“Hop in!” yelled the girl behind the pickup wheel, “Name’s Sal…wouldn’t have stopped but yuz looked the part.”
Bleary-eyed, unshaven and grubby (jetlag and the, not altogether dissimilar, nightlife of Bangkok and Sydney had taken their toll) this was not the first time that we’d received this dubious compliment.
 Looking the part is all-important in the Australian Outback. It’s the new Aussie chic.
My faithful sidekick Crocodile Dougee and I - lacking the wherewithal to aspire to the true Drizabone-and-Akubra designer-chic of ‘the Bunyip Aristocracy’ - liked to imagine that they meant we were Paul Hogan look-a-likes. But it was more likely that the people who helped these two ragged Pommy winter-refugees in their westbound walkabout saw us as ‘Jolly Swagmen’ . . . which translates into English, with somewhat less panache, as ‘Pissed-up Bagman.’
Sal slammed the pickup into gear and the Blue Mountains (tinted by a haze of eucalyptus oil) began to roll past. This was the Great Dividing Range that had, for twenty-five years, formed an impenetrable barrier to earlier Pom (Prisoners Of Her Majesty) desperadoes who had tried to force a way inland.
Our own 3000-mile foray into The Back o’ Beyond had begun in earnest that morning when we stuck out our thumbs at Katoomba, a mountain retreat above the suburbs of Penrith and Richmond (known to Sydney-siders as the ‘slurbs’). Besides being illegal in several Australian states I had read that hitchhiking could be very difficult here, on the fringe of ‘civilisation.’ Hitchers are invariably superstitious characters and the happy omen that we prayed for arrived almost immediately in the form of a diminutive hatchback: “Jump in! We only picked yuz up ‘cos yuz look the part.”
Two more miraculously quick lifts combined to roll us over the Blue Mountains, into a vast region of paddocks. For once a few native species had also benefited from man’s interference in their habitat and we fought unsuccessfully to hide our childish glee as we spotted our first kangaroos, grazing side-by-side with their woolly neighbours. Because of the cultivation of grazing land there are many more ‘roos in Australia today than there were at the time of the white fella’s arrival.
We hoped to make it that evening as far as Orange, the birthplace of Banjo Paterson – of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ fame.
“Aah, Orange is okay,” said Sal, “but when Banjo wrote - ‘A township where life’s total sum - Is sleep, diversified with rum,’ – well, that’s the sort of place he meant.”
Normally an Outbacker wouldn’t give a Four X for anything as la-di-da as poetry but Andrew Barton Paterson (he called himself Banjo after a horse) wrote with affection and humour about their tough lives:
‘But round about the pub all day
A crowd of shearers, drinking hard,
And using language in a strain
’Twere flattery to call profane.’
When Crocodile Dougee and I made camp at the edge of Orange the sun was setting fast on what Sal called ‘a two-dog night’ - the Aboriginals, regulated the temperature in their vast outdoor dormitory by dragging their hunting dogs ever closer as the nights grew colder.
The first fat drops of an unseasonable rainstorm began to drive down as we broke camp the next morning, and soon we were forced to consider the likelihood that two bedraggled Poms shivering by the roadside would very soon look so irrevocably the part that even the most romantically minded Outbacker would be unlikely to want them dripping all over his upholstery. So we bludged it and copped a train to Dubbo to connect with the Broken Hill bus.
A woman on the train had advised us to sit up front and talk to the driver: “Poor boys – it’s an awfully long, boring road and they’re apt to go to sleep.” This seemed like sound advice and we gasped with boyish excitement as Brad told us that the Barrier Highway here was so straight and empty that the speedo needle need never dip below 100km/hr during the ten-hour drive to The Hill. “The old crate could probably do this run herself if you just pointed her in the right direction and gave her a good push,” he said.
We took turns to stay awake and nag Brad about avoiding the spiny echidnas that, like European hedgehogs, rolled themselves into what they imagined to be an impregnable ball at the sudden appearance of a ten-tonne bus.
Eventually, we stopped to refuel at the Outback ‘metropolis’ of Emdale where the six of us temporarily doubled the population. An Aboriginal man and two footsore women shuffled out of the bush from the direction of the Darling River - Australia’s longest and what’s known here as a ‘real big mob of water.’ As he climbed into the bus the young man was drinking a can of Fanta, beaded with frost from the roadhouse esky.
“I hope that’s not beer there, boy,” Brad challenged him.
“No boss. Not beer.”
“Better not be – ‘cos otherwise someone won’t be comin’ on this bus.”
“It’s okay, boss,” – then wearily, “I gotta come with you. Too far to walk and I can’t live off the land no more.”
