2000 Miles On The Smell Of An Oily Family - part 4

In the fourth of five instalments of the Tyndale-Biscoe family’s epic biodiesel-fuelled journey, they leave the east coast and head through Arnhem Land, cross the track of Burke and Wills, and encounter a curious railway and some monstrous beasts. (Read part one, part two and part three here).

by Paul Tyndale-Briscoe
Darwin, Northern Territory

City life was gettin’ us down, so we spent a week in Darwin town,
Liked the crocs and liked the beer, so decided to move the family here.

As I write this, nearing the final part of our little journey from Melbourne to Darwin, partly powered by the humble canola plant, I am flying over the country through which we drove. Eleven kilometres below me, the vastness of the gulf country and Arnhem Land is spread out like a rumpled carpet. Every now and then a small community in the middle of nowhere appears, attached by an umbilical road to the nearby airstrip, unnaturally straight in the organic landscape. It looks soft and inviting from this perspective, but of course on the ground it is a different story, as we discovered.

Readers may recall that we had reached Port Douglas after a 4000-kilometre meander up the east coast in our Hilux, towing a homemade camper trailer. Roughly three quarters of this trip was powered by biodiesel made from the discarded oil from our local pub in Melbourne, and supplemented by some commercial biodiesel we happened to find en route. Leaving Port Douglas and the east coast, however, we had little hope of finding more biodiesel, so we resigned ourselves to the final third of our journey on fossil diesel as we joined the slow progression of the more adventurous grey nomads heading west from Cairns on the Savannah Way.

The real beginning

To me, this was where our real adventure was starting — I had been itching to get into the outback since the trip began. From my wife’s perspective, this was the final leg of our move to the tropics and she was keen to get there and begin our new life. As for the kids, they were simply annoyed that we weren’t letting them watch Peter Pan on the DVD player, so as the landscape changed dramatically from the lush, green, coastal and hilly tropics to the endless plains of the gulf country, they dropped off to sleep.

Our destination for the first night was the Undara Volcanic National Park, a bizarre series of underground tunnels known as lava tubes created by the collapse of ancient underground lava flows. It was our first visit to a tourist site on our trip — and we made the most of it by booking ourselves on a tour the next morning. It was certainly an interesting spot, and quite amazing descending into the earth’s cool interior and wading through underground streams, but it also reminded me how annoying I find it being herded around like sheep and told where I can stand and what I can do — and paying $120 for the privilege. I clearly should have been born in an era when it was OK to trample all over everything without regard to environment or culture, name it after myself and then claim it all for Britain.

Still, I rolled over for the sake of my kids’ education, and we are all the better for it, so feeling suitably enlightened, the next day we headed back out onto the Gulf Development Road (possibly named like that due to the fact that it looked half built) and headed towards Normanton. The road, to use some much-overused analogies, was straight as a die and flat as a tack. The tarmac strip down the middle is wide enough for one car so when an oncoming vehicle approaches, the etiquette is to head for the dusty verges. If the approaching vehicle is a car then it is generally possible to keep the right hand wheels on the seal, but when a road train is heading towards you, the general advice is to get right off the road. When my wife, a somewhat nervous driver, was at the wheel, she tended to head bush completely, only re-emerging onto the road when the thundering beast had passed.

This was the country that Burke and Wills passed through in their endeavour to traverse the continent and reach the northern Australian coastline. The story goes that they stopped when they saw evidence of tidal activity, indicating they had reached the sea, but, unbeknown to them, they were still some 90 kilometres from the coast, so flat is the country here. One can just imagine how dreary the trip must have been, trudging through the flat, scrubby land, that doesn’t change by the hour even at 100 km/h, so at walking pace it must have been endless — the only excitement being the odd encounter with a crocodile at river crossings!

The kids inspect the mouth of the Savannah King for tooth decay.

The train to nowhere

Normanton is a small and dusty town situated near the bottom of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Its claim to fame appears to be its proximity to Karumba up the road (on the coast), which is a popular fishing spot, and a clear destination for the off-road nomads. It also boasts a railway line that starts in Normanton and finishes in Croydon — about 100 kilometres down the track — truly a train from nowhere to nowhere.

For us the most memorable feature of Normanton, however, was the life-size replica of the biggest crocodile ever shot — anywhere. This prehistoric monster (known as the Savannah King) sits on a masonry plinth next to the road and extends nine metres from tip to tail, resembling more a dinosaur than a creature that you could possibly meet face to face during a quick dip in a river in the top end. Somewhat awestruck, we cheerfully encouraged our kids to climb into the King’s mouth so we could snap a few pics. “Don’t do this if you happen to see a live one,” was our salient advice and concession to good parenting. To my feminist wife’s delight, the slayer of this gargantuan creature was actually a woman. “Be warned,” she muttered as we stared at the beast.

We passed a pleasant enough evening in Normanton before heading on west the next day. Our efforts at an early start, however, were thwarted by the road train that pulled in to the petrol station in front of us, taking roughly 45 minutes to fill up. The gruff driver of this gargantuan machine just glared at me as I paced impatiently up and down. I did think sadly back to the time when we carried all our fuel in the back, and left a sweet fish and chip smell in our wake. Still, soon we were on our way again, heading through Burketown and onwards up into real remote outback country. The road got worse and worse, and the countryside rougher and rougher. I was mildly concerned about how the vehicle and trailer would fare in this rough terrain, and my wife was mildly concerned about whether we would be attacked by descendants of the Savannah King as we ploughed through each river crossing.

• Paul’s final instalment will appear in the summer issue.

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