I MUST HAVE WALKED thirty or more miles that day. I was afraid to stop. Afraid that the feeling of loss, guilt and loneliness would swamp me. I eventually pulled into a washaway and built a bonfire. I had hoped that I would be so exhausted that I would fall asleep without having to think. I was in a strange state. I had been expecting a lack of control over my emotions, but instead I was cool, rational, hard-edged, accepting. I decided to finish the trip in Wiluna, not because I was wanting to run away from it, but because I felt that the trip had ended itself; had reached some psychological conclusion, had simply become complete, like the last page of a novel. I dreamt that night, and most following nights for months, that Diggity was all right. In my dreams I would relive the sequence of events, only it always turned out that she survived, and that she forgave me. She was often human in these dreams, and talked to me. They were disturbingly vivid. I woke to the reality of loneliness, and was surprised at the strength which enabled me to accept it.
It may seem strange that the mere death of a dog could have such a profound effect on someone, but it must be remembered that, because of my isolation, Diggity had become a cherished friend rather than simply a pet. I’m sure, had the incident occurred back in the city, surrounded by my own kind, the effect would not have been anywhere near as great. But out there, and in that changed and stretched state of mind, it was as traumatic as the death of a human, because to a large extent she had become just that, she had taken the place of people.
Henry Ward had shown me on my map where to turn south. From the mark I had made on that map, it seemed a good few miles past a certain bore. I had obviously made a mistake — I was still travelling due west across monotonous flats, watching what I considered must be the pass in the hills dwindling away behind me. I camped that night on a small sandhill that looked like an island left behind by the tide. This was peculiar, oppressive country. It was dead flat, covered in white gypsum dust dotted with clumps of a salty succulent at intervals of twelve feet. And out of this vast expanse would rise the occasional still wave of sand, covered in taller trees and scrub. It had an abandoned quality and it gave me the creeps.
I decided to use my hated radio set that night to call Henry and check up on the direction. I wasn’t so much panicked as uneasy. I wanted to talk to someone. Everything was so still and there was no Diggity to play with or talk to or hold. It took me half an hour to set the wretched thing up — a long bit of wire draped over a tree, and another along the ground. It didn’t work. I had carried this monster for fifteen hundred miles, loaded and unloaded it hundreds of times, and the only occasion I needed it, it wouldn’t work. It had probably been broken all along.
I was woken that night by the most chilling, hair-lifting sound I had ever heard. A soft, high-pitched keening that got louder and louder. I had never been afraid in the dark, and if I heard a sound I couldn’t place, it didn’t disturb me too much. Besides, Dig had always been there to protect and comfort me. But this? Ripples ran up and down my back. I got up and wandered around camp. Everything was perfectly still, but the noise was now a continuous unmodulated wail. I was beginning to recognize the first tell-tale signs of panic — this noise had to have a rational explanation. Either that, or I was going mad again, or some spirit was out to drive me that way. And then I felt the first stirrings of breeze. Of course, the noise I was hearing was the wind whistling through the top tips of the trees I was under. There had not been a breath of turbulence on the ground, but now the pre-dawn wind, that solid unflagging front of cool air, was chilling me to the bone and making the coals of the fire glow red. I crawled back into my swag shivering, and tried to get back to sleep. I would have given anything just then, to be able to hold that familiar warm dog flesh — the need was like a physical ache. Without her, I was suddenly susceptible to all those swamping, irrational feelings of vulnerability and dread.
Most of the rest of that week or ten days was a timeless blur. The ground travelled under my feet unnoticed until some piece of country shocked me out of my mental machinations. I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.
I came across an almost dried-up, green putrescent water-hole, filled with rotting carcasses of cattle, horses and kangaroos. Around this water-hole were stretches of stone walls, high up on the banks. I suspected they were Aboriginal hunting blinds, perhaps thousands of years old. The hunters would have waited patiently behind these walls, upwind of the animals coming down to drink, then leapt out with their spears. They would have kept the hole clean in former years. Now, with none of them left to maintain and take care of this potentially beautiful watering place, even my camels turned their noses up at it. It was a horrible sewer and it smelt of death and decay. I made sure the camels had enough to drink from my drums that night before letting them go, just in case. Luckily, it was too cold for them to want to wallow in it.
