Desert Storm

Sun Herald

Sunday August 8, 1999

Michael Gebicki

Flies, endless stretches of red dust dotted with iconic landmarks and characters sprouting wistful tales of travellers past await Big-Trippers on

the Coober Pedy mail run. Story and photographs by Michael Gebicki.

Take a cushion, everyone advised me, when I mentioned I was travelling with the mailman out of Coober Pedy. And from the tour brochure, it sounded like the posterior was in for a pounding. In the space of a day, the mail truck would cover 600 kilometres, most of it on gravel roads notorious for their corrugations.

But it wasn't so much cushions as fly nets that were high on the agenda of my fellow passengers as we assembled at the Underground Bookshop, just off the main street in Coober Pedy. "The fine mesh ones," I heard a woman stipulate. I had always thought that the wearing of a fly net might cost you your Australian citizenship but the flies of Coober Pedy turn even hardened veterans of the bush barbecue into windmilling maniacs.

Our driver was John Stilwell, a man built on the reassuring scale of a boab tree. John came to Coober Pedy as a policeman and left the force to become an opal miner. He's been the mail contractor for about six years. "Which probably means I've done this trip about 500 times now," he added. Enough to go five times around the equator.

We piled on board. John had just acquired a big new Chevrolet for the mail run but today there were 19 sightseers on board and only the Opal Inn tour bus was big enough. Most were retired couples travelling around Australia by caravan: "Doing the Big Trip," Dawn, from Albury, described it to me.

To the very last, they were as happy as blue heelers in a ute. Whether it was natural high spirits, the freedom of their footloose, gypsy existence or something to do with the expansiveness that the desert allows, to the very last they were in a sparkling mood. They were positively quivering with excitement at the prospect of a 12-hour bus journey across the desert. Not once that day did I hear a cross word or notice a look of anything less than rapture across their faces. I salute them all.

Our route would take us in a giant triangle, with Oodnadatta at the apex and Coober Pedy and William Creek at opposite ends of the base. A few kilometres out of Coober Pedy, we left the bitumen. Another 10 kilometres further, we crossed the cattle grid that marked the Dog Fence, which separates sheep country from the cattle country to the north. "Crude, but it actually works," said John. Beyond the grid we crossed the Moon Plain, a flat, scorched expanse where mica glittered in the morning sun like shattered windscreens. "The never-ending sameness of the everlasting plains" Dawn quoted to me and I had to admit the landscape out the window was visual Valium.

As well as mail, the back of the bus was stacked with fresh food and spare parts - a typical load for the twice-weekly service. Most mail runs in remote areas carry sightseers, without whom the mail contract would scarcely pay its way. Two hours into the journey, we turned off to Mount Barry Station. Any romantic notions of life on an outback cattle station evaporated in the mid-morning heat.

On the outside at least, life at the headquarters of this 2500-square-mile, 4000-head cattle station looked spare. But inside the schoolhouse was a real surprise. Shrunk to modest dimensions, this was a proper classroom, with neat shelves of books, show-and-tell treasures and drawings and charts with basic phrases in different languages, even Polish. There was also a computer with Internet access, provided by the education department as part of the standard equipment for children on remote properties, which I thought showed a refreshingly laudable use of my tax dollars.

As we left Mount Barry, John passed back a menu. Time is short on the mail run and John would call up the roadhouse at Oodnadatta to place our lunch orders. The total was 13 Oodna Burgers - John's recommendation - a vegie burger and a steak. I thought of requesting my burger without pineapple but I suspected this might identify me as a petulant urban foodie. "Oodnadatta is named for the flowering blossom of the gidgee tree," observed John in a ruminative aside. "It stinks."

We arrived at Oodnadatta just after midday and made a circuit of the town. Considering its surroundings, Oodnadatta is a substantial community. There are perhaps 35 houses, a police station, clinic and school but Oodnadatta looked withered. Not a single soul did we see on the streets. Against this sparse backdrop, the Pink Roadhouse is a monument to glorious excess. Out the front of the all-pink facade was a pink phone box and pink canoes for hire. There was a pink truck parked at the bowsers, which were also pink. Inside, owner Lynnie Plate was cooking up a storm as she shovelled our burgers on to the plates. After lunch, there was time for a brief excursion.

