Leaving Alice

We left Alice just past noon on the hottest day of the year. As we drove south from town Carmel pulled out the tuning forks from their velvet pouch that Ann-Marie had bought her as a gift from a hippie witchcraft store in Brooklyn. She touched them lightly together releasing the soft ring of her spiritual essence which spread vibrations of hope and love through the car for the journey that was about to unfold. God knows what would have happened if she hadn’t done that. I immediately felt a wave of calm come over me.

Almost as soon as we got through the Gap the skyline was filled with twisting spirals of red dust. Well, not filled exactly, because out here in the red centre it’s a big skyline and it’s quite normal to see one or two, but this day there were at least half a dozen going at once. But these weren’t just willie-willies spinning across the desert floor, they were elongated tubes of twirling hot air siphoning sand all the way up to the stratosphere. And they were moving fast. You could see their path through the small trees and shrubs like a mad bull bursting through the undergrowth, kicking up dust in a fit of anger. One came across the highway as we went passed and it rocked the car just like the backwind of a speeding road train.

We’d had the air-con reconditioned, so we travelled in 21st century comfort down to Erldunda where we topped up with hi-octane fuel and sat in the shade making plunger coffee and putting out water for the dogs. It was 44 degrees with a 17-knot wind blowing from the north-east. It was like sitting in a fan forced oven. We didn’t last long, just scoffed down two cups of coffee each and quaffed a few slices of home-made carrot cake and we were back on the road. We talked about heading to Coober Pedy but decided to stick to our rule – no driving at night. Black bulls on the highway suck light, you can’t see them even when they’re right in front of you. All you get is an absence of light in the shape of a bull, like the road sign. We head for Marla Bore.

We pull in at 6pm, get petrol and pay for the campground but when we get out of the car and walk around we regret not getting a room with air-con, but then no dogs are allowed, so we set up a mozzy-dome and roll out the swag. The heat drains me in about 5 minutes flat, so I go to the shop for a sugary drink to stop from passing out. Organic Tasmanian sparkling apple juice, even here at the outer reaches of the Australian universe. I draw a picture in my mind, the Tamar Valley, perfect climate, organic orchards, pristine water, cooperative living, barefoot hippies on a farm. I’m dreaming, delirious with something like heat stroke. Lying on the swag soaking up the heat is not helping me. I mumble to Carmel, “I’m going over to sit in the pool,” and plod off, carefully putting one foot in front of the other. The pool is fenced and pad-locked to keep out the locals. I don’t have the energy to go to reception and pay $5 for the key. I wander back and stand in the passing spray of the rotary sprinkler keeping the grass green for the campers. Being wet revives me. My wet skin can feel the air moving around me, cooling me. Before that there was only heat.

After the sun goes down, we venture into the shower block and wash off the day’s dust in a hot salty brine pumped straight up from the Great Artesian Basin. Everything in the amenities building is caked in calcium. Taps, tiles, mirrors, drains. If left untended, you imagine this would become like the Jenolan Caves – stalactites falling from the ceiling streaked with colour, taking over the room. I don’t use the towel I brought, treasuring the wetness, letting it soak into my clean clothes. This water is Jurassic, two million years old, but who knows how long it will last now. BHP Billiton pump out 42 million litres a day to run their uranium mine at Roxby Downs, south of here, and people are worried that fracking for coal seam gas in Queensland is causing chemical damage to the basin. Nobody drinks this water. We don’t even use it to brush our teeth.

We reheat frozen chic-pea curry and rice and have tea in the twilight and watch the dogs regurgitate their dinner onto the green grass, unable to keep it down on the first attempt. The sprinkler is still belting away, spraying the bore water in a wide arc. It goes all night but even in the morning there are no puddles. We tie the dogs to tent poles and drift off to sleep in the moonlight with the southern cross rising in direction of our travel. Road trains crashing their gears disrupt our sleep throughout the night as they pull in to refuel and exit back to a ghost highway devoid of traffic, just them and the Kangaroos.

There’s only moon and star light in the sky when I wake and fart and rollover to look up at the universe. I’m not sure how close it is to dawn, but I feel like I’ve slept enough and I’m thinking it’s about the same temperature as it was when I went to sleep. In reality the temperature has dropped slowly from about 40 degrees at 10pm when I shut my eyes, to what is now at 5.30am Central Summer Time, around 36 degrees. As I lay there, I feel the moment when the temperature drops to its lowest overnight, 35 degrees. It feels cool. I crawl out of the dome to take a leak and untie the dogs who go scurrying to the fence line. From here it’s only going to get hotter. While I add my own sterile water and nitrates to the lawn, I feel the slap of passing sprinkler water on my face and shoulders. ‘Don’t they ever turn these taps off?’ I’m thinking as I put Adelaide spring water in the billy and dig around the esky for the soy milk and dried buckwheat and that over-ripe mango I saved for breakfast. I have frozen orange juice and coffee ready when Carmel wakes up to the glare of my head torch. ‘I think it’s almost dawn but it’s hard to tell,’ I say, ‘I felt the temperature drop a little while ago.’ She felt it too. Pretty soon our theory is confirmed, not by a crack of light on the horizon but by the stirrings of the motel guests loading up their Nissans and Prados and rolling out slowly through the carpark gravel to the highway. ‘There were a lot more people on the road last year,’ Carmel says. I agree. We pack up and hit the road as the sky finally begins to brighten.

