Stepping outside the air con in the Wild West

I’d been meaning to practice changing a tyre on the Land Cruiser for a couple of months. It’s got two spares: one on the back, and one underneath. As you know, I’ve got a fully-stocked tool bag and a good selection of recovery gear for if I get stuck in the wilderness.

What I hadn’t planned for was rusty nuts attaching the spare to the wheel carrier.

I was on my way to Yarrie Station for the weekend. It’s about a 400km drive heading into the north-east of the Pilbara. I got the flat 22km into the trip on the highway.

I wasn’t in a great spot – the car was close to the busy road and on a lean. I got out, and started unloading the jack and various attachments. And then the flies found me. The locals say they can tell when you’re stressed and emitting extra carbon dioxide. Approximately 800 attached themselves to my shirt and face.

Temperature was the other challenge. On the exposed plain outside of Karratha, surrounded by road and red dirt, it must have been close to 40 degrees, late morning.

I got out my Land Cruiser owner’s manual to check the best spot for putting the jack. I opened my mouth and flies blew in. A hot wind came up and caught the loose pages of the manual, and my hat.

I put the book of words away and decided to work on getting the spare off the back. Pig farming gave me big shoulders, but they couldn’t budge the three nuts on the wheel brace.

Hot, sticky, and frustrated, I reluctantly got out my RACT membership card and called for help.

I’m realising how tough – and prepared – you’ve got to be up here. My flat tyre was a little dress rehearsal, performed comfortably within the town boundary.

Since I’ve been in the west I’ve heard the coroner’s report into a teenager who died from heatstroke on a short bushwalk not far from here, and I’ve read about a truckie who got bogged in the bush and died when he left his rig to walk for help.

After my tyre had been changed, by a lovely young man from Newcastle, I kept going on my way to Yarrie. On the highway between Karratha and Port Hedland, my air con kept cutting out and I was dripping in the driver’s seat. I had the window down for airflow, and with my arm outside it felt like mid-40s. I was onto my third large bottle of water.

I stopped at Hedland for shepherd’s pie at a takeaway, and to pick up bread, milk, and a newspaper for Yarrie Station.

Another 100km, now heading south, and blue-grey clouds appeared, the first clouds I’d seen in five weeks. Fork lightening was splitting the sky over the basalt hills, and smoke spirals rose from the spinifex.

I collided with the storm, and the road in front disappeared. The rain hit the car like thousands of buckets of water being thrown at it. I found the sideroad to Yarrie, and turned the hubs to 4WD.

The red gravel road alternated from hard and reliable, to side-sliding slurry. I got behind a B-double carrying hay, and radioed to tell him I was going to overtake. I went wide to the right and hit the soft edge, and slewed back towards the truck. I was only going 60km an hour. I made a joke on the radio – I was thoroughly embarrassed.

The fork lightening had crept closer, and I watched it hit the same place ahead of me over and over. When I’m really scared my throat tightens, and adrenalin stings my fingers. I didn’t want to stop, but I didn’t want to keep going either. I hit a pothole and red dust that was lying under the puddle flew up like a flame under the bonnet.

An hour later on the other side of the storm, I found a sign to Yarrie. I took a winding sand track to a riverbank, crossed the almost-dry bed, and stopped at a boom gate. The sprinklers were going on the homestead’s green lawn and an old horse wandered around the yard. The adrenalin drained away.

After I’d settled in with a Tassie red and was sharing my last wheel of Red Cow Camembert with the station staff, the 31-year-old owner Annabelle Coppin arrived.

On the back of her Land Cruiser flat tray, she had a 300kg steer she’d just shot in the paddock – a “killer”, or in Tassie language, a home kill. With blood-crusted hands she shook mine, and went on to instruct the staff on unloading and skinning the beast.

Somehow I ended up trimming the offal for dinner, with a semi-circle of dogs around my feet. When the skinning and quartering were finished, we had heart, skirt, milk gut, liver, and kidneys crumbed on the bbq.

I went to sleep in a spinifex hut: an over-sized chook pen with netting walls stuffed with grass and watered with the hose. If it hadn’t been stormy and humid, a breeze would have blown through to cool me.

I’m a girl with common sense and plenty of skills, but I feel like a soft foreigner up here. There’s no doubt, it really is the Wild West.

Getting to know a different town

There are no gutters outlining the houses in Karratha, WA. It’s the wet season but I haven’t even sniffed a whiff of rain yet. Apparently one in four wet seasons up here is a fizzer – the rain just never turns up.

There is a strong whiff, however, of chlorine in the town water. In the shower it’s a haze around me. I’ve been turning the “cold” tap on, and having quite a pleasant warm shower. In the kitchen it’s impossible to get a cool drink from the sink, or to chill cooked broccoli or prawns under the tap. I’ve been wondering what happens if I burn myself – I certainly won’t be running it under warm water for 20 minutes.

I’ve got a sourdough starter going again. Flour varieties are fairly limited: so far I’ve found 1kg bags of ‘wholemeal’ in Coles. In the heat it took just three days to have a bubbling container of wild yeast. When I add water though, I have to leave it to breathe on the bench to get rid of the chlorine – otherwise it’ll kill the happy bugs.

After two weeks, visiting the supermarket is becoming less traumatic. I’m making an effort to buy fruit and vegetables (just because I don’t want to get scurvy), but I’m supplementing them with basil and spinach from the community garden. The instant coffee range is a sight to behold. There’d be a good two metres frontage of milky, sugary, just-add-water packets. It reminds me of the Indonesian sachets the Dili locals drink – despite being in a coffee-producing country.

