The Road Home

As I write this, we are well and truly at home. In fact we are restricted to our house as Canberra has gone into a three week lockdown due to some coronavirus in the community. If we had known this, we may well have stayed in the safe and secure hospitality of rural Western Australia. As a person with a well-known disposition for laziness, I have been struggling to write a last story of our final days on the way home, but a few well-meaning friends have asked about it, so here we are.

Looking back, I can see that the last post was written when we were at Nullarbor Roadhouse after successfully negotiating the South Australia border. We were all quite motivated to make a dash for home, and spend as little time as possible in South Australia, emerging tentatively from its own lockdown, and New South Wales where the management of the virus seemed quite precarious.

Still, we did not want to totally waste the trip, so we called in to Head of Bight and one of the cliff-top lookouts along the bight. I hope everyone, at some point in their life, gets an opportunity to see this part of the country. The vast, flat plains of the Nullarbor come to an abrupt halt when it comes to the heaving seas of the Southern Ocean which pounds away at the cliffs in a constant assault on the land of terra Australia. The cliffs sweep away to the West, and below, the whales laze in these cold waters, nurturing their young and training them in the way of the whale. The experience is quite breathtaking.

We had two nights at Ceduna, as we needed a bit of a rest after our long days of driving from Western Australia. It is also an opportunity to restock as in entering Ceduna we had to give up any fruit and vegetables we had not already consumed. You can’t visit Ceduna without having a meal at the Ceduna Foreshore Hotel. It is famous for its fish and chips, so we all partook. Everywhere along the coast of the Eyre Peninsular has wonderful offerings of seafood, but the Fish Box Kiosk at Cowell has yet to be bettered. Anxious to make a start on the onward journey, the Manns and the Priests made an early start on the Sunday morning, but we delayed moving on as we wanted to attend (via Zoom) at least the start of the church service at Tuggeranong. In think that in our twelve weeks away, we have not missed one service. 

So, as we untethered ourselves from Ceduna, we were in a bit of a rush to catch up to the others as we headed for Kimba, roughly half-way to Port Augusta. Unfortunately, as we motored along, I could feel a bit of a twitch in the driving behaviour of the truck, so we pulled over to discover that we had a flat tyre on one of the back wheels. We have dual wheels, so the inner wheel was able to take the load, even if there was a bit of a wobble and we limped along for about 150 kilometres, hoping that the tyre would not be shredded. At Kimba the next morning we were at the tyre shop as it opened. It was a bleak day, cold and wet, but the repair chap was undeterred, saying he put up with a lot worse changing tyres on back roads and farms. He spent more than hour changing and repairing the tyre and he seemed a bit embarrassed to charge us all of $35. We insisted he take more, which he reluctantly did, though his mother, who managed the books, was quite a bit more enthusiastic, snatching the $50 we offered. We were just very thankful to have the tyre fixed and we would have paid a hundred! Kimba is also known for its painted silos which aremagnificently illustrated. Kimba is also exactly halfway across Australia, from East to West (and from West to East I suppose.)

Our initial plan had been to spend a couple of nights at Port Augusta, but we changed that plan so that we could get to Broken Hill a day ahead of schedule. And Broken Hill is a bit more interesting. We visited the desert sculptures, the Pro Hart Gallery and tried some other galleries, but it seems that most were closed due to the pandemic. Broken Hill has one of the state’s best regional restaurants at The Palace Hotel and we indulged ourselves with a feast there. We decided to give ourselves a treat on what would be our last night together after nearly three months on the road. Rob and Pauline were heading north in the hope of being able to cross safely into Queensland, and we and the Manns were heading in a southerly direction as far as Narrandera, from where we would take different routes.

I had taken the precaution of checking road conditions on the website of the Broken Hill Shire, and I am sure it said that the road to Ivanhoe was sealed. But while it was mainly sealed there was about 70 kilometres of unsealed road – or dirt road. Still, as we say in the bush it’s dirt, but good dirt. Some parts were of the teeth-chattering condition, but mainly it was not too bad. This was our first time at Ivanhoe, which is a pretty small village of about 100 people and a small roadhouse caravan park for about 6 vehicles.

From Ivanhoe we were heading for Hay and through country I was familiar with as a child. Nevertheless it is probably 60 years since I had been at Booligal on the Lachlan River. It was terrific to see the Lachlan with water in it. I remember being there when I was about 10 or 11, helping my old man on one of his contracting projects to build a field tank – basically a wide hole in the ground to capture some water for the sheep. We would spend weeks scraping the earth and building the banks. My enduring memory from that time was the experience of being in an environment of absurd flatness. The countryside was so flat and devoid of vegetation and features that the land seemed to rise in every direction from wherever you were. It was like being in the middle of a basin. We had several times when we were out in this lonely country doing various jobs. On another occasion when I was quite young, probably about five, we were caught in a flood when the Murrumbidgee overflowed its banks and we were isolated for some time. My brother Peter shot an emu that was unlucky enough to share some high ground with us. At least we were able to live off the emu for a period before the river subsided and we were able to get supplies.

The Riverina really is “home” in a sense, and I have a strong feeling of connection as we drive through the  featureless One Tree Plain, along the Hay Plains where the sheep stations are giving way to cotton and almond plantations, though the irrigated fields of the MIA, and then through the rolling hills of wheat and canola. It was wonderful to see the Murrumbidgee full and flowing freely, spilling its banks and filling the billabongs, and the big old river red gums following the course of the river. We are very fortunate to have the Murrumbidgee so close to us here in Canberra as a constant reminder of its link to the Riverina.

We arrived home on Saturday, 7 August, having spent just on 91 days away and travelled some 13,550 kilometres. We travelled in the company of good friends – people who have been companions for over 40 years and our friendship has grown richer and deeper for our time together. We have seen some amazing parts of this wonderful country. People sometimes ask what was the best place, but that is impossible to answer, as every place was very special.

I do appreciate that people have been kind enough to read my blog and even to offer their own comments and stories of their own travel experiences. Ultimately the blog and the photos are just there to remind ourselves what we were doing at a point of time, so it is just a personal journal, capturing bits and pieces and not the complete story. Thanks for coming along.