Nullarbor Crossing


A few years ago, I'd found myself sitting next to a West Australian MP on a excruciatingly long flight between Los Angeles and Sydney. He was returning from some sort of a mining-company junket, and, after drinking a little, had railed for hours against the new Mabo Act of Australia which recognized certain Aboriginal rights over traditional lands. I was trying to read a Vladimir Zhirinovsky interview, the one in which he promised that Russian soldiers would soon "wash their feet in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean." The MP snarled when he saw me mark up that phrase - " just don't let them come too far south on our side of it."

The Australian side of the Indian Ocean. I asked people I met in Sydney what they thought of it, bracing myself for the New Yorker's opinion of Nebraska. I was not disappointed. Eyes glazed over, people mumbled they'd heard about dolphins splashing around beaches between Broome and Perth, someone mentioned acres of wildflowers. But there are 4000 kms of desert between here and there! Go to a resort on the Whitsunday Islands instead.

Riding round the Sydney metro, I picked up a discarded National Railway timetable at Parramatta. There were trains to the West. The Indian Pacific ran between Sydney and Perth via Adelaide, over 4 days and 3 nights. I was impressed, but dubious. Rail networks Down Under are notoriously chaotic, a legacy of their birth in uncertain colonies suspicious of each other. When, for example, Queensland and New South Wales wanted to build railways, they checked not with each other but with the Colonial Office in London. In what must be a gem of colonial bureaucracy, this resulted, by the time of Australian confederation early this century, in each state possessing a gauge different from those of its neighbors. For years, passengers traveling between Melbourne and Sydney had to wake up in the middle of the night at the Victoria-New South Wales border to change trains -- timetables advised sleeping with overcoats around pajamas to minimize delays. To travel between Brisbane and Perth, you had to change trains as many as six times.

Since the 60s, however, bits and pieces of standard-gauge track were laid here and there by the Australian National Railway, and these threads crept up and connected each other. The brochure showed a gleaming line of silver-and-white coaches thundering across the Nullarbor plain on this Trans-Australian line. It was not much more expensive than an air-ticket between Sydney and Perth; and you got three nights' accommodation of sorts, along with a claim to have been on one of the Great Rail Journeys of the World. To say nothing of seeing a continent spin by, far away from the clutter that lines highways.

I read Ansel Adams at night - "In the last analysis, Half Dome is just a piece of rock ... but there is some deep personal distillation of spirit and concept which moulds such earthly facts into some transcendental emotional and spiritual experience." But alas, I could not find the time to spend on this whimsy while having to work for a living on a compressed assignment. I returned to San Francisco, transcendental experiences limited to paying 40 dollars for a 3km cab-ride out of Redfern one pouring night.

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It is 1996, and I'm back in Oz, this time to Melbourne, on a somewhat longer project. Determined to get to Perth by rail, I plot a two-stage trip - to Adelaide by the Overland Express, then connecting to the Indian Pacific for the rest of the journey. I also have company; a friend from San Francisco vacationing in Melbourne is coming along. Overnight train travel is something of a childish fantasy to Tricia - reminiscent of shuttling between British army bases as a kid. "Sleeping in your own berth for three nights!" she gurgles. I check the distances - a total of about 3400 kms between Melbourne and Perth, longer, for example, than that between Paris and Moscow. There's certainly the scope for monotony -- in a comparable journey in India, you would expect the bedlam of a major station every hour, and an almost continuous vista of habitation; the Indian Pacific stops at just six places in the 2500 kms and 38 hours between Adelaide and Perth. Two of these stops are on the outskirts of Adelaide and Perth - little flag stations to get on and off the main line, which leaves just four halts along the Nullarbor crossing: Tarcoola, Cook, Kalgoorlie and Merredin. Four halts at windswept bone-dry platforms scratched out in the middle of nothing.

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The train leaves Melbourne's Spencer St. station a Thursday evening. Interstate rail-travel seems to be about as popular in Australia as it is in the US - the platform is empty and windy, and Tricia shivers in the cold as we wait for a couple of toothpick-chewing conductors to open the carriage doors. Once we get in, the compartments turn out to be minimally heated, so we stamp our feet, clutching coffee cups, trying to keep warm.

It's about nine as we slowly slide out of the oily, silent, graffiti-streaked yards. Once we're past the glittering lights of the oil refineries on the Bellarine peninsula, the Southern Cross blazes in the sky. I lie awake late in the dark cabin, absorbing the familiar motion of a train moving through the night.

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Landscape, as Simon Schama says, is culture before it is nature; a construct of imagination projected on soil and water and rock. Some of the first 'munanga' to describe the Australian interior were those under the sentence of transportation from Britain, men and women for whose descendants words like 'bastard' and 'mongrel' are today compliments. The word 'Nullarbor' itself is very bad Latin for 'no trees' - typical coinage by some small-town autodidact or public-school colonial office administrator. 'No trees' compared to England; for the red soil does not lack vegetation. Stretching all the way to the horizon are clumps of thorny spinifex grass that look like sleeping echidnas, dense thatches of saltbush, here and there a desert oak. For a few hundred miles out of Adelaide place names show the anxiousness to cling on to at least some terms of English reference - pubescent swells in the ground are rewarded with names like Tent Hill and Red Hill, the mouth of a sand-clogged creek labeled Port Germein. But as the deserts start splaying out, we slowly fall back into aboriginal dreamtime - Wirraminna, Moondrabilla, Boonderoo, Koolyanobbing. The water in evidence recedes to slim billabongs and then to barely visible clay flats; finally there is none to be seen whatsoever.


