Australasia > Australia > South Australia > Oodnadatta Track > Articles > Outback Odessy: Australian Crawl

The first thing you notice about the William Creek Hotel are the bras. Hanging from the ceiling of the pub in far northern South Australia, they range from tiny teen bras to massive big mommas stiff with the red dust of the outback. The walls are littered with business cards, drivers’ licences, student ID from all over the world and a pretty black and baby-blue negligee, fluttering in the air-con.

A prosthetic foot hangs down, in amongst all the detritus, with the inscription, the property of Grant, the one-legged Kiwi.
“I was pretty shocked when this guy told me he wanted to leave his foot here,” says Neville Jacob, who manages the pub with his wife Adriana. “It was his spare one, though.”

It’s now unfashionable to say pubs are the lifeblood of a community – thanks to the PR campaigns against alcoholism, drink driving, unsafe sex and all those dodgy practises associated with uncontrolled boozing.

But along the Oodnadatta Track, political correctness, like many other luxuries, has no place. There’d still be flies, orange dust and a long, straight road. But there’d be no music, no dancing, no cold water and no hot emu pies.

This iconic unsealed track starts at Marree and ends by hitting the bitumen 615km west at Marla, on the Stuart Highway, which links Adelaide to Darwin. We’ve picked out our route, flipped a coin or two and decided to steer off at Oodnadatta to Cadney Homestead, further down on the highway, so we can skim the beauty of the Painted Desert, to put the culture in the crawl.

Our odyssey begins with a bouncy flight to soulless BHP boom mining town Roxby Downs. The countryside’s as flat as a cricket pitch and enormous wedge-tailed eagles, the symbol of the region, coast the same thermals that casually pitched our 56-seater plane around, rendering even the solid miners faintly queasy. It’s a couple of hours’ drive from Roxby north-east to Marree.

We know we’ve hit the Track when we cross the old Ghan railway line. Rusted and buckled, this mess of metal is the reason these pubs are here. Parts of the line were built under a government unemployment relief scheme in 1884, from Adelaide up through the Flinders Ranges, chucking a right at Marree and another right at Oodnadatta before heading up to Alice and then on to Darwin.

Back in the days when it used to rain, floodwaters would wash out the track, leaving the towns stranded for weeks at a time until the line was pulled up and moved to a more direct, stable route up through Tarcoola. People still talk about when the Ghan left, back in 1981.

Now, the sleepers are ripped up for firewood, souvenirs or for backpackers to drag laboriously into friendly greetings. “Groovy!” “Ben and Tristan,” or just plain (and easy to construct) “Hi!”

Thanks to the isolation, everything comes at a price, including petrol, which makes you wish shock jock John Laws was still on air so you could ring up and say, “I just paid $1.85 a litre at William Creek!”

The sandstone Marree Hotel dates from 1883. It’s a no-nonsense affair, the quiet air interrupted by the annoying bling of a couple of pokies down the back in the coolest corner of the pub.

Like most outback pubs, the walls of the Marree establishment are a community noticeboard advertising everything from movie nights at the youth centre ($1, free popcorn) to Christmas cards (“We wish you a Marree Christmas”) and fundraisers for postman Tom Kruse, who famously did the mail run from Marree up the Birdsville Track from 1930 till 1960, once a fortnight, no matter what the weather. Portraits of outback outfitter RM Williams and country and western songwriter Slim Dusty hang on the walls amongst bullock harnesses and old leather straps.

The pub’s a respite from the glare and heat that hits the 50-degree mark in February. Locals Lyle, Ron and Max swipe at the night crawlies as they sit outside smoking, drinking light beer and talking of the days they played eight-ball for $1000 a game and bought beer by the keg at Dino’s Casino, in Marree’s halcyon days as a rail town before the tracks were moved.

“The money just went round and round, like a dog catching its tail,” says Lyle, who owns the caravan park and general store down from the pub. The boys call out their greetings to old Chopper, a barefoot bloke in a bright red tracksuit who wanders in for supplies. He’s looked after by publican Lawrie Kalms, a giant of a man, topping 6’ 3” and, according to the local papers, weighing in at 20 stone, a legend in outback town Mildura’s football Hall of Fame.

Lyle’s a third-generation Marree man, Max’s face is his inheritance from the Afghan cameleers who gave The Ghan its name, while Ron popped up to see a mate 35 years ago and has been working here ever since, a few weeks up here, then back down to the missus, just north of Adelaide. “She says it keeps it all fresh,” he says with a guileless smile.

