Articles > The Big Wet Red

Oodna-bloody-datta (anonymous)

This bloody town’s a bloody cuss,
No bloody trains, no bloody bus,
And no one cares for bloody us,
In Oodna-bloody-datta.

Just bloody heat and bloody flies,
The bloody sweat runs in your eyes,
And when it rains, what a surprise!
In Oodna-bloody-datta

It was a bloody surprise for us all right when an official road report advised us that Oodnadatta, on the edge of the great Simpson Desert, was entirely cut off by flooding! With the legendary Oodnadatta Loop under several meters of water we swung the car northwards instead along the Stuart Highway. The Track, as it’s known, kinks to the right and left a couple of times as it climbs gently away from Adelaide and the Southern Ocean, then barely deviates from a straight line for almost 2,000 miles to Darwin.

Gali and Shirley, the Israeli girls who had rescued these two travel-worn Pommy hitchhikers from NSW’s blistering Barrier Highway, serenaded The Track with a seemingly endless chain of Shania Twaine songs. My sidekick, Crocodile Dougee, roared in on the chorus – “MAN! I feel like a woman” – with an enthusiasm that I feared might not go down too well in the hard-bitten Outback roadhouses that advertised ‘Last Fuel for 300 Miles.’

You can count the miles up The Track to Coober Pedy in dead kangaroos…but there’s not too much else to look at and I dozed off somewhere around 60. These road-kills have had a horrifying effect on Australia’s biggest bird of prey. The wedge-tailed eagle, with its eight-foot wingspan, is irresistibly attracted to this transcontinental smorgasbord and, having no natural predators, it is quite ready to do battle with any roadtrain that has the audacity to try to scare it off its meal. Trackside roadhouses are full of yarns about truckies who were terrified to see a half-dead wedgie coming through the windscreen at him. “He was all torn and bleeding and spitting feathers when he turned up here,” they tell you. “Funniest bloody thing you ever saw!”

Although the South Australian tourist authority likes to refer to Coober Pedy as ‘Australia’s Opal Wonderland,’ the town’s name comes from a local Aboriginal language. I wasn’t in ‘White Fella’s Hole-in-the-ground’ for long before I felt a much closer affinity to the native Australians who had named the place in such derogatory terms than I did for the many Outbackers who had advised us not to miss this ‘Pearl of the Desert.’ The town’s highlights include ‘The Opal Bug Museum’ (boasting a day-glo VW Beetle with twelve-foot insect legs), ‘The Opal Cutter Shop’ (with a day-glo Ford Escort) and the ‘Public Fossicking Area’ where you’re free to spend all day on your hands and knees scrabbling through a slag pile.

Coober Pedy is like a war zone – but a war zone that’s been blitzed with day-glo paint. Drivers who think they’re Mad Max extras tear around in dump-trucks and post-apocalyptic buses that have been converted into ‘fossicking machines.’ As you rush out of their way warning signs scream at you: ‘DON’T RUN!’, ‘BEWARE – DEEP SHAFTS!’, ‘DON’T WALK BACKWARDS!’ Even today most of the inhabitants of ‘White Fella’s Hole’ avoid the perpetual heat by living underground, and it comes as a relief when you can finally move on and forget about the ever-present danger of falling through somebody’s chimney.

Even ‘roos wouldn’t be seen dead on the Stuart Highway north of Coober Pedy and the only way for a driver to keep himself awake is to count the dry gullies. This had been the wettest Outback summer in living memory so we had an unusually eventful trip: 50 miles out of Coober Pedy we crossed a pond that was called Pootnooura Creek and a 130 miles north of that we crossed the veritable ‘runnel’ that our map showed to be the mighty Alberga River. It was then that Seven Radio’s weather report brought us the startling news that heavy rainfall had flooded the Stuart Highway between Uluru (aka Ayer’s Rock) and Alice Springs, cutting the latter off from ‘civilization’ in the form of Southern Australia.

Crocodile Dougee and I (cunningly anticipating the rainy season of the tropical ‘Top End’) had arranged to hire a campervan in Alice Springs but we had never imagined that floods here, in the very heart of the ‘Red Centre’, might prevent us even from making our rendezvous at ‘The Alice.’ Nevertheless Gali, Doug and I took turns at the wheel and plodded doggedly northward, past a sign that proclaimed Kulgera Pub to be ‘The First and Last Pub in the Northern Territory.’

We were now in ‘the real Outback.’ Southern roadtrains are not considered worthy of the name in the NT where they have five trailers, stretch to fifty meters and are capable of sucking the windscreen-wipers off your car as they pass. Up here termite mounds grow to cathedral-like proportions, ‘dunny budgies’ (flies) are so thick you get tennis elbow shooing them off and snakes are so smart that if you drive over them they’ll wrap themselves around your differential and follow you into your house.