The heat last week was pretty tough – a few days all sitting above 40. On a work day it’s fine – I can go from air-conditioned car to office, back to car, and into house. I’ve been trying to sleep without air-con (mixed success) and attempting to acclimatise by spending as long as I can on the verandah in the mornings and evenings. That’s where I’m dripping now.

I’ve been staying at the ABC house with colleagues while I find a rental. It’s a five-bedroom monstrosity that fills the whole block, except for a strip of couch grass at the front that’s watered before dawn by sneaky reticulation. Eighty per cent of houses in Karratha have reticulation, a real estate agent told me. The house is tin with black aluminium windows, a black steel verandah, and even black metal verandah shutters. I can feel the heat pulsing through the whole suburb.

I’ve found a rental, and I’m moving in this Friday. It’s also bigger than what I need, but it’s got a nice garden and shade. There are natives out the front, and room for a veggie patch out the back. There’s gas cooking and a bath. I negotiated a little on the price, and it was accepted first go – I’m now wondering how much lower I could have gone! There are about 400 empty houses in the town, because of the downturn in metal prices and the insistence of the mining companies to keep their workers in camps on the town’s outskirts.

There’s no kerb-side recycling. It’s very strange seeing a rubbish bin with bottles and tins mixed in with food scraps and plastic. I’ve been saving toilet rolls and mini UHT cartons for raising seeds. I started a compost collection in the ABC house within 24 hours of arriving. I’ve been taking the bag down to the community garden compost bins on a Saturday. It’s making me feel much better. Although, I think the housemates might have been sick of the prawn heads that had been brewing since Wednesday.

I’ve filled my recyclables with potting mix and put in the seeds of zucchini, cucumber, pumpkin, watermelon (!), and chilli. After two days the cucumbers had germinated. I’ll have to order in some seeds from ‘over east’ to get the full garden variety. Not much growing goes on up here over summer, it’s just too darn hot.

I was on air for the first time today, and the old nerves rose in the form of sleepless nights and nightmares over the weekend. But despite that, and the heat, I’m taking so much pleasure in establishing a routine. My bike’s serviced and oiled, I’ve been doing a few laps at the pool (emphasis on just a few…), and this week I start boxing fitness classes – watch out!

 

 

 

A different kind of red dirt

There aren’t many places further from Tasmania than Karratha in Western Australia. It’s quicker to drive to Darwin or Kununurra, than it is to traipse to Karratha.

If you’re going on an adventure, you may as well make it a big one, I say.

In the lead-up to my drive, there was only one moment when I questioned what I was doing. Mum and I were watching the weather on ABC. After the Tassie forecast, the image zoomed out to the rest of the country. I visualised the path I would take around the south and west coasts. I looked away.

I’ve been treading water for the past year. After deciding to leave Mount Gnomon Farm, I did some wwoofing in Victoria, spent three months in Asia, and then went back to the farm, like a moth to the flame, to help for a few busy months.

Sometimes, it takes a while for the pieces to fall back in place.

Writing the job application was painful. It’d been 10 years since I applied to be the ABC’s Rural Reporter in Burnie. I had to google resume templates, cover letters, and talk to friends about how to address the selection criteria. I listened back to interviews and broadcasts I’d done in Burnie so I could put a show reel together. I’d forgotten that I actually used to be pretty good at my job.

A few days after the interview, I got a call offering me an adventure in the Pilbara. I was camping on Bruny Island that day, and a land of red rocks, cattle stations, and mining camps was almost impossible to imagine.

I was determined to travel as lightly as possible. I filled the back of the LandCruiser with cooking gear, pantry ingredients, a tool box, camping table and chair, and my new snazzy fridge/freezer. I managed to fit about 8kg of meat from the farm in the freezer, and then bacon, chorizo, and Tassie cheeses in the fridge section. And a bottle of local white, of course…

I allowed myself two boxes for “luxury” items: books, art materials, pretty pieces of material for decorating new digs, headscarves, nice linen, and photographs. I kept my clothes pretty simple – just every long-sleeved shirt that I own, work trousers, happy pants for weekends, and a couple of go-with-everything dresses. I may also have packed an original 70s, psychedelic satin dress… just in case.

My aunty is an experienced outback traveller, and she put together a packing list for me. So along with all the day-to-day stuff, I’ve got an over-flowing first aid kit, fire extinguisher, 4WD recovery gear, 2kg of jelly beans, a shovel, washing line, wire, sewing kit, various tarps and occy straps, a wheel chock (LandCruisers have a reputation for dodgy hand-breaks), superglue… and it goes on.

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I could tell you all about the 5,000km from Tassie to Karratha, but this post is getting pretty long. I loved the trip – honestly. The first couple of days I didn’t go too hard, but eventually I got up to 1,100km in one day (that was a bit ridiculous, but I had to be in Perth by a certain day). I camped in national parks and at roadhouses. I had wine and cheese before dinner every night and used a tablecloth. I even washed up before I got in my swag! I listened to The Best of Van Morrison CD approximately 45 times because I couldn’t get radio reception most of the way, and my iPod kept dying. The driving time took 6.5 days, with a break for a couple of days in Perth to meet the boss.

I’ve had five days at work, ringing cattle stations and trying to charm the pastoralists. It’s usually pretty tough for new reporters up here, I’m told, with people saying things like, “How long will you be staying? Five minutes?”

Did you want to bet on that?