Both our phones are dead. The cheap-arsed 12-volt phone charger we bought doesn’t fucken work and the solar rechargers exploded when we put them out in the sun before we left. That’s why we can’t tell the time, but we’re on the road now, changing the dashboard clock from NT to SA time and grooving to the dawn disco of Carmel’s latest road mix. The hallmark of South Australia’s northern region is the sparseness of trees and pretty soon we’re in ankle-high shrub country as far as the eye can see. This, like the grasslands of the Barkly region east of the Stuart Highway to the Queensland border, is where you can see the curvature of the earth. A massive dawn sky bares down on us with gold tinted clouds colouring the early morning blue. Pretty soon we’ve got the air conditioner set to absolute cold and the fan running at max speed, warding off the impending heat. It’s still before eight in the morning but the temperature outside is already unbearable.

Up ahead, on one of those straight stretches of highway that taper to a vanishing point where the sky meets to the road, there’s a figure standing on the bitumen, motionless, like a blackened tree trunk. As we get closer Carmel lifts her foot off the pedal and we lose speed, slowing to a crawl as we come up to it. It’s an eagle, a wedgetail, tall and slender, about the size of a 12-year-old child. It is perched on the carcass of a big red kangaroo, knocked down in the night by one of those road trains no doubt. It’s not moving. The eagle stares straight at us, signalling in no uncertain terms ‘this carcass is mine. I will surrender to no one.’ Carmel drives right up to it and stops. The eagle doesn’t flinch. Fuck off it says. We drive around it slowly and continue south, amazed at the audacity of this bird standing its ground against modernity.

Down the road a we notice a white mist in the distance. It looks like a fog. ‘Some kind of condensation,’ Carmel says, puzzled. The wind is picking up, buffeting the car now as we drive into it. Soon it becomes clear. It’s not fog, but a dust storm. We’re getting close to Coober Pedy where a moonscape of craters and pyramids of white tailings from millions of mine shafts, pimple the vast opal fields either side of the town. The dust has created a cloud the size England that blocks out the horizon and narrows our vision to a couple of hundred meters either side of the highway. It’s eerie as we follow a tow truck into town and pull up at the servo to refuel and walk the dogs.

I’m gritting my teeth and squinting into the wind as I squeeze the trigger on the petrol pump nozzle and watch Carmel literally disappear into a cloud of swirling dust with the dogs. When I get back in the car, they’re there, strapped in and begging to hit the road. It’s 8am, stinking hot and blowing a gale. No one’s interested in coffee and cake. It’s my turn to drive. Just as we’re pulling out Carmel says stop, grabs her purse and jumps out of the car. An old Aboriginal man has been moving between the bowsers asking people for money to get a drink, but everyone is telling him to go away. She gives him $10 and he thanks her and introduces himself, telling her his name. He’s Kokatha. Their country is just south of here. One of the harshest, most waterless places on earth.

When we get out of town it gets worse. Wild wind gusts push the car sideways so I’m forever correcting the steering against the wind. Gradually as we move south the white dust is replaced by red sand coming in waves in front of us. Sometimes we’re chasing it down the highway as it twists and turns down the bitumen using the white lines as a slalom. Everyone is on high beam. The headlights of trucks appear out of the red cloud seconds before they pass, and visibility is down to 50 metres. No one is overtaking, we buddy-up and travel in convoy, glad of the company, unsure of what lies ahead. All we say to each other is ‘fuck!’ repeatedly.

The conditions are unrelenting. For two hours we drive south. When we pull in to the petrol station at Glendambo Carmel is telling me to go around, ‘Can’t you see? The petrol pumps are wrapped in black plastic. You have to go on the other side!’ I say fuck, again. When I get out of the car, it feels like the sandstorm in Mad Max Fury Road. Half a dozen road trains are pulled up on the roadside, the nearest one loaded to the hilt with scrap metal, the detritus of modern civilisation compacted into neat square blocks, being carted away to be rebuilt by robots into more robots. Chinese tourists in baseball caps with scarves tied around their faces run from their tourist buses into the roadhouse which has no lights on – I don’t even ask. It’s really windy but the wind is all over the place blowing in every direction and laden with grit that goes in your eyes and mouth and nose. All you can hear is the howl of the wind, the idling of diesel engines and the creaking of a metal sign swinging violently on its hinges above the bowser. It’s fiercely hot, like what you imagine it’s like when they open the door on the blast furnace at Port Kembla. I find myself wondering why the petrol doesn’t spontaneously explode as it comes out of the nozzle. You can’t see the sky. This is truly freaky. Seriously, it feels like humans can’t survive in this for longer than the time it takes to fill the tank and scurry inside. Carmel and the dogs are back in the car before I hang up the nozzle. Inside the roadhouse everyone is standing around in the dark. The fridges are all on, the pie warmer is glowing, and the EFTPOS is working, so I just flash my card and leave without opening my mouth. Back in the car, Carmel says, ‘Those Chinese tourists are probably thinking ‘We could’ve gone to Paris!’