The odd ones out are the two well-spoken blokes , John and Robert, who are taking an evening stroll as we walk in. They greet us in genteel English accents, swatting at the flies. John’s tracing the life of his German grandfather, a missionary at the remote Killapininna Mission, when Marree was known as Hergott Springs, one of the many towns to have its name changed in the state’s patriotic frenzy to erase its Germanic roots during World War One.

Everyone’s stayed in at this pub, including the state’s governor, the Earl of Kintore in 1891, to Slim Dusty, who in 2002 performed his last concert from the railway platform, no doubt all enjoying the continental breakfast, that peculiarly ill-named Australian repast of Corn Flakes, white toast and Nescafe. It’s a good excuse to eat eggs and bacon so salty, you’d swear it came out in the First Fleet.

As we pull away from the pub and turn the Toyota Prado toward William Creek, Lawrie leans out the door with a parting farewell.

“Tell ‘em all I can’t believe my luck I got the pub!”

Two hundred kilometers down the road from Marree stands tiny William Creek, population five, though three are out of town at the moment. You can see the city limits – all of them – from the front door of the pub.

Set slap-bang in the middle of the world’s largest cattle station, Anna Creek, there are three businesses and one’s up for sale. But the William Creek Hotel has been serving booze (legally) since 1887, the oldest constantly licenced pub in the state, so it’ll take more than a few years of drought for it to curl up and die. If there was no pub, there’d be no William Creek. It’s late afternoon and the only people in the bar are manager Adriana and the barmaid, Swedish traveller Laura.

By 7pm, though, the bar’s thick with backpackers fresh off a little tour bus, and accents from Ireland, Finland, Germany and the UK mingle with the broad Australian voices of the station workers who’ve popped in to let their hair down. The British gents from the Marree pub are devouring pasties and downing Coopers over by the juke box. Everyone’s hot, and not in the Sydney sense.

The dart board’s getting a work out and the station women whirl their kids around the tiny dance floor as melodic tunes pump out into the quiet night air, a foot-jangling mix selected by Adriana, who’s got the knack of getting a party started. With her long plait, dark eyeliner, miniskirt and singlet top, Adriana’s a little bit rock chick, a little bit country-and-western.

“I like to dance. It keeps the arthritis away,” says the former yoga teacher from Adelaide. Late in the night, she starts to wind it down and her uncanny skill sees Dire Straits’ 14-minute epic, ‘Telegraph Road’, call out into the dark night. The song traces the history of a remote road in Detroit, Michigan, that morphs into suburban hell, thanks to the arrival of the telegraph line.

Sitting out the front of the pub by the horse railing, you couldn’t say the same has happened here. Before the Ghan was the Overland Telegraph Line, connecting Adelaide to London via Alice Springs and Darwin , built in just two years, from 1870 to 1872, following the footsteps of explorer John McDuall Stuart. It’s yet another great engineering feat that’s quietly disappearing into the earth: the gossip now runs along the track via UHF; who’s gone, who’s coming, who’s doing renovations, who’s given up and gone south.

Due to the lack of communication – not even CDMA phones work out here – travellers are encouraged to call ahead at the pubs and roadhouses so someone knows where the hell they are in the outback.

“It seems very strange to call a pub and say, ‘I’m going to be there tomorrow,’” says Dutch backpacker Joost, who’s travelling in a loose, friendly coalition with Momo, an Italian-born architect who lives in Canberra and Nicki, a beautiful beauty student from Munich. All along the Track, at every single settlement, someone brings up the German couple who in 1982 were stranded out by Lake Eyre in the heat of summer, the woman dying of thirst steps away from a water trough.

“No-one could work that one out,” is the refrain we hear at every pub. The tragedy hasn’t stifled the romance of the track, if not for Australians, then at least for the rest of the world. Mostly, it’s foreigners coming through here, says Neville. “I’m amazed at the amount of Europeans who’ve seen more of Australia than us Australians. We’re not that adventurous, really, are we?”

You know you’re in Oodnadatta when everything turns pink. Girly, candy pink. That’ll be the Pink Roadhouse, a loose collation of buildings in this vivid hue, painted by owners Adam and Lynnie Plate.

Just 200km down the road from William Creek, it’s taken us four hours to get to Oodnadatta. There was the swim in the waters of the Great Artesian Basin, which spill out into a small, deep pool at Coward Springs. There was a poke around some old ruined stone cottages that South Australia does so well, a photo stop for a massive flock of squabbling, shrieking corellas by a waterhole and red sand dunes, and a quick squiz at the old Ghan bridge at Algebuckina Waterhole, the state’s longest bridge, set nearly 11 meters high to avoid being washed away in flash floods.

The Pink Roadhouse is also the post office, garage and where Annie makes the best burgers with the lot. The usual board full of notices advertises local services including tai chi, next time the Flying Doctors are in town. “Time??? Keep an ear out for the plane’s arrival,” the flyer advises.