From 1891 until the railway line to Alice Springs was completed in 1929, Oodnadatta was the end of the track for travellers on The Ghan. From here, goods and passengers transferred to camels for the six-day camel journey to The Alice. Although the steel tracks at the front were half-buried in sand, the stone railway station still looked proud and purposeful, a tribute to the combined assuredness of steam and the Victorian era.

On the way into Allandale Station, our first stop after Oodnadatta, we passed a yard full of cattle. The old homestead was a study in sturdy colonial architecture but, according to John, it was too close to the creek and when the creek flooded, the homestead drowned. In front of the new homestead, just up the hill, there was a vivid stripe of lawn and bougainvillea in pots on the veranda.

Here, I must apologise to the owners of Allandale for leaving smudgy handprints all over their windows but curiosity got the better of me and besides, there was no one home. Inside, the house was a picture of contented and prosperous suburbia - framed photos of the property, an unmade bed in one room and two shades of green paint smeared above the dado. They were trying to decide what colour to repaint.

For much of the afternoon we followed the Oodnadatta Track alongside the route of the old Ghan, now stripped of its rails but still with many of the sleepers strewn along the track. In the early days of The Ghan, the fettlers' settlements were close together since the hand-pumped rail carts they used could only travel a few miles in a day. These were quickly replaced by powered carts and many of these settlements were abandoned shortly after they were built.

Out the window, we passed a succession of fine stations of brick and stone, surrounded by water towers and houses that conveyed the sense that they were part of some great and thriving enterprise just beyond the horizon. Across the aisle, John, from Melbourne, recalled a trip aboard the old Ghan with a German family who arrived as refugees just after the war. "A mother and four kids. Not a word of English. Bright kids, though. Wonder what became of them."

In the old days, The Ghan was legendary for its delays. Floods could add days to the journey. On one occasion, John said, the train had been stuck in one place for several days and one of the women on board approached the conductor. "When are we getting to Alice Springs?" she inquired. "Madam, how should I know?" he replied. "But you can see that this is a matter of urgency. I am to give birth any day now," said the woman. "Well, madam, a woman in your condition has no business travelling on The Ghan," said the conductor. "Well, I wasn't in this condition when I left Adelaide," shot back the woman.

The Oodnadatta Track follows a chain of waterholes known as the "string of springs", which was also an Aboriginal trade route. Near the iron railway bridge at Algebuckina Creek, we pulled off at a waterhole several hundred metres long. "When it's hot and we've got backpackers on board, they go skinny-dipping," said John wistfully. "Off with their gear and into it. Doesn't worry them a bit. Europeans!" and his voice trailed off as he put the bus into reverse, a little hurriedly I thought, lest we be tempted to follow their example.

It was dark by the time we reached William Creek. The town has a population of seven: "But it's got a hotel, a golf course, an airport and a racetrack. What more could you ask for?" said John. The main street at William Creek doubles as a runway, and our headlights picked out two aircraft parked at the front of the pub.

The William Creek pub is an outback legend.

T-shirts dangling from the ceiling commemorated the visit of Fiona from County Durham, Sven from Sweden and Alison from Dubbo. There was a camel safari in the bar - cameleers with stovepipe arms, shredded sleeves, chewed-up hats and enormous grins, plus a couple of wide-eyed American clients.

After William Creek, we stopped briefly at Anna Creek, billed as the largest cattle station on earth. Most of the afternoon, we had been driving on this single property, part of the empire carved a century ago by Sir Sidney Kidman, the outback cattle baron.

It was almost 10am by the time our wheels hit the bitumen on the outskirts of Coober Pedy. It hadn't been such a tough day, after all, although my blow-up cushion hadn't survived an encounter with the rusty railway spike I'd souvenired from the track of the old Ghan. There could have been a moral there but I was too bushed to figure it out. n

Fact file

The mail run day tour departs Coober Pedy on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The cost is $75 per person. For bookings and information, call 1800 069 911. Coober Pedy has a wide choice of accommodation, including campgrounds, backpacker hostels and motels. The Desert Cave is the best in town, with some rooms located underground. For bookings,

call 1800 291 958. Kendell Airlines has daily flights to Coober Pedy from Adelaide.call 1800 291 958. Kendell Airlines has daily flights to Coober Pedy from Adelaide.

© 1999 Sun Herald

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