The Track rippled on and on into the heat haze and by the time we reached the Lasseter Highway to swing left towards Australia’s most famous icon I’d forgotten where the indicator lever was.

A vast system of ‘sunset viewing areas’, ‘sunrise viewing areas’, ‘dune viewing areas’, ‘No Stopping’ signs (in the Outback!) and the Yulara tourist resort in general combine to make the Uluru of today feel an awful long way from the wilderness. This is one of the most powerful Aboriginal sacred sites but the polite requests of the traditional owners to refrain from climbing the rock have surprisingly little effect on the busloads of visitors who pour in every week with little on their minds but the desire to be able to say “I did it!”

Nobody was ‘doing it’ when we arrived to see what is surely the world’s most photographed monolith capped by a thick band of cloud and draped with ribbons of white water that cascaded down the shadowy gullies. We had traveled halfway around the world to escape the drizzly European winter and we did our best to focus on the thought that this was a sight that might only be seen once in a generation.

Average yearly rainfall on Uluru is 203mm but more than that had fallen in the previous two weeks alone and the waterlogged landscape was now more reminiscent of the Rock of Gibraltar than the popular desert image of the world’s largest monolith. That night, as Crocodile Dougee and I set up our tents in the Yulara campsite and the girls made themselves comfortable in the car, it began to rain again. By dawn, when Doug woke under a corrugated-iron barbecue shelter - where as the lightning clashed around him he risked being barbecued himself - and I finally evacuated my flooded tent to tap pitifully on the car door, the campsite had received a further 105mm!

With the tarmac ballooning up from the hardcore it seemed like the whole Yulara resort - Sails in the Desert Hotel, Spinifex Lodge, Outback Pioneer Bottleshop and all - was about to float off into the Never-Never. It occurred to me that there would be a refreshing sense of divine justice, worthy of any Dreamtime legend, should the whole place rise up and float the mere five kilometers into Anangu Aboriginal territory . . . where it would have to begin paying taxes to Uluru’s landowners.

I gunned the car towards Alice in the hope that we just might be able to slip through before floodwaters in the Lasseter Desert cut us off. I lost count of the number of times I slowed down or swerved to avoid watery mirages that I would have refused to believe in just a few days ago. But at Curtin Springs roadhouse (pop. 8 - plus 2 itinerant camel-catchers) we learnt that the flood had beaten us.

In the bar speculation was rife: “Fair dinkum, might not fine-up again for a week. Even if you could get back to The Track the Finke’s flooded and there’s nothing else to do but turn around and go back to Adelaide.”
“Well, I’m not going back through bloody Coober Pedy,” I said to Dougee.
“Better to sit it out here,” he agreed, “. . . or swim.”
“No worries,” said Cookie, the shaven-headed barman, “- you’ll be okay here. The month’s beer supply only turned up two days ago.”

And he was right; with cheap rented rooms, a steady supply of cold VB and Cookie’s monstrous camel steaks (“Territory T-bones - the big buggers!”) we were okay at Curtin Springs. By morning – despite the hangover – I was beginning to think that there could be worse ways of spending five or six days than in exploring the Amadeus Salt Lakes and the tabletop of Mount Connor or even in helping to muster a few of the Outback’s estimated 300,000 wild camels.

But there was still the whole of the Top End to cover and Crocodile Dougee was a man on a mission. Every vehicle that made the obligatory stop for fuel and information was likewise quizzed by an Essex Pom who was now heard to discuss ‘the depth of floodwater at Karinga Creek’ and whether the ‘Meneenie Loop Road might be do-able in a convoy’ with the assurance of one who was born to do so. Finally he announced that: “a couple of vans have managed to struggle out to The Track with no more hassle than being attacked by a herd of marooned camels.”

The camel-catchers set out on motorbikes to scout out this report and we loaded the car to try to get at least one step further towards our final destination – Darwin. Doug’s information had been correct; the water level had dropped as quickly as it had risen and was never higher than the loaded estate car’s exhaust pipe . . . until that is I drove over the ridge at the, by now legendary, ‘Finke River Crossing.’ The Finke River was there all right but, apart from the posts of a pitifully small bridge in the middle of 100-metres of swirling current, there was precious little evidence of any ‘crossing.’

The car was an automatic so we would only have one shot at this – if I couldn’t keep up a steady momentum there would be no clutch to give me a second chance to blast the water clear of the exhaust pipe. Crocodile Dougee thoughtfully volunteered to walk across to scout out the situation and perhaps raise the car’s suspension by that all-important fraction.

I gave him just enough time to get well out into the river and had managed to build up quite a bow-wave by the time we drew level with him. But the joke seemed to have backfired when, just a few meters further on, the engine coughed and stopped . . . I held my breath and punched the accelerator and incredibly it belched back into life again!