At about this time I entered and spent a day exploring what was probably the most impressive surreal piece of landscaping I had seen on the whole journey. A vast depression had sunk away from the broken plateau. Rimming it all around the horizon were cliffs of every imaginable hue. Some of these faces were as smooth and glossy as fine porcelain. Some were pure dazzling white, some pink, green, mauve, brown, red and so on. The depression was covered in samphire, which I then thought was ‘sand-fire’. It was a perfect name. When this plant dried out, it changed into myriads of colours — rainbow colours, reflecting the glow and iridescence of the cliffs. And dotted throughout this lost world were weirdly sculptured mounds of rock and pebbles. A martian landscape seen through multi-coloured glasses. I picked up and kept one small rock — pale pink sandstone studded with glitter, one side rippled into tiny sharp ridges.
But even this exploratory walk felt empty. I had to force myself to do it. Everything I did now was like that — unspontaneous, forced. I had even given up cooking for myself at night. I would scrabble around in the bags for something to eat, forcing myself to nibble even though I wasn’t hungry.
The other topographic freaks that stopped me in my tracks were the claypans. Mile after mile these perfectly flat brown hard-baked Euclidean surfaces ran, without a blade of grass on them, without a tree or an animal or a clump of spinifex — nothing but towering, thin, crooked, brown pillars of whirling dust being sucked up into a burning, almost white sky. Looking at these claypans was like gazing at a calm ocean, only you could walk on this stuff. Right next to one huge pan was a dwarf replica, about a hundred yards across. A bush ballroom. An outback amphitheatre. I tied up the camels for their midday break and in that searing, clean, bright, dry heat, I took off my clothes and danced. I danced until I could dance no more — I danced out everything, Diggity, the trip, Rick, the article, the whole lot. I shouted and howled and wept and I leapt and contorted my body until it refused to respond any more. I crawled back to the camels, covered in grime and sweat, shaking with fatigue, dust in my ears and nose and mouth, and slept for about an hour. When I woke, I felt healed, and weightless, and prepared for anything.
I was well and truly back in station country now. The tracks here were well used. I had a bath and a swim at the next bore, washed my hair and clothes and hung them on the saddle to dry. It takes about five minutes out there. And I promised myself as I walked along that I would eat properly that night — I was too light-headed, too close to the edge to continue on the way I was doing, and I needed to bring myself down.
I spotted a vehicle coming, belting along with a train of red dust behind it stretching to the horizon. I thought it must be station people out to do their check on the bores. I hastily put on my clothes and tried to twist my mind into shape for a short and simple chat with some bush folk. They were usually people of few words, but I was actually frightened of that car.
It wasn’t bush folk. It was the jackals, hyenas, parasites and pariahs of the popular press. By the time I saw the long-lens camera trained on me, it was too late to hide, or get out the gun and blast it at them, or even realize that I was crazy enough to do such a thing. Out they spilled.
‘We’ll give you a thousand dollars for the story.’
‘Go away. Leave me alone. I’m not interested.’ My heart was pumping like a cornered rabbit’s.
‘Well, for Christ’s sake, might as well come and have a cold beer anyway.’
They had the human psyche so well tapped that they could bribe me with one beer where they couldn’t buy me for a thousand bucks. I accepted the bribe as much to find out what was happening back in the world, and why they were here, as anything else. They sneaked in a few questions, some I answered perfunctorily, others I refused to comment on.
‘Where’s your dog?’
I didn’t know how to sidestep these people — had once again forgotten the rules of the game. It was either blow their brains out and run or shrink into an acquiescent quivering blob, fighting hard to stay in control.
‘She’s dead, but please don’t print that as it would make a few old people back home very distressed.’
‘Yeah, OK we won’t.’
‘Is that a promise — your word?’
‘Sure, sure.’
But they did print it of course. They flew back to Perth with a scoop, made up a story, and the myth of the romantic, mysterious camel lady was launched.
That night I camped well off the road in a dense thicket. This was something I had not expected at all. Those light planes I had seen buzzing around all day and vaguely felt curious about were for me. What on earth had got into those people back there? I had noticed a kind of hysteria in the reporters when they talked of the press reports so far. ‘World-wide,’ they had said. I couldn’t believe that. And they’d scuttled off home playing their part in the great ugly farce called ‘the public has a right to know’. I decided to wait there for a couple of days. If the press were really after me it would be better to hide out until it all blew over.
