Tracks (13 page)

All around me was magnificence. Light, power, space and sun. And I was walking into it. I was going to let it make me or break me. A great weight lifted off my back. I felt like dancing and calling to the great spirit. Mountains pulled and pushed, wind roared down chasms. I followed eagles suspended from cloud horizons. I wanted to fly in the unlimited blue of the morning. I was seeing it all as if for the first time, all fresh and bathed in an effulgence of light and joy, as if a smoke had cleared, or my eyes been peeled, so that I wanted to shout to the vastness, ‘I love you. I love you, sky, bird, wind, precipice, space, sun, desert desert desert.’

Click.

‘Hi, how’s it goin’? I got some shots of you waving goodbye.’ Rick had been sitting in his car with the windows up, listening to pop music, waiting for me to come round the bend.

I had almost forgotten. I plummeted back to earth, my grandiose emotions crashing into shards of fussy practical detail. I looked at the camels. Dookie’s pack was all skew-whiff. Zeleika was pulling at her nose-line to see where Goliath was and Goliath was straining at his rope which was pulling off Bub’s saddle, trying to get to his mother.

Rick took hundreds of photos. At first I felt uncomfortable and camera-shy. And if one vain little voice said, ‘Don’t show that gold filling when you smile,’ or ‘Watch those double chins,’ she was soon defeated by the sheer impossibility of remaining self-conscious in the face of the burgeoning quantity of film exposed. The camera seemed omnipresent. I tried to forget about it. I was almost successful. It wasn’t that Rick was asking me to do anything, or interfering physically, it was just that he was there and his camera was recording images and giving them an isolated importance, which made my actions stilted and unspontaneous, as if I were just out of sync with myself. Click, observer. Click, observed. And whatever else could be said in their favour — cameras and Jackson Browne just didn’t fit in this desert. I began right then and there to split into two over Rick. On the one hand I saw him as a blood sucking little creep who had inveigled his way into my life by being nice and by tempting me with material things. On the other hand I was confronted with a very warm, gentle human being who genuinely wanted to help me and who was excited by the prospect of an adventure, who wanted to do a good job, and who cared.

The day grew hotter, and Dookie’s pack got worse and worse so that I had to stop constantly to try to rearrange it. My neck had a crick in it from glancing back at the animals. The great spirit had fled, leaving me to my own resources. Make or break me indeed. I knew so little. It was preposterous thinking I would make it unscathed two thousand miles to the ocean. Good season or no, the desert is no place for a dilettante. I combated these feelings by thinking of it as nothing more than a series of steps, of days, one after the other, and if nothing went wrong during one, why should it on the next? Tiddly pom.

I had arranged to meet Jenny and Toly and a few friends from town at Redbank Gorge. That would be the final contact with people until I got to Areyonga, an Aboriginal settlement seventy miles along. I was exhausted by the time I arrived. It is one thing to walk seventeen miles, quite another to do it when you are so tense that your muscles have set hard like cement.

We spent the night and the whole next day in that impossibly beautiful place. We camped on silver sand, near the entrance of the water-filled gorge. Rick’s rubber raft came in handy for shipping camera gear up the mile-long ravine while we swam through water that was black, crystal and freezing. This gorge was only a couple of feet wide in places, with red and black cliffs that rose sheer out of the water for a hundred feet or more. Then it would open out into a gloomy cavern or a fissure where the sun shot spears of yellow into the water. Rick was the only one who made it the whole mile, out to the sunny cliffs at the other entrance. We built him a driftwood fire half way on one of the tiny beaches of a cave-pool, so he would make it unfrozen on his way back. That night he drove back to Alice, to catch a plane that would take him to his next assignment somewhere out there in the wide world. We arranged to meet again at Ayers Rock, three weeks away, because
Geographic
had insisted on a full pictorial coverage of this well-known Australian landmark. I felt resentful about having to see him again so soon.

On the following morning, I went through two and a half discouraging hours of loading up. I knew I had far too much stuff, but at that stage I was sure I needed all of it.

