton, and a natural film set for the likes of “Mad Max” and “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”

It’s here that we visit the haunting Line of Lode Miners Memorial, which lists the names and causes of death (“fell down mine shaft,” “run over by truck,”

“explosion”) of more than 800 miners who have died working the massive ore-rich deposit that brought both wealth and tragedy to this outback town.

The heat is still an issue, of course.

By the time we reach South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, I can barely get out of the shade long enough to take photos. But one picture that’s truly worth a thousand words — in Kimba, which has the distinction of being exactly halfway across the continent — is the iron sculptures of explorer Edward John Eyre and his Aboriginal companion Wylie, who helped Eyre become the first European to walk the coastline of the Great Australian Bight and the Nullarbor Plain.

••• We’re still technically in the Outback, but having arrived at the Southern Ocean, the camping just keeps getting better.

On one occasion, we pull into an old sheep station and set up camp under ancient gum trees populated by more wild koalas than I’ve ever seen in one place.

On another occasion, we camp on a cliff

overlooking the ocean. On still another, we camp on the beach after swimming with sea lions and enjoying one too many Christmas Eve drinks with the locals.

And then, suddenly, it’s time to face the sharks.

Having turned eastward again we’ve arrived in Port Lincoln, where cage diving with great white sharks is apparently a rite of passage.

None of the excuses I’ve come up with impress my girls, so now there is no backing out.

We board a boat fitted with gear for 25 divers and head south toward the open ocean and the Neptune Islands. Three hours later, we drop anchor, and at last it’s our turn.

We struggle into our wetsuits, pull on the gear and practise breathing through the tubes that will connect us to the boat once we’re in the water. Breathing underwater is completely foreign to me but, with everyone watching me, there’s nothing to do but go for it.

I can’t believe I’m doing this. I also can’t believe I’m not scared.

The girls and I are rewarded immediately when two 3.5-metre great whites cruise past, close enough for us to reach out and touch, which of course we don’t.

They are surprisingly serene, and more come along shortly, as if they are curious to look at us. (I’m told they can sense individual human heartbeats).

We’re given 45 minutes in the cage, a once-in-a-lifetime experience at the end of which a massive five-metre great white cruises past and whacks our cage with its tail as if to say, “That’s the end of the show, folks.”

It is the pinnacle of what’s been an incredible trip, and now as we east toward more familiar territory in rural Victoria (Melbourne being our final destination), I know that while the Australian Outback might not be for everyone, it most definitely taught me a thing or two.

And after all, isn’t that what real travelling is about?

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