It was the overlander who had really set me up. When he arrived back in civilization, longing for any limelight he could stand under, he told a story of this marvellous woman he had ‘spent the night with’ in the desert. The quote ran something like, ‘It was romantic. Her bare shoulders protruded from the sleeping bag, bells were tinkling on the pack, and I talked with her for many hours in the moonlight. I didn’t ask her why she was doing it, she didn’t ask me why I was doing it. We understood.’ Not a bad description of a sun-crazed loony in a sweat-soaked, camel-bespattered, grimy swag, who had been innocently pushing up zeds from the pit at the time. The worm. Maybe he thought he was doing me a favour.
I ran into the bushes when the first cars arrived, television cameras and all. These reporters had hired a black tracker. But my fighting spirit was coming back to me now. They were so stupid, so heavy, these people — they didn’t belong here and I had the edge on them there at least. I whispered silent Indian war whoops from behind my camouflage. I circled right round through the thicket so that I was only twenty feet from them. The place where I had camped was sandy, so a blind fool could have tracked me. My footprints stood out like neon signposts, like Mack truck tracks on a sandhill.
‘All right, fella, where is she?’ One of them, the fat one with sweat staining his red T-shirt and a scowling heat-struck look over his matching face, addressed the black tracker.
‘Gee, boss, that camel lady might be real smart one, she might be cover up them tracks. I can’t see where she gone.’ And he shook his head and rubbed his chin in thoughtful puzzlement.
Yippee and whoop whoop. I could have leapt out and kissed him for that. He knew exactly where I was and he was on my side. The fat one cursed and grudgingly handed over the ten dollars’ wages. The Aborigine smiled and put it in his pocket, and they took off — 150 miles of dirt track back to Wiluna.
I went back to my camp, stoked up the fire and felt as if my skin had been pulled off. My stomach had knotted into a tight cold ball of tension. What in god’s name was happening here? People had done trips like this before, how come I was copping the attention? I still had no idea of the extent of the furore. I thought of covering my tracks but that wouldn’t fool any Aboriginal — eventually one of them would find me. I thought of scaring them all off with a few shotgun pellets but dropped that immediately — it would just be another story.
And then I saw Rick’s car charging past at the speed of light with several other cars chasing him. ‘Oh my God, what IS going on?’ Rick came back in five minutes, turned in on my tracks and drove up to me. He only just had time to give me a vague outline before they all piled out. Some were from the London press, some were from television, some were from the Australian papers. I hissed and snarled and ground my teeth at them. I stomped into the bushes and ordered them point-blank from behind a tree to put their cameras down. Rick told me later that I looked and behaved like a mad woman. Exactly what they had expected. I had washed my hair in a salty bore, so it stuck out of my head in a frizzed, bleached electric halo. I was frazzled and burnt black by the sun and I hadn’t been sleeping much in the last week or so, so that my eyes were piggy little slits, with brown sag beneath them. I had not recovered from the loss of Diggity and couldn’t handle this invasion of what looked to me then like inter-galactic war-lords. I was so adamant and so crazy that they shuffled their feet with embarrassment and did as they were told. I came back. And then, like a fool, I partially relented. Curiosity killed the cat. When I look back I marvel at myself. At what makes me instantly apologetic to people I have stood up to when they have been prepared to walk all over me. I still allowed no photos so one of them photographed my campfire. ‘Can’t go back with nothing, I’d get fired.’
One man even apologized after he had defended television as a medium, even mildly castigating me for not sharing myself with the public. He said, ‘It’s funny how truth always seems to get in the way.’
Others rationalized my dislike for publicity by saying, and later printing, that I was committed to a magazine, that I had done the trip for the magazine and therefore couldn’t talk to anyone else about it. Why couldn’t they understand that some of us just don’t want to be famous — that anonymity cannot be bought for any price, once you have lost it? Richard played protector. I was glad of it, I felt too weak and confused to be able to do it for myself. Besides, he spoke their language. They left eventually, and Rick and I were free to talk. He told me of his own ordeal. Of reading in some obscure overseas newspaper that the camel lady was lost, and how he had not slept for four days trying to reach me before the wave of reporters did, and wondering if I were dead. He had been leapt upon by reporters in Wiluna and had tried, unsuccessfully, to shake them off. He showed me some of the papers he had picked up. Pictures of me smiling into the camera.
‘How the hell did they get hold of these?’ I was stunned.
‘Tourists have been selling them to the papers.’
‘JeeeeeeSUS.’
