Australasia > Australia > Western Australia > Kimberley > Articles > Roadhouses

Jim Morrison never travelled in Western Australia. This is a shame, because it would have appealed to him, if only for its roadhouses. Dotting the region’s isolated highways, roadhouses are both sanctuaries and lions’ dens, full of grizzled truckies and sketchy travellers, fringe-dwellers living on hamburgers and roll-your-own cigarettes. Roadhouses are romantic, or as romantic as the Outback can get.

Looking for adventure, I’ve taken to the road, driving from Exmouth in Western Australia, north-east along the Great Northern Highway to the Kimberley town of Kununurra, sampling the roadhouses along the way. A journey of 3000km in seven days, it’s the roadtrip to end all roadtrips, or so I’ve been told.

Setting out in the late afternoon, I head toward Nanutarra Roadhouse, 300km north of Exmouth. Wedging myself behind the wheel, I nudge it up to 130km/hr, then sit there, to conserve petrol (fuel is expensive here, as much as $1.30 a litre.) I hum past riverbeds lathered in rubble, dead trees in the fields. Ahead of me the blacktop is bordered by bulldust. And then, suddenly, the sun sets.

Which is bad. You don’t want to be driving at night here, when animals gather on the road, attracted by the warmth and dew at its edges. Soon, however, I spot the lights of Nanutarra Roadhouse, lit up like a lunar module.

At the counter I’m greeted by a Philippino called Rupert, who wears his cap on backwards and has grease smeared on him from head to foot. He charges me $44 a night for a sparse, comfortable room in a “donger”, a lightly insulated 8ft by 12ft ship container on stilts. Dropping my stuff, I make my way to the diner, where I meet Nick, one of the cooks. Nick had come up from Perth with the intention of painting a mural on one of the dongers. When I suggest it’s along way to come to paint a mural, he shrugs, like he’d never thought of it that way.

I ask Nick what he does for fun, and he says he goes down to Ashburton River Bridge, 200m away. Like most of the bridges here, it’s a single-laner with no room for pedestrians. Walking into the middle, he waits for a roadtrain, then jumps over the edge, hanging onto the handrail while 100-tonnes of truck rumble overhead. “Man,” he says, “you should feel it shake!”

The next morning I leave early for Fortescue River Roadhouse, 160km north. Fortescue River is infamous for its rough-house reputation, now somewhat diminished thanks to the owners Barry and Doreen Clements, who’ve been here 25 years. “People used to turn up and ask ‘How’s things in Fortespew?’” says Doreen, wearing a sweatband to restrain her explosive hair. “But we’ve turned that around.” She takes me outside for a tour, pointing out the line of dongers behind the restaurant, and Barry’s riverrock wall that took three years to complete. I suggest that she must be proud of the way it’s worked out. She shrugs. “People pull up and say, ‘You have such lovely scenery, with the river and everything!’ And I say, ‘Well, why don’t you buy the place and you can look at it all day long!’”

After lunch (Mrs Mac’s Meat Pies), I set my sights on Sandfire Roadhouse, another 600km up the coast. It’s a tiring stretch, past Karratha, Whim Creek, Port Hedland. My legs go numb. The sun pounds down. Insects head-butt the windscreen — pock-pock … pock-pock-pock — until the whole thing is smeared in bug guts. With the dark setting in around Pardoo, waves of crickets waft up from the roadside like confetti in reverse.

By the time I arrive at Sandfire it’s dark and cold. On the diner wall is a mural of a man and camel dying of thirst in a sea of sand. Sandfire is one of the most isolated roadhouses and totally self-reliant, with a generator that supplies power for the entire place, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

After my meal — silverside and white sauce — I go outside. The night sky is vacuuming up heat and light. I can feel it, pulling me up, like a cinder up a chimney.

Trucks, I learn, are like pornography here. The roadhouses are plastered in pages torn from trucking magazines, double-page spreads of big rigs with flared hubs and leering grills. Though they get most of their custom from travellers and campers, roadhouses couldn’t exist without the truckies, who supply them with everything they need.

“They bring things that are hard to get if we do the right thing by them,” says Sandfire’s Ken Norton. “We keep the kitchen open late for them, or preparing their favourite dish when they radio in orders from 200 kilometres away.”

Later that night I get talking to Bevan, an 18-stone truckie whose beard has colonised every inch of his face except his eyes, which stare out, as if through a hedge. I watch as he pours an entire bottle of BBQ sauce onto his steak, then churns the whole lot — potato, peas, carrots, and meat, which he’s cut into chunks — into a mush which he shovels down his throat with a spoon.

“I’m a turd-herder,” he explains. “Professional livestock relocator.” I frown. “I drive cattle trucks, mate.” I ask him about his vehicle. “Double-decker, triple-trailer, 120-tonne when loaded, 60 net. So 60-tonne-a-cattle. Heavy.”

Bevan finishes eating, then suggests we hit the tavern next door and drink ourselves into a stupor. I’m about to say yes when he gets up, slaps my back, and tells me he’s joking. “Gotta keep drivin’.” Then he walks out, trailing ciggy smoke like a human steam train.

It’s the enormity of the Kimberley that really gets you; the infinite savannas and mouth-like skies, the baobab trees like beer-bellied trolls. Even the six-foot termite nests, called jilkarr by the Aborigines, look like the droppings of some grotesque, never-seen beast.

By the time I arrive at Willare Bridge Roadhouse, the sun has singed my face, the space has frazzled my mind. I dump my stuff in one of the rooms — bright, big and clean, the best I’ve stayed in yet — then take a trip to the nearby Fitzroy River. The Fitzroy is Western Australia’s largest river, with an average annual flow of 8.25 million cubic metres, enough to cover the whole of Australia to a depth of one metre. But this afternoon it’s quiet and still and velvety smooth. I walk down to its banks, and sit there for a moment, staring into its depths.

Back at the roadhouse that night, I’m sitting drinking with the owners Sheree and Darrel, under the neon awning that shelters the bauzers. Roadtrains growl past, their undercarriages rattling. When I tell Darrel about sitting on the riverbank, his eyebrows jump. “There’s a 14-foot croc living right there,” he says.

The following day it’s 32 degrees, the land wilted and blurry. Just before Halls Creek I make a 120km detour to Wolfe Creek Crater, the second largest meteorite site in the world. Again, the scale is overwhelming. Some 850m across, the indent reminds me of something Zeus might do in a fit of rage, throwing a planet against the wall of the universe.

My penultimate stop is the Turkey Creek Roadhouse, a bustling little epicentre from which tourists take joy flights over the nearby Bungle Bungles, a labyrinth of sphinx-like erosions carved by wind and water 360 million years ago. There’s the noise of helicopters overhead, and people shouting good naturedly. “No, I said ‘A hamburger with THE LOT’, ya bloody nong!”

I reach Kununurra round sunset. It’s a tropical town with broad streets and partied-out backpackers flaked on the nature strips. I check into a motel. That night I lie on my bed — a proper solid mattress — in a room with a window (most of the dongers didn’t have windows), and a phone on the bedside table, should I want to call someone, which I don’t.

And yet something is missing. I lie there wondering what it is, and then I realise. Trucks. I miss the trucks, the hiss of their hydraulics, and their muffled, leonine rumblings in the darkest part of the night.

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