Bub carried four petrol drums containing water for the camels, each weighing fifty pounds. Over these were four canvas bags filled with food, all manner of tools, spare bells, spare leather, clothes, mosquito net, raincoats for them, etc. The swag I attached to the back of the saddle. Zeleika carried much less weight than the other two, as she would need all her spare energy for feeding the calf. Two hand-made five-gallon water drums were designed to fit into the front section of her saddle. Behind this and hanging on a bar were two tin trunks filled with food and the various odds and sods that I would need for camping at night, such as kerosene lamp, cooking utensils. The pretty goat-skin bags went over the water drums and Diggity’s dog biscuits were secured to the top. Bookie, being the strongest, had the most to carry. Four water drums, a large hessian sack containing oranges, lemons, potatoes, garlic, onions, coconuts and pumpkins, two large red-leather bags with yet more tools and paraphernalia, two more canvas bags including a cassette-recorder and the offending radio set, and at the back of his saddle, a five-gallon bucket with washing things in it. All of them carried spare ropes, straps, hobbles, halters, sheepskins, etc. Everything was strapped down securely with ropes running around the gear then lashed to the saddle-frame.

I put my pillow on Bub’s saddle so I could ride comfortably, and slung my rifle and a small bag carrying all the precious things like cigarettes and money over the front of this saddle. My maps (which were 1:250,000 series, topographical) I wrapped in a cylindrical pipe and stuffed into one of Bub’s packs. The compass I carried around my neck. I had a knife strapped to my waist and a few spare nose-lines in my pocket. Hmmm. Only two and a half hours for fifteen hundred pounds — I was going to spend this whole trip heaving baggage.

I decided to put Bub in front since he had the best saddle for riding, should I get footsore. He was also the most easily spooked, and I wanted him where I could have complete control of him should he decide to shy. Zeleika came next so I could keep an eye on her nose-line and berate her if she started pulling back on it. Dookie came last, a slight and an ignominy he could scarcely bear. I let Goliath go, so he could eat as he walked along. I was planning to tie him to a tree at night as Sallay had suggested. This meant that the very real danger of the camels disappearing in the night, when they were hobbled out to feed, would be minimized. I left a halter on him, with a length of rope hanging from it, so he would be easy to catch.

It was done. I was on my own. For real. At last. Jenny, Toly, Alice Springs, Rick,
National Geographic,
family, friends, everything, dissolved as I turned for the last time, the early morning wind leaping and whistling around me. I wondered what powerful fate had channelled me into this moment of inspired lunacy. The last burning bridge back to my old self collapsed. I was on my own.

A
LL I REMEMBER OF
that first day alone was a feeling of release; a sustained, buoyant confidence as I strolled along, Bub’s nose-line in my sweaty palm, the camels in a well-behaved line behind me and Goliath bringing up the rear. The muffled tinkling of their bells, the soft crunching of my feet in the sand and the faint twittering of the wood-swallows were the only sounds. The desert was otherwise still.

I had decided to follow an abandoned track that would eventually meet up with the main Areyonga road. Now, the definition of a track in Australia is a mark made across the landscape by the repeated passage of a vehicle or, if you are very lucky, initially by a bulldozer. These tracks vary in quality from a corrugated, bull-dust-covered, well-defined and well-used road to something which you can barely discern by climbing a hill and squinting in the general direction you think the said track may go. Sometimes you can see where a track is by the tell-tale blossoms of wildflowers. Those along the track will either be growing more thickly or be of a different type. Sometimes, you may be able to follow the trail by searching for the ridge left aeons ago by a bulldozer. The track may wind around or over hills and ridges and rocky outcroppings, straight into sand-dunes, get swallowed up by sandy creek-beds, get totally lost in stony creek-beds, or fray into a maze of animal pads. Following tracks is most often easy, sometimes frustrating, and occasionally downright terrifying.

When you are in cattle or sheep station country, the following of tracks can be especially puzzling, mainly because one always assumes that a track will lead somewhere. This is not necessarily so since station people just don’t think like that. Also there is the problem of choice. When you are presented with half a dozen tracks all leading off in the general direction you want to go, all used within the last year, and none of them marked on the map, which one do you choose? If you choose the wrong one it may simply stop five miles ahead, so that you have to back-track, having lost half a day’s travel. Or it may lead you to an abandoned, waterless windmill and bore, or slap-bang into a new fence-line, which, if followed, will begin leading you in exactly the opposite direction to where you thought you wanted to go, only now you’re not quite sure because you’ve made so many turnings and weavings that you are beginning to lose confidence in your sense of direction. Or it might lead you to a gate made by some jackaroo who thought he was Charles Atlas and which you haven’t got a hope in hell of opening, or if you can open it without suffering a rupture, then closing it is impossible without using the camels as a winch, which takes half an hour to do and you’re already hot and bothered and dusty and all you really want in life is to get to the next watering place and have an aspirin and a cup of tea and a good lie down.

