AlternateRoute

The rocking of the train resulted in a fitful, frequently interrupted sleep. The narrow top bunk had no side rail so I was in constant fear of rolling out of bed and plunging 2m to certain injury. We stopped twice during the night for extended periods at the localities of Fuchall and North Fuchall Downs. We arose early (0630) in order to maximise the number of hours sitting around doing nothing, which of course is much more civilised than lying in bed doing nothing.
The gentle glow of dawn was just starting to add colour to the sky as we entered the dining car. Sometime during the compote of fruit the sun itself poked its head out from behind a distant mesa, squeezing its light between the horizon and the low cloud.
The landscape became a mosaic of silhouetted saltbush punctuated by long shadows which slowly clawed their way toward the bases of the trees.
The orange red soil that gives this part of Australia its name, glowed in the warmth of a new day, while the occasional skeletal remains of cattle lay as testament to the harsh dry nature of the land. While having the overall appearance of being in the middle of nowhere, the area is surprisingly full of the works of man.
Dusty roads criss cross the railway track and the blown tyres of unlucky travellers litter the bush. The rail runs quite close to the Start Highway and often a car or road train can be seen in the distance.
Every now and then a fence-line runs up to the railway in a seemingly infinite line from the distant horizon. This typifies the peculiar white man motion that this piece of vast nothingness belongs to me, but the vast nothingness on the other side of the fence belongs to someone else.
In the city where people have small properties and savour each last square metre of land as they live in the back pocket of their neighbour, such distinctions make sense. Out here where some properties are the size of European countries, such a concept of ownership seems foreign or at least superfluous.
We don’t stop at Kulgera and all I know about the place I learnt from the old Redgum song, “Lear Jets Over Kulgera” where John Schumann is lamenting the sale of our natural resources to multi-national corporations. (I should not be too harsh on multi-national mining conglomerates, as I just missed out on a job with one.) Our next stop is Alice Springs, but that is another meal away.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 0800 and is filed under Darwin-Broome 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.