After this we are feeling totally apocalyptic, like we are living through the end days right now and that nothing in the future is certain. It causes adrenaline to pump at a steady consistent level, so much so that my muscles will ache for days after the drive. I’m gripping constantly, even when I’m not driving. We shuffle through CDs and listen to music that we think might be calming in the circumstances, but Leonard Cohen seems like a profit of doom and Carol King signals emotional meltdown. Only Canned Heat manage to sooth our fraying nerves with the persistent beat of On the Road Again and the ever-hopeful escape route of Going up the Country. That song always made me fantasise about living in the rainforest out of Nimbin in a handmade house built from river rocks. When I was in Lismore not long ago for a funeral, you couldn’t see across the valley for the smoke coming in from the burning rainforests and all the hippie cafes were full of volunteer fire fighters brought in from other towns to try and save people’s houses.

Pushing down the highway through the dust from Glendambo we trail a road train for an hour before we can see far enough ahead to overtake. Slowly the sandstorm thins as we near Pimba and the turn off to Roxby Downs. Lake Hart, usually an expansive, wedding-dress-white saltpan, is shrouded in a caramel mist. As we climb down from the desert plateau to the low-lying acacia scrubland around Port August, visibility increases so we can see the misty outlines of the Flinders Ranges behind a mix now of dust and bushfire haze. Little do we know but the Adelaide Hills are on fire. When we pull into the foreshore at Port Augusta we queue for the toilet. We’ve been too freaked out to take a shit until now. The toilet seat is warm, not from the recent touch of someone else’s bum but just from the air temperature, still at 40 after peaking at 43 an hour before. The wind is still gusting, hot and dry and there’s no place to be except back in car.

On the way out of town we tune in the radio to the local ABC where we get emergency bush fire updates every 15 minutes complete with a screeching alarm sound effect and a warning to people in effected areas, including a town on the route we are taking into Adelaide, that says something like, ‘… it is now too late to leave. Seek shelter in a solid building now. The heat will kill you well before the flames arrive!’ No music. Only this, every quarter hour for the three hours it takes to reach the outskirts of Adelaide, interspersed with callers from scratchy mobile phones shouting their observations of smoking vineyards and people gathered on the local football oval. It’s dire and depressing to have the conversation again about the failure of our leadership, the corruption of public policy by stooges representing vested interests.

By the time we get to the Angle Vale turnoff, the volunteers have got the grass fire that was threatening the caravan park under control, so the warning has been downgraded but police are here diverting traffic around the smouldering scrub on either side of the highway. The radio predicts an imminent change in the weather which will bring both cooler temperatures and stronger, less predictable winds. So, we follow the traffic crawling around the detour and down a series of country lanes lined with vehicles and people standing on the road. A caller on the radio is telling how her family has multiple experiences of catastrophic fire. She starts with the story of her brother who was burned so badly he had to live his life in a body sock. Soon our line of traffic comes to a complete halt. It’s a rural road with a thick row of trees and bushes maybe 30 feet high on the side that the fire is coming from. As we sit idling in the line, our air-con stops blowing cold air and quite quickly starts blowing really hot air on our faces. The temperature gauge on the dash shows the engine is now superhot with the needle jammed above the H. I’m watching the bonnet of the car for signs of steam or smoke and weighing up the likelihood of the car suddenly bursting into flames. The caller on the radio is now reminding the listeners of all the people who were incinerated in their cars in the Black Saturday fires of 2009. I look at the line of trees and imagine a fireball toasting the entire row of stalled vehicles. The line moves forward a little and we pass a Hilux pulled over on the side of the road. The driver is pointing at the dashboard while his passenger makes frantic gestures that seem to say ‘For god sake, let’s get the fuck out of here!’ which is the exact same thought that is going through all our minds on repeat. There’s a round about up ahead and we are now ever so slowly crawling towards it. When it comes to our turn we inject ourselves into the stream of cars without caution and plant the foot to take us onto an escape route from this hell hole and back towards the city expressway. Once the danger is passed and we are flying through the northern suburbs, the temperature comes down, the air-con returns to cold and we kill the emergency broadcasts on the radio. My forearms are aching from the constant Tarzan grip on the steering wheel and my mood is shaky as if I’ve survived a life-threatening ordeal.

When we reach Glenelg for a cuppa tea and check-in with Carmel’s mum and dad, the temperature has dropped by 10 degrees and the sea breeze keeps any hint of the catastrophic fires in the hills well away from the city, but next morning the blanket of bushfire smoke sits over the Adelaide plains like a rug. The body count is one and the number of lost homes is climbing into the 80s. I feel like crying.