This is complicated further by the fact that whoever those people are who fly in planes and make maps of the area, they need glasses; or perhaps were drunk at the time; or perhaps just felt like breaking free of departmental rulings and added a few bits and pieces of imaginative topography, or even, in some cases, rubbed out a few features in a fit of solitary anarchic vice. One expects maps to be always but always 100 per cent correct, and most of the time they are. It’s those other times that can set you into a real panic. Make you think that perhaps that sand-ridge you swore you sat on back there was a mirage. Make you entertain the notion that you are sun-struck. Make you gulp once or twice and titter nervously.

However, that first day held none of these problems. If the track petered out into dust bowls with drinking spots in the middle of them, it was relatively easy to find where it continued on the other side. The camels were going well and behaving like lambs. Life was good. The country I was travelling through held my undivided attention with its diversity. This particular area had had three bumper seasons in succession and was carpeted in green and dotted with white, yellow, red, blue wildflowers. Then I would find myself in a creek-bed where tall gums and delicate acacias cast deep cool shadow. And birds. Everywhere birds. Black cockatoos, sulphur-cresteds, swallows, Major Mitchells, willy-wagtails, quarrian, kestrels, budgerigar flocks, bronze-wings, finches. And there were kunga-berries and various solanums and mulga apples and eucalyptus manna to eat as I walked along. This searching for and picking wild food is one of the most pleasant, calming pastimes I know. Contrary to popular belief, the desert is bountiful and teeming with life in the good seasons. It is like a vast untended communal garden, the closest thing to earthly paradise I can imagine. Mind you, I wouldn’t want to have to survive on bush-tucker during the drought. And even in the good season, I admit I would prefer my diet to be supplemented by the occasional tin of sardines, and a frequent cup of sweet billy tea.

I had learnt about wild foods from Aboriginal friends in Alice Springs, and from Peter Latz, an ethnobotanist whose passion was desert plant-foods. At first, I had not found it easy to remember and recognize plants after they had been pointed out to me, but eventually the scales fell from my eyes. The Solanaceae especially had me confused. This is a huge family, including such well knowns as potatoes, tomatoes, capsicums, datura and nightshades. The most interesting thing about the group is that many of them form a staple diet for Aboriginal people, while others which look almost identical are deadly poisonous. Peter had done some tests of various species and found that one tiny berry contained more vitamin C than an orange. Since these were eaten by the thousands when Aboriginal people were free to travel through their own country, it stands to reason that their modern-day diet, almost totally devoid of vitamin G, is just one more factor contributing to their crippling health problems.

I was a little nervous my first night out. Not because I was frightened of the dark (the desert is benign and beautiful at night, and except for the eight-inch-long, pink millipedes that sleep under the bottom of the swag and may wish to bite you when you roll it up at dawn, or the careless straying of a scorpion under your sleep-twitching hand, or the lonely slithering of a Joe Blake who may want to cuddle up and get warm under the bedclothes then fang you to death when you wake up, there is not much to worry about) but because I wondered if I would ever see the camels again. I hobbled them out at dusk, unclogged their bells and tied little Goliath to a tree. Would it work, I asked myself? The answer came back, ‘She’ll be right, mate,’ the closest thing to a Zen statement to come out of Australia, and one I used frequently in the months ahead.

The process of unloading had been infinitely easier than putting the stuff on. It only took an hour. Then there was wood to be gathered, a fire and lamp to be lit, camels to be checked on, cooking utensils, food and cassette player to be got out, Diggity to be fed, camels to be checked on, food to be cooked and camels to be checked on. They were munching their heads off happily enough. Except Goliath. He was yelling piggishly for his mother, who, thank God, was taking no notice whatsoever.