On our slow wanderings along the track, we haven’t seen a single car all day, not surprising, considering we’re travelling at the hottest time of the year.

“In winter, you’ll see a road train on the highway ever 15 minutes, and at least one Britz van during a 24 hour cycle,” says Adam Plate, with a sense of humour as dry as the desert in which he lives. “The track looks scary, but there’s always people on the road.”

The Plates arrived in the early 70s, via art school in Darlinghurst, a surfing phase, a long-distance motorcycling phase then an outback phase that saw them walking camels and donkeys through the desert. “It was a hippy thing,” Adam says matter-of-factly, as if wandering through sand dunes in 50-degree heat is something we all do to find ourselves. Perhaps he should have written a book about it and become internationally famous. “Yeah, I ran into Robyn Davidson [author of the iconic girl-camel-desert epic, Tracks] in Kings Cross a few years after I got back. She was more media savvy than me.”

The roadhouse sells cold beer to grateful travellers, who have adapted its pool to a makeshift bar. Meanwhile, while the town’s hotel has its windows closed against the heat, though ACDC still manages to blare through its fibro walls. The Transcontinental is a community-owned pub that’s not for the faint-hearted. Every arrival is scrutinised carefully, ladies most welcome, with a friendly wave of a pool cue from the table over near the juke box.

Payday is Thursday, so that’s the big night in the Transcontinental, a relative term that means about 20 drinkers, says manager Alan Wilson, who’s holding the fort with wife Bev while the owners are away. They live on the Yorke Peninsula now, closer to the grandkids, but if she had it her way, Bev would never have left the pub, which they managed for six years.

“You don’t have to dress up, there’s no hustle and bustle, you don’t have to be anybody different.” Together, they’ve worked in Aboriginal communities from Broom to Groote Island. Being an Aboriginal-owned pub means there’s no Sunday trading, closing is 8pm on a Saturday, and there’s no takeaway for spirits or cask wine.

Pubs aside, it could be a great sunset at one of the Track’s ultimate beauty spots, the Painted Desert, so we decide to push on down the road. About 80km between Oodnadatta and Cadney Homestead, on the Stuart Highway, the dirt road is slippery and slow going, and the 4WD skitters over pebbly corrugations. It’s like someone’s thrown a bag of marbles down the track.

The signposts are made from the base of 44-gallon drums, and marked with the now-familiar pink of Oodnadatta’s most colourful landmark, years of work by the Plates who have mapped and signposted this track to lure people up to the outback. “South Australia’s a very odd state, 70 per cent of its land area has no local government, so is condemned to third-world standards,” soapboxes Adam from his website, and you can’t but help agree, though the beauty of the landscape must help assuage their frustration.

There are storm clouds in the east, and the wind swipes at the metallic pebbles of the gibber plains, but the ochre, orange, caramel and white layers of the Painted Desert glow richly in the late afternoon sun. Remnants of an ancient sea bed 80 million years old, the wind and rain have whittled the landforms away to bare ridges, turrets and peaks – weathered warriors against the elements.

“You should have been here last night,” says Steven, reciting what surely is the traveller’s least-favourite refrain. A recent ring-in from Lismore in northern New South Wales, he’s one of nine staff running Cadney Homestead, a roadhouse on the Stuart Highway, where we leave the dirt track and feel the smooth hum of bitumen beneath the wheels, the first time in four days.

Apparently, last night the lads were out from Mt Willoughby station and there were a few travellers on the road, drinking in the cool, air-conditioned barn-like roadhouse. Tonight, however, there are just four of us. Steve’s packed up the Cattleman Bar’s stools and the other two patrons go to their cabin before the Saturday night movie kicks in, so we do the same.

Our final morning is soft and cool. “It’s a welcome change,” says a woman outside the homestead, enjoying an early morning cigarette. Road train driver Mark Pimblett is already for the next leg of his journey, his segmented rig taking advantage of the quiet roads. Passengers on the Greyhound bus heading north are taking the last chance to stretch their legs while their driver a contemplative, older man in the uniform of shorts and long socks, enjoys his tea and reads the papers he’s just brought up overnight from Adelaide. He cuts a lonely figure in the quiet roadhouse.

We pack our gear in the 4WD for the last time. We’re heading back down south, and Coober Pedy, whose population numbers just 1900, seems a metropolis. It feels like the adventure’s already over, though we’re still 1000km from the nearest capital city. We could head north to check out the Marla pub, or out to the little mining town of Mintabie, and Alice Springs, up and over the border, is only about five hours away… the next adventure is just down the track.

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