Doug was still floundering and cursing in mid-river when a roadtrain came roaring into the flood, driving a wall of white water ahead of its ‘roo bars. By the time this second wave broke over our intrepid scout the rest of us were already high and dry with only the relatively tame Hugh River between Alice Springs and ourselves.

Old Outbackers complain that Alice Springs has become too sterile and, with art galleries and bistros lining the pedestrianized Todd Street Mall, it’s easy to see what they mean. ‘Alice doesn’t live here anymore,’ is their rallying cry but there was something that we all immediately liked about The Alice. Perhaps the question is not with what style this town of 22,500 exists but that it exists at all, at almost a 20-hour drive from its nearest comparable neighbor!

Gali had brought us almost 2,000 miles from Broken Hill in NSW but at the Britz rental depot in Alice our paths finally divided. We had arranged to pick up what was known in the brochures as a ‘HiTop Overlander Campervan’ but - with many of their vans stranded in the flooded bush – the Britz people had some slick juggling to do before they could give us a vehicle. We considered upgrading to a ‘4WD Landcruiser Bushcamper’ - which (with such macho specifications as high-level exhaust and long-range fuel tanks) really ‘looked the part’ - but finally decided that the added confidence that this would give us might lead us (literally) out-of-our-depth in the flooded billabongs of the Top End.

The campervan was equipped with a fold-down table, a fold-up bed, a gas stove and a small fridge, which - in the name of Outback expedition provisioning - was soon filled up at a drive-thro’ bottleshop.
“Hang a left out of the gate and go straight over two sets of lights,” we were told, “cross the Tropic of Capricorn - and if you don’t see Sexy Rexy’s Piss Parlor in Tennant Creek in six hours you’ll know you made a wrong turn.”

In fact our destination for the night was a mere four hours up The Track – in Australia’s very own Twilight Zone. Wycliff Well is famous as ‘the UFO Capital of Oz’ and a notice board in the roadhouse was pasted with newspaper headlines: ‘Are the Devil’s Marbles a UFO landing pad?’, ‘Bizarre sightings every night for three weeks.’ Weird lights are frequently seen hovering over the nearby Devil’s Marbles rock formations but the proprietor of the roadhouse was unable to confirm the true nature of the sightings. “I haven’t seen who’s driving them yet,” he said, “but the wife’s gettin’ me a telescope for me birthday.”

Crocodile Dougee and I arrived at The Devil’s Marbles just in time to watch a spectacular blood-orange sun sink between the enchanting formations that geologists have, with refreshing simplicity, described as ‘round cheeses’ and ‘cottage loafs.’ Local Aboriginals believe the eerie Min-Min lights to be mischievous Dreamtime spirits but, more recently, they have been attributed to the luminous markings of a certain hovering bird – the letter-winged kite. My own theory is that an ‘aurora australis’ effect is produced by lightning flashes reflecting in the almost solid cloud of mosquitoes that collect around the occasional Pom who is foolish enough to try to camp at Devil’s Marbles.

Early the next morning as we trucked northwards – Shania Twaine had been replaced with Bruce Springsteen – road signs warned us of the ever-present threat of bushfires in the increasingly dense bush. ‘We like our lizards frilled - not grilled’ they said, tugging at our heartstrings with the aid of NT’s reptilian mascot. Almost ten driving-hours later we swung off The Track towards Mataranka Ponds.

In the 3,000 miles that we’d traveled from Sydney we’d seen some unforgettable things – the dramatic natural amphitheatre of Wilpena Pound, the cascades of Uluru and the blossoming ‘Red Center’ to name but a few – but at Mataranka Ponds we were about to see what must be one of the most astounding wildlife displays on earth.

For a few weeks of every year a colony of up to four million little black fruit bats come to roost in the rainforest around Mataranka thermal springs. As we floated on our backs, wary of the long-necked turtles that shared our hot bath – and the crocs that have been known to snack on them – we gazed up at the crowds of squabbling bats, hanging like bunches of ragged brown fruit from every trunk. At sunset we drove to a patch of open ground and watched as thousands-upon-thousands of bats, swarming towards their nocturnal hunting grounds, peppered the sky in every direction.

We spent a further week dodging the floods in Kakadu National Park and finally, in Australia’s most cosmopolitan city, the storms that had dogged our footsteps right across the Outback succeeded in driving us into the shelter of Darwin’s Billabong Bar, and Rourke’s Drift, and Shenanigans . . .

The day before we flew out I replaced the old walking boots that had been destroyed by the ‘Great Australian Inland Sea’ with a pair of Blundstone elastic-sided bushman’s boots. In the Top End Blundies are the key accessories in a style that’s known as ‘Territory Rigging.’ Worn with shorts they are undisputedly the epitome of Outback chic. But it’s a style that doesn’t travel well and as I passed through customs at Heathrow I was already aware that the giggling customs officials weren’t whispering to each other because the slouch-hatted Crocodile Dougee and I ‘looked the part.’

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