Long before the Darling had been ‘discovered,’ in 1828, the young man’s forefathers had been singing their way between these billabongs, hunting goannas and geese - but few among the Aboriginals of today remember how to trace the ancient ‘songlines.’
It used to be said that Broken Hill lay ‘beyond the Darling River and on the edge of sundown’ and, sure enough, our first sight of The Hill was a tall heap of mulloch (slag), neatly silhouetted in a break amongst the angry storm clouds. Broken Hill is lauded in NSW tourist brochures as ‘The Accessible Outback’ (presumably since it had only taken us two days and one time-zone crossing to reach) but the town’s historical claim to fame is that it once boasted the world’s biggest deposits of silver, lead and zinc.
The Imperial Hotel (88, Oxide Street) offered us ‘A Way to Feel at Home in the Heart of Australia’ but homeliness of that sort was beyond our means so we made instead for the lights and music of the ‘Black Lion Hotel and Drive-In Bottle Shop.’
The next morning, as we wandered along the boardwalks of Sulphide, Bromide and Iodide Streets, numerous art galleries testified to what the brochures called ‘the expansive vistas, dazzling skies’ and general ‘earthiness’ that has made Broken Hill into a veritable Mecca for artists . . . not to mention the hallowed ground upon which ‘Mad Max 2’ and ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’ were filmed.
Apparently the pride of Broken Hill’s modern art scene is the ‘Living Desert Symposium,’ a hilltop gallery featuring huge  sandstone figures sculpted by twelve artists (including a Mexican Aztec, a Syrian Bedouin and local bushman Badger Bates). As Dr Ahmad Al Ahmad (the Bedouin) said, ‘the Symposium is a necklace for a maiden – the maiden being the incredibly beautiful desert landscape around the mountain.’
The wallaroos and wedge-tailed eagles that haunt the hill are easily appreciated and the beauty of the desert, stretching into the hazy distance in varying bands of ochre and sandstone, speaks for itself . . . but I had a feeling that we might need a local expert to explain the meanings behind the sculptures themselves.
Of the many guides in Broken Hill, the tourist office recommended John Arnold: a self-confessed bushman extraordinaire, master-chef, ace helicopter pilot, Mel Gibson’s motorbike stuntman, etc. etc. In short, a man of many words - most of which were reserved for himself. A degree in marketing (‘passed at fifty-eight in a record 3 months’ - if you must know) had done little to improve customer skills at ‘Cockatoo Tours.’ [“Cocka-bloody-mamie more like,” said Crocodile Dougee viciously.]
As our ‘guide’ swung the minibus back towards town (he’d already seen the sculptures and ‘didn’t fancy hiking all the way up there again’) I noticed a dark form bounding along the skyline above the track. It was a large kangaroo, galloping powerfully along the ridge in thirty-foot bounds and I remembered reading that ‘big reds’ could run well over 100 miles in a night, chasing thunderstorms like the one that was brewing at that moment on the western horizon.
The next morning saw us back on the Barrier Highway, patiently shoving our thumbs towards the still gloomy clouds above South Australia and vaguely in the direction of the Flinders Ranges.
The sun was climbing high when a dusty estate car pulled up and, with scant formality, we were invited to chuck our stuff into the back. It was immediately apparent that our two female chauffeurs were not from this neck of the woods from the way they thoughtlessly omitted to compliment us upon looking the part. In fact, Gali and Shirley were Israelis, bound on an Outback odyssey to celebrate their recent liberation from military service. They met by chance in Sydney and had decided to hit the road together . . . and in this same happy-go-lucky frame of mind they quickly succumbed to Crocodile Dougee’s inspired description of The Flinders. This forty-minute wait would be the longest of our entire journey but - although we didn’t yet realise it - this lift would eventually take us almost 2,000 miles into the ‘Red Centre.’
Later that afternoon at Hawker (the Central hub of the Flinders), we were handed the daily road-report from the Transport SA organisation. It was an awesome document, peppered with such statements as Mt Fitton to Moolawatana – impassable and hazardous, Nepabunna to Arkaroola Village – 4wd caution at creek crossings. It ended with the stunning declaration that The Stuart Highway is closed at the Palmer River crossing and therefore Alice Springs, the very heart of ‘The Red Centre,’ was entirely cut off from South Australia by some of the worst flooding on record!
I wondered if that storm-chasing big red had foreseen the power of the downpour that would, in the coming weeks, inundate almost a third of Queensland and go a long way towards making the mythical Australian Inland Sea a reality.
