From My Notebooks In 1976: Crossing the Nullarbor

We left Ceduna, and André’s garage, on April 6th to take the road across the Nullarbor plain.

Strangely there is almost nothing in my diary about this part of the journey, although after almost fifty years some of it is vividly memorable, so I will abandon the normal format of this series and just describe it as I remember it.

The next township of any note, so far as we knew, was Eucla, on the state boundary between South Australia and Western Australia. That was about 500 miles away.

We had met nobody coming the other way, so we had no current information of the state of the road, but we had gathered plenty of alarming prophecies. So far as we knew it was all dirt. Kangaroos, bulldust and road trains would be the principal dangers. Bulldust, they said, was thin powdered rock that filled huge potholes so that you wouldn’t know they were there until you fell into them; families of kangaroos would charge across the road unannounced and knock you down, most probably into a large pothole; and road trains – well, obviously you need to get out of the way in time because they don’t stop.

We had no information about fuel stops and had to assume there were none. Since my range on a full tank was about 300 miles, I must have been carrying extra, but my diary says nothing about it.

What we discovered after we got going was that a lot more of the road had been sealed than we expected, and when it did turn to dirt it was quite manageable – certainly nothing like as bad as the mountain roads of Ethiopia.

There were only 200 miles of dirt road left, and halfway across them we met Mr. Gurney. He was a spry, elderly gent with a big white beard, and he had a tin shack by the side of the road where he sold petrol. He lived with his wife (whom we never saw) in a ramshackle bungalow, with some emus, a pet wombat, and some other more familiar animals. It was there that I learned the wombat, a substantial animal, has a sense of humour. It likes to get between your legs and suddenly spin, tossing you to the ground.

Mr Gurney at his Kunaldra Station

Gurney said he owned eleven hundred square miles of Australia, but it was of no value to him because the only drinkable water was found in a cave near his dwelling. It was the cave we wanted to see, but he was reluctant to show us – “not since those three blokes with guns. They were sitting down there firing rifles at the roof. Mad drunk or something.”

But we persuaded him that we were safe. The Nullabor is quite flat, so we clambered down a crater. As I wrote in Jupiter’s Travels:

“Miraculously, at the bottom of the crater among rocks and boulders Gurney had an orchard, the only place where fruit trees could survive the heat. The cave is a series of great caverns, and an important experience, for it suggests that the whole plain must be largely hollow. Indeed there’s a theory – or fancy – that the Southern Ocean flows by subterranean passages to the interior of Australia. At any rate, the hollowness seemed most significant there, because you can feel the earth reverberate when you stamp on it, because emus call to each other by inflating bladders under their croups and making a noise like the underground echo of a steel drum, and because hollowness is a sign of great age. So in the night, half asleep on the ground, listening to the emus drumming and the clank of distant goat bells and not knowing what they were, I thought I was hearing the sound of a great tribal celebration drifting across the plain”.

We spent the night there outside on the ground. We were among the last to travel that road. Later that year a new road, further south, was built and tarred, leaving the Gurneys alone in the wilderness and I have wondered from time time what happened to them. He called his place Kunaldra Station.

On Wednesday, April 7th, my diary says:

Met Bill McGarry at Eucla. Camped out in the bush.

The Nullarbor at dawn