Whatever you can do, or dream you can … begin it.
Goethe, 1835
On the day I left Canberra the westerly breeze blew dry on my cheeks. I leaned on the long steel gate to the paddock that, in early March, stretched away bleached-brown and dusty. Lifting my head, I looked across to the truck where shaded faces under hats waited watching me, then beyond to the blue-green haze of the Brindabella Range in the west. In the cloudless sky, crows circled above the stands of grey-green trees. Three camels stood motionless, their long faces turned to me without a blink of their long-lashed eyes.
Down by the truck, Richard, one of Canberra’s few camel men, stood with his hands on his hips. His normally warm open face was marked by a dark shadow of concern. As I walked to the group he said, ‘You’ll be right.’ He sounded more optimistic than he looked or I felt.
Cliff and his son Dan were leaning against the side of their open-top horse truck nursing cigarettes. They watched me closely from under their wide-brimmed Akubra hats. Cliff met my gaze with a brighter eye than usual. He leaned forward, cocked his torso over his left leg to ease his lower back, damaged from falling from too many horses, and asked, ‘Get started?’ In answer to his father’s question, from between index finger and thumb, Dan dropped the end of his cigarette to the ground. The ball of his R.M. Williams boot ended the discussion.
We let down the ramp of the horse truck and tied off long ropes from the rear corners of the truck, using the ropes to make a race. I took up a lead rope and walked each of the three camels onto the tray. As the camels moved up the ramp of the truck the ropes were moved closer together so that they were eventually crossed behind. Each camel was tied off to a corner, with room to stand up and to sit down on the straw spread on the wooden tray.
First was Kashgar, my little princess, tied off into the driver’s side corner, closest to the cab. Next was Kabul, and finally Chloe, who I had dubbed ‘Queen of the Desert’. She watched with a disdainful curl of her lip. It took time and protestations of undying love to get her onto the truck. Finally though, with Chloe on board, we secured the tailgate and loaded the last of the gear. Among it all were steel-framed winged saddles from Alice Springs, blankets, swag, tin boxes, jerry cans, ropes, while a plastic tube of maps was secured behind the cab. I shook Richard’s hand and thanked him for his help.
A key turned, pistons pumped and a cloud of black-blue smoke billowed from the exhaust. A grinding of gears and we turned out of the brown dust and onto the sticky black tarmac of the road north. At last.
With the drive ahead of us, I had some time to think. Across the front seat of the car following the camel truck, I watched Amber again. I wondered if we could ever really know another person. Though we loved each other there were doubts, uncertainties and fears. I doubted she would ever understand what drove me. Sometimes she laughed at what I did, made fun of camels and questioned whether this adventure was really worthwhile. Perhaps she feared what she could never understand in me. Maybe she loved this part of me, but she also wanted to change it, to give her life and future some certainty from my obsession and departures.
How to explain to someone who did not understand that it was not a question of worthwhile, or even good or bad? It was just something that had to be done, a part of myself that could not be denied. I was going away and I would miss her. I would miss her lustrous hair, the midnight waves and ringlets that hung to her shoulders, a legacy of her Spanish grandmother. I would miss too the freckles on her cheeks and the warmth in her eyes.
Later that day I agreed to meet the truck at a place on the map called Wattle Flat, just past Bathurst on the road to Mudgee, before dawn the following day. Amber and I stayed in a motel in town and over dinner shared silences that were too long.
Next day, in the early morning light, I checked the camels. I murmured each name and long-lashed wet eyes turned and glistened in greeting, or was it accusation? Their dew-damp sweet camel fragrance was a reminder that they did not belong in a truck but in open places where the sky was not a canvas tarpaulin but a bright, blue ceiling. They met the sound of the truck’s revving engine with fragranced sighs.
Amber and I followed north, out of the burnt brown plains and into country where the summer had not dissolved or bleached the land of colour. We passed through Glen Innes and later that day stopped at Goondiwindi on the Queensland border, a place named after the local Aboriginal language that meant ‘the resting place of birds’. I thought about Australia’s Federation in 1901 – Goondiwindi was one of the few border crossings from New South Wales into Queensland. The old Customs House is now a tourist attraction.
We pulled up behind the truck at the white-gloss weatherboard quarantine station nestled under a crown of red-petalled frangipani. I met Cliff just outside the flyscreen door of the building. He had been dealing with bureaucracy and said in his darkest voice, ‘Paperwork crap.’ According to the blustering whitecoated inspector who followed Cliff outside, there was ‘No way bloody camels are getting through on my shift.’ His face was cherry pink, beads of moisture collected on his top lip and his chin was greasy. Cliff gently shook his head. I did not want Goondiwindi to be the resting place of camels.
In the weeks prior to leaving Canberra I made many calls to the agricultural and quarantine authorities in New South Wales and Queensland. I believed I had all the necessary paperwork so I followed the inspector inside to the airconditioned cool and walls official off-white. It soon became clear that because camels were not cattle, horses or sheep, they were too hard to deal with. According to this inspector there were no guidelines or procedures for him to follow. As he shook his head I imagined having to camp near the quarantine station, unload the camels, and spend days trying to reach someone in authority who could make a decision. Despite the artificial chill I felt a bead of sweat slowly trace a course between my shoulder blades.
Salvation for us came in the form of another inspector in the station. She looked at her colleague, at me, the papers in my hand, and then out a window at the camels waiting patiently in the back of the truck. She picked up the phone and over the line we had our permission to go north. All it took then was the flashing light of the photocopier to capture our information and we were on our way.
We crossed the border into Queensland to bountiful green and a growing humidity. At last in Queensland we were not far from where I wanted to leave the camels. They had endured enough that day and I wanted them off the truck as soon as possible.