A few miles north, on the edge of the vast natural amphitheatre of Wilpena Pound, Tony Smith the owner of Rawnsley Park Station was hoping that at least some of what was being called The Big Wet would soak its way southwards into his 7,453 acres of grazing land. But the rain – always a doubtful commodity here - seemed to have reached its limit 100 miles to the north.
In 1851 a white stockman first followed some Aboriginal guides through a narrow pass under the soaring 500-metre walls of a ‘lost world’ that the local tribe called Ikarra. William Chace recognised its potential and renamed it Wilpena Pound and that same year Rawnsley Park was settled.
Within a decade the unreliable rains dried up altogether.
 Ikarra has always been sacred to the Adnyamathanha Aboriginals who believe that the walls were formed by the bodies of a pair of giant water snakes that had surrounded a group of their ancestors in the Dreamtime. By the time the rains came again – bringing cruel floods and bitterly cold winds – many of the tribe and almost half the livestock had perished. The Adnyamathanha looked on these ‘heaven-sent’ calamities as punishment for the white fellas invasion of sacred Ikarra.
Luckily for Tony, Rawnsley Park began developing a sideline back in the sixties and is now less dependent on the whims of nature. It now rents out holiday cabins and caravans and offers bush-walking, horse-riding, mountain-biking and ‘scenic charter flights’ over The Pound (and as far as Lake Eyre). At the Woolshed Restaurant there are sheep-shearing demonstrations, ‘Aboriginal cultural events’ and ‘Outback Tucker Evenings,’ offering everything from lamb-on-a-spit to damper, billy-tea and bush tucker cooked by local Adnyamathanhas.
We decided to weather the storm in Rawnsley Park and use it as a base to explore Wilpena Pound. It was high summer and, despite the bottleneck of frustrated northbound traffic, we were the only guests in residence. We rented a four-berth trailer, split open a slab of Victoria Beer and fed the mynah birds while Gali set about impressing us with her culinary abilities.
That evening another visitor came to sample local tucker Israeli-style. In the darkness and tranquillity of the campsite dozens of wallaroos came to graze and one - predictably christened Skippy - was so confident that he hopped directly up to the trailer to eat out of our hands.
There’s still only one way to enter Wilpena Pound and next morning we trekked through Sliding Rock Gorge where, in 1904, the Hill brothers began work on the road that would allow them to get their wheat and wool to Hawker. It took several years to build - through a season of prolonged drought – but just a few short days for flash floods to demolish it.
Hill’s Homestead, where the family battled against the spirits of Ikarra for twenty years, can still be visited inside The Pound’s western walls. Hovering high above it is St Mary Peak, the head of the male water snake and an important Dreamtime spirit-place. Pauline Coulthard, an Adnyamathanha woman, explained the significance that the peak still carries for her people today: “As we were growing up we weren’t allowed to climb Ngarri Mudlanha (St Mary Peak). Ngarri Mudlanha means ‘the mind waits’ – the mind pauses and you can’t think straight. The Adnyamathanha people won’t climb the peak because of its religious power.”
Respecting this we headed up through the native pines and red river gums - where kangaroos locked up from their grazing with mild interest and emus strutted gawkily - to climb only as far as Wangarra Lookout. From here we had a clear view along the twenty-mile length of the snakes’ backs.
The next day Tony led us off on a horseback tour of the station. Apart from the occasional dog fence, or a tree-lined gully in which kangaroos and emus scattered before the horses, there was nothing to stop us cantering right up to the soaring ramparts of Wilpena Pound. Tony was quiet and capable in the sort of way that is most appreciated in the Outback. Although he didn’t waste words, his love of the country was obvious as he described the damage caused by the herds of feral goats that his boys were trying to muster from within The Pound.
With a shrug that clearly illustrated the Outbacker’s resignation to the whims of their climate Tony described the immense dust-storm that had recently swept southwards from the sandy Lake Torrens all the way east to Broken Hill: “Visibility was down to a couple of metres for a whole day. It was a real beaut.”
“Skippy’s gonna be really pissed-off when he comes calling this evening and realises he’ll have to go back to eating grass!” Crocodile Dougee said, as he turned the car towards the flooded Red Centre.
The radio told us that the citizens of Alice were once again receiving supplies from the south: “. . . but we’re waiting to see what happens with those cloud-banks in the MacDonnell Ranges – if it comes down, we’ll be in strife again.”
It was hard to believe that there could be such a ‘big mob of water’ anywhere in the Outback as we towed a plume of bull-dust back to the highway and the ‘willy-willys’ danced across the desert either side of us. But by Outback standards these little whirlwinds were barely worth mentioning.
As Tony Smith would say, “they’re not man enough to chuck a heifer.”
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