Some of the reports were at least entertaining. They said things like, ‘Miss Davidson lived on berries and bananas [?] and said she would kill her camels for meat if she was starving,’ or, ‘Miss Davidson was met by a lone and mysterious Aboriginal man one night who travelled with her for a time, then disappeared, as silently as he had come,’ or (this from an American bush-walkers’ magazine), ‘No points this week to Robyn Davidson the camel lady, for wilfully destroying the Australian native [?] camel. Perhaps she thought she was on a big game hunt.’ Idiots.
And enemies had suddenly switched sides. All those people back in Alice Springs who wouldn’t have spat on me if I were burning in those frugal, anonymous days, were suddenly on the publicity bandwagon. ‘Sure,’ they said, ‘I knew her, I taught her everything she knows about camels.’
And it was only then that I realized what I had let myself in for, and only then I realized how bloody thick I had been not to have predicted it. It would seem that the combination of elements — woman, desert, camels, aloneness — hit some soft spot in this era’s passionless, heartless, aching psyche. It fired the imaginations of people who see themselves as alienated, powerless, unable to do anything about a world gone mad. And wouldn’t it be my luck to pick just this combination. The reaction was totally unexpected and it was very, very weird. I was now public property. I was now a feminist symbol. I was now an object of ridicule for small-minded sexists, and I was a crazy, irresponsible adventurer (though not as crazy as I would have been had I failed). But worse than all that, I was now a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that ordinary people could hope for. And that was the antithesis of what I wanted to share. That anyone could do anything. If I could bumble my way across a desert, then anyone could do anything. And that was true especially for women, who have used cowardice for so long to protect themselves that it has become a habit.
The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. ‘Watch out, be careful, watch.’ ‘Don’t climb trees, don’t dirty your dress, don’t accept lifts from strange men. Listen but don’t learn, you won’t need it.’ And so the snail’s antennae grow, watching for this, looking for that, the underneath of things. The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits, to push up the millions of tiny thumbs that have tried to quelch energy and creativity and strength and self-confidence; that have so effectively caused her to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness.
And now a myth was being created where I would appear different, exceptional. Because society needed it to be so. Because if people started living out their fantasies, and refusing to accept the fruitless boredom that is offered them as normality, they would become hard to control. And that term ‘camel LADY’. Had I been a man, I’d be lucky to get a mention in the Wiluna Times, let alone international press coverage. Neither could I imagine them coining the phrase ‘camel gentleman’. ‘Camel lady had that nice patronizing belittling ring to it. Labelling, pigeonholing — what a splendid trick it is.
Rick had met a man in town — Peter Muir. An ex-dogger, brilliant tracker, and who turned out to be one of the finest, multi-talented bushmen I have ever met — a dying breed. He came out to visit us with his wife Dolly and their children. It was nice to see some calm pleasant quiet people. We talked about the country I had just been through. Peter knew it probably better than anyone. He had spent his life oscillating between white and Aboriginal cultures and had combined the best elements of both. He told us what was happening in Wiluna. The town was being invaded by reporters offering money to anyone who could find me — a kind of siege; the police were receiving international calls all through the night, and were, understandably, ready to wring my neck; and the flying doctor radio was clogged with calls, to the point where real emergencies were not getting through. I was really angry now — deep down seething angry. Oddly enough, all the people in town (there were approximately twenty whites in Wiluna and a large group of blacks living in humpies on the outskirts) were on my side. As soon as they heard that I didn’t want the publicity they went out of their way to protect me from it. The town clammed up.
Peter and Dolly offered me their second house, several miles out of Wiluna, to hide in. The people at Cunyu invited me to let my camels stay in their horse paddock, and continued to play dumb as to my whereabouts.
‘Camel lady? Sorry, mate, no idea.’
I drove into Wiluna with Rick and then he told me that he had arranged for Jenny and Toly to come out and see me. Dear Rick. They were just what I needed.
After stocking up our hideaway with luxuries, we drove to Meekatharra, a slightly larger town a hundred miles west, to pick up Jen and Toly from the airport. I couldn’t speak when I first saw them, but I held on to them tight. Then we went into town for a coffee and a spilling of our various ripping yarns. Seeing them and touching them was like a dose of tonic. They understood. They stroked my ruffled feathers and forced me to laugh at the insanity of it all. I began to feel less like a hunted criminal and more like a normal human being. As I have said before, friendship in certain subsections within Australia amounts almost to religion. This closeness and sharing is not describable to any other cultural group to whom friendship means dinner parties where one discusses wittily work and career, or gatherings of ‘interesting’ people who are all suspicious, wary, and terrified of not being interesting after all.