So we continued north to Dalby, on Queensland’s Darling Downs, on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range. The region was named after the then Governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling, by the explorer Allan Cunningham, whose path I was to follow or cross a number of times on my walk. We arrived at Dalby just as the heat of the day gave way to the evening cool. A short drive beyond Dalby and just off the Kingaroy road was a cattle feedlot named Aronui. The cattle fed here were destined for Australian and Japanese supermarket shelves. The grounds were green and mowed; the parts of the fences that could be were painted white gloss or were otherwise well strained; the trees and bushes were trimmed and well watered. Even so, there was no fragrance of frangipani that lined much of the garden, nor of eucalypt that surrounded the property. Instead, the air hung heavy with the scent of sweet shit and cattle feed. A haze of rich dark dust hung over the yards as fat, shiny coated horses under riders quietly and efficiently worked the cattle through the yards.
I met an Englishman named Charlie who had adopted Australian ‘bush attire’ of tight blue jeans, brown braided kangaroo leather belt, pale blue shirt and brown R.M. Williams boots. He worked at the feedlot and led me to a small office where tests were carried out on the feed. He said I could leave my saddles and other gear in the room for as long as I needed.
While I was busy organising where gear could be stored, Cliff had taken matters in hand. He backed the truck up to a pile of dirt close to the yards, dropped the ramp of the truck, and began to walk the camels off the tray. I arrived just as he began to coax Kabul down the ramp. As usual Chloe proved to be the trickiest, deciding at the last moment to dance a nervous camel jig. She put one leg off the ramp and I held my breath.
For a moment I had a vision of a snapped bone and a jagged accusing femur that would have her screaming in pain. Instead, Chloe blew out her cheeks in disapproval at her less than graceful dismount. Once unloaded she, Kabul and Kashgar huddled together, nervous at their changed environment, its different sounds and smells. I led them into yards where white porcelain full water troughs and an enormous bale of hay awaited them. I went back to the truck.
I scribbled a cheque and presented it to Cliff. I said goodbye to him and Dan, thanking them for their help and the care with which they handled the camels. I thought his look said, ‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’ But all Cliff said was, ‘No worries, hope she’ll be ‘right. Camels look a bit green to me.’ Our hands joined at the palms to conclude our business. I felt the fingers, bony and hard, the skin rough and horny, close around my hand, and under his bushy brow I’m sure his eyes were wetter than usual.
The clean water and bale of hay were thanks to Gibbo, the Aronui manager. Introductions had been through friends of my brother’s wife’s parents, my having tried for months to find a location for the camels to stay while I walked from the coast to meet them. I met Gibbo in his house just behind the feedlot offices and just far enough away from the cattle that the low noise of the mob was little more than a murmur. Greg, Mary-Ann and their children Meg and Drew sat around the dinner table and invited me to sit down. Gibbo offered to put up the camels for a couple of weeks and said, ‘Mate, don’t worry about it at all. Meg and Drew have been looking forward to this for weeks.’ Mary-Ann gently poked her elbow into Gibbo’s generous blue-signeted belly, smiled at me and said, ‘So has he.’
Amber became more distant and withdrawn as I became more obsessed with what I felt I had to do. I told her again what I planned; leave the camels at Aronui while I walked from the coast to the camels and the gear, then west along the Warrego Stock Route.
We stayed in Dalby that night and left the following day to drive to Ipswich and the coast. I needed to know what the alternatives were for me to walk from Byron Bay to Dalby. The drive confirmed what the map had told me months before; the route between Toowoomba and the Queensland coast was multilane tar, oil and cars. Not a place for camels. Certainly not a place for camels and cars, so I was glad I had decided not to walk with the camels from the coast, leaving them instead at Aronui where the Warrego Stock Route began.
Amber and I spent the following night in Murwillumbah, on the Tweed River, New South Wales’ most northerly river. We woke to the green shark fin of Mount Warning, known in the local Bundjalung language as ‘cloud catcher’, in the hotel window and lungs full of sweet syrup sub-tropical air. After breakfast we found the Information Centre in the middle of town. I wanted to know if there were hotels on the possible routes from Byron Bay. A soft, damp-handed tour guide with a name tag on his chest that said Barry, set between two golden circles of smiling faces, ignored my questions on the route west through Lismore and north to Kyogle. I watched Barry’s pink wet lips work the patter of the tour guide. There was no information here, just a salesman selling theme parks. I felt an instant dislike for his rainbow waistcoat, bow tie and moist, smooth brown skin; an all too common face of tourism.
Having received nothing from Barry but a road map and a sense of alienation we drove to Kyogle. At the Shell petrol station a young mechanic emerged from the dark interior of the workshop wiping grease from his hands with a dirty rag. There was a blob of grease in his red hair and his cherubic face turned to a frown as he said, ‘No mate, not much at all on that road to Woodenbong up north. No pubs. In fact not much at all, just forest and scrub.’
It was decided. My walking route would take me north from Byron Bay to Beenleigh and west to Toowoomba and Dalby where I would pick up the camels. Until I got to Dalby there would be days when I would have to walk more than 40 kilometres to make it to a pub and a bed. I thought this was better than carrying a large pack. I would need to walk fast and not take too many rest days. As the crow flew, the distance across the continent was just over 4000 kilometres. I knew that I would have to walk many, many more and calculated my Walk Across Australia added up to more than 5500 kilometres, including the first solo east–west walk across the Simpson Desert. I wanted to avoid moving across the country in summer, when temperatures got up to 50ºC. Even so, I knew this journey was to be an extreme challenge. It would test the limits of my endurance.
I was ready.