And there was mail. Acres of it. There were letters from friends, loved ones, and hundreds of anonymous people too, whose general message was, ‘You have done something I would have liked to do, but never had the courage to try.’ They were almost apologetic, and their letters puzzled me and frustrated me the most, because I kept wanting to shake them and tell them that courage had much less to do with it than sheer good luck and staying power. Some were messages from young men who on page three gave detailed descriptions of themselves (usually the tall blond handsome variety), then said they knew a great jungle in Peru and was I interested in exploring it with them? There were letters from old pensioners and young children, and a surprisingly large proportion from people in mental hospitals. These were at once the most interesting and the most difficult to follow. Lots of diagrams and arrows and strange cryptic messages which a week before I’m sure I would have understood perfectly. There was a telegram from an old friend which read, ‘They say the sands of the Ryo-an are even more infinite …’ I liked that.
We laughed and joked and shed a few tears that day, and went to play pool in the local pub, where a woman (the local runner for the ABC) noticed Rick’s cameras and asked him if he knew where the camel lady was. He answered that he’d heard she was going to be in Meekatharra in about a week’s time, and from there was travelling south, but could she please not print that as he knew the camel lady was extremely upset over the publicity. She tsc-tsced, and said yes, wasn’t it awful, poor thing, etc., and immediately skulked home to type out a piece which put everyone off the scent and had us rolling in the aisles. Rick had said all that with a perfectly innocent face, and begged her in the name of common decency to do the right thing, knowing full well that she would not. I was beginning to appreciate just how talented Richie was in the gentle art of manipulation. We then loaded up the Toyota with yet more foodstuffs and sped back to our hole in the wall in Wiluna.
We all camped together in one room with a roaring fire — we sat in there swaddled in blankets, we toasted marshmallows, and talked and talked and talked; and we drank real coffee and Baileys and we cooked spinach pies and other culinary delights and we went out to visit the camels at Cunyu; and because I had gone into such raptures over the country I had been through and because I felt in a sense that I had missed really seeing it, being in such a state over the dog, we decided to drive back a-ways along the Canning.
The first part was OK, the station roads were quite good, but once we got further out into the desert, we cut back down to five mph. And just as I was eulogizing about the wilderness, the untamed pure quality, the magic and freedom of this country, we turned a corner to see a helicopter perched on a creek-bank. Uranium prospectors. Was nothing sacred?
We spent two or three days of bliss on the Canning, then returned to Wiluna, where a gymkhana was being held. Almost every station person for a radius of hundreds of miles attended. There aren’t too many social events in the back of beyond, so even when there’s a drought on, everyone makes a concerted effort to go. This old ghost town with its empty buildings, once sumptuous with the flush of gold, now covered in graffiti and broken glass, normally housed the police, the publican, the post-master and the store-keeper. It was now a bush metropolis — a shadowy reminiscence of its former bustling self. A dance was arranged for that evening, to which my friends and I were cordially invited. When we arrived, however, we were met at the fallen-down hall by a bouncer in a suit. He didn’t know who we were and said we couldn’t come in because we weren’t wearing ties. This was a polite way of keeping Aborigines out. Groups of blacks hung around outside the doors.
This was a difficult situation for me. While Jen and Toly were indignant at this treatment of the blacks, I was caught between two versions of the truth. I liked station people and knew that they did not consider themselves racist. When they look at the sordid camps around town, they see only the violence and dirt and the incomprehensible lack of protestant work ethic. While they usually have a patronizing respect for the older Aboriginal people, they are unable to see beyond the immediate and beyond their own values, to understand why the demise occurred and what their part in it is, either traditionally or at present. Wiluna had a wealth of social problems and was a good example of what destruction of culture can produce.
We left Wiluna a day later. My last night with Jen and Toly on the track finally convinced them that camels are virtually human. Mine had a habit of hanging around camp, looking for hand-outs, or waiting until I wasn’t watching so they could sneak their long-lipped faces into the food bags. As we ate dinner that night, we were entertained by Dookie, who kept trying to get at the large tin of honey he knew was hidden in a pack-bag just near where I was sitting. I told him to piss off. There followed a game of, ‘See how far you can push Rob without getting a clout.’ He inched forward ever so nonchalantly. Had he been human the parallel behaviour would have been hands behind back, eyes gazing up at the sky, and whistling. We pretended to keep eating but we were all watching him out of the corner of our eyes. He made a dive for the bag, I flicked him on the lips and he retreated about six inches. We continued eating. And then, to Toly’s uncontrollable hysteria, Dookie pretended to eat a completely dead bush, his eyes rolling so he could keep his beady stare on the honey, and when he thought he had fooled us sufficiently with his innocence and diversionary tactic, he dived for the bag and tried to take off with it. ‘All right, Rob, I take it all back, you don’t anthropomorphize at all.’
I had learnt the hard way to pack the food up tight at night after an incident with Bub along the Gunbarrel. I had opened a tin of cherries (the ultimate in luxury out there) and to eke the pleasure out, had left half in the tin beside my swag, for breakfast. I woke up in the morning with Bub’s head in my lap, suspicious cherry stains all over his lips. Curing this bumming in them was impossible. Besides I kind of liked it, it made me laugh, and I reinforced it constantly by giving them whatever I could spare. They were indiscriminate over what I gave them. I could pick a piece of mulga, exactly what they were eating anyway, and they would all fight over it, just because it came from my hand.
Those next couple of weeks with Rick were easy and pleasant. The strange thing about being with a person in the desert is that you either end up the bitterest of enemies or the closest of friends. It had been touch and go in the beginning. Now, without the pressure of my feeling he had robbed me of something, or rather, with my acceptance of things turning out the way they did, plus the fact that Rick was a changed person, the friendship was firmly cemented. It had a rock-hard basis called shared experience, or the tolerance developed from seeing someone at their best and at their worst, and stripped of all social value — the bare bones of another human being. He had learnt a great deal from the trip; sometimes I think he got far more out of it than I did. We had shared something miraculous which had fundamentally changed us both. We knew each other very well I think. Besides, he had now moved out from behind his camera and become part of the trip.
The feed situation for the camels during that time was worse than I had expected. It didn’t matter too much with Rick around. He was marvellous. He must have driven a thousand extra miles, relaying bales of oats or lucerne to me from Meekatharra.
He had been extremely upset over the death of the dog. I don’t think he had ever had a pet and this was the closest relationship to an animal he’d experienced. They had been nauseatingly in love with one another. I had never seen Diggity take to a person like that before. A couple of weeks out from Wiluna, Rick returned to camp late one night, after having driven a few hundred wretched miles of mercy run to pick up feed — he was extremely tired and he was not feeling well. He woke me up from a particularly disturbing dream in which Diggity was circling camp, whining, but would not come when I called her. Rick was quite out of it with exhaustion, and when he and danced. I danced he said, ‘Hey, what’s Diggity doing over there — I nearly ran over her when I came into camp.’ He had forgotten. I don’t know how to explain that one — won’t even try to, but it was not the only incident of its kind that happened in those weeks.
By now we were taking turns in leading the camels. Or rather, I grudgingly and nervously allowed Rick to lead them sometimes. He managed very well except that Dookie hated him with a jealously burning passion. Oh how I snickered. If Rick tried to do anything at all with him, Dookie would roll his eyes, lift his head, swell out his neck and mock-burble threateningly the way he dimly remembered bulls do. It amounted to, ‘You’re not my boss and if you touch me I’ll snap you in half like a twig, you pipsqueak.’ I knew Dookie would not really hurt Rick — well, I was 99 per cent sure — but Rick much preferred leaving the handling of Dookie to me. It really was funny. I’d stand near Rick and ask him to try to put the nose-line on him, and Dook would go into his act and then put his head down to me and snuffle and nibble and go all gooey with love, just to show this upstart where his affections lay.
I can’t say enough good things about camels. And they did eventually win over the honey. Rick and I had driven back to a station to send a message to Geographic and when we returned the whole camp was upturned and there were copious amounts of honey spread over everything — pack, sleeping bags, camels’ lips, camel eyelashes, camel rumps, everything. They knew exactly what they had done and took off as soon as they saw me.
The station people I met all through that area were incredibly kind. Once again you wouldn’t know by their faces that the drought was ruining them. They fed us and the camels until we rolled along like little puddings. And they told me that there would doubtless be a welcoming committee in Carnarvon, the town I planned to reach on the coast. Oops. Revision of plans. I had met some people on the road months before, one of the few groups I immediately liked. They owned a sheep station a couple of hundred miles south of Carnarvon and close to the sea and they had asked me to drop in on them. I decided to do exactly that. And if they were prepared to take the camels, that would be one of my major problems solved.