The British claimed Australia in 1770 under the legal principle of 'terra nullius' - land which belongs to no one and which may therefore be freely occupied. Like the native Americans, the aborigines of Australia could not comprehend land belonging to individuals - it was the people who collectively belonged to the land. For the next 150 years, they were forced to leave their homes under British guns, and even exterminated altogether in Tasmania. When the first legal challenges were mounted in the 60s to protect traditional homes and sacred sites from being turned into open-cast mines or sheep paddocks, ringleaders would often be locked up and die mysteriously in custody (a fine tradition which continues to be observed to this day.) The courts generally held that the act of claiming the land under the name of the British sovereign immediately and automatically extinguished any other claim or ownership.

'Native' title recognition was slow to come, beginning in the 80s, and then limited to the Northern Territory. Something changed in the 90s, with the continent in the throes of its worst depression since 1930. Eddie Mabo, an aboriginal Torres Strait inhabitant, moved the Australian High Court to secure rights over some sites in scattered islands against mining companies preparing to move in. In its most significant decision in 200 years, the court (inexplicably, to some) struck down terra nullius in 1992, and awarded legal rights on the sites to Mabo and his extended family on grounds of continuous association. There was social convulsion in Australia along fault lines of race and culture and occupation. Aftershocks continue to this day: a politician's position on 'Mabo' is as much a litmus as a US candidate's stand on flag-burning, or an Indian one's on Hindutva.

Under legislation following the Mabo awards, 'traditional owners' could claim land that was not owned, leased or otherwise used at present. In other words, whatever had been lost in the past could not be claimed back - but there was some measure of protection against future demands of progress. Further, in most places, aboriginal peoples could not veto mining or other 'community' developments on their lands, but they did have the right to be consulted about such issues. And being consulted they are; elders are paid consultative fees and flown business class to Sydney, sons and daughters get jobs, uranium yellowcake - which looks like gray sand, actually -- comes out from under red dust.

West Australia, where we're headed, fought the Mabo judgment tooth and nail; only last year, after the courts handed down a thumping 7-0 decision denying appeals and challenges, did Native Titles start getting registered in earnest. Today, an astonishing 72% of the state has been claimed in some form. The brake-man, who fusses around the pneumatic couplings at our Port Augusta stop, is not concerned with all this. He migrated from Macedonia six years ago - he's seen land claim headlines in the papers. Ironically, he's wearing a 'Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee' sweatshirt - I ask him about it. His wife bought it from a Wollongong K-Mart - he thinks it might be an American thing.

Another irony of Native Title lies almost bang on the railway line as we speed through South Australia. In the 50s, the British had conducted nuclear explosions in some parts of the Maralinga Basin, leading to widespread contamination and reports of frilled-lizards that fluoresced in the dark. In the 80s, the South Australian government handed back Ground Zero to the Nangu people, a shining - nay,
glowing - example of voluntary restitution.

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First Class passengers on the Indian Pacific have their own dining car, called the Queen Adelaide. Each meal is served in two seatings - and each passenger is given a seating card as well as a table number. As First Class is filled with elderly German tourists (color coordinated in Yothu Yindi t-shirts ), all this orderliness in the middle of the desert must be very welcome. We are, alack, traveling 'Holiday' Class, and merit nobbut a freewheeling bistro serving three cafeteria-style meals a day. There is one 'Coach' class carriage jammed with backpacking Japanese students. These souls have a stand-up counter at the end of their carriage, which sells sandwiches, cigarettes and soda. Just to chastise us cheapskates into buying First Class tickets the next time around, all First Class meal and entertainment announcements are made loudly over the intercom all over the train. "A-ttention, a-ttention. We are pleased to
announce the first seating of lunch for our esteemed First Class passengers. We will serve grilled salmon in a light white sauce, cold
almond pesto pasta, fruit salad and white wine. Those esteemed First Class passengers holding first-seating cards only, please. "

The Holiday Class bistro does not make meal announcements; you kinda keep checking around mealtimes till the food is cooked, and then the shutter clatters open with a "come and get it." But it is called the Mathilda, which immediately makes it far superior in my eyes to Queen Adelaide. For the Waltzing Mathilda is Australia's alternative anthem - about a jolly swagman who stole a sheep and tried to flee, and, when surrounded by the Law, drowned himself in a billabong rather than be caught. In last century's small-town Australia, you 'waltzed' if you carried a swag or bedroll - a term that probably comes from the Bavarian euphemism 'walz bruder' for tramp. Written by Banjo Paterson, the Oz Bard of the Bush, and adopted by trade unions as a protest-song against strike-busters, the Waltzing Mathilda is a stubborn little in-ya-face perfectly Aussie anti-establishment piece. I am delighted.

                                                                                              ***

I wake as there is a change in rhythm, the train is slowing to a stop in the middle of the night. We have pulled off the main line into a siding
overgrown with myall and bullock grass. Tricia sleeps on, huddled and peaceful. There are no lights, no sounds from other carriages. I steal out into the passage, and creak open the carriage door. A blast of cold wind, arid desert smells and silence, broken here and thereby clanks and hisses from the undercarriage. I step down five steps guiltily, and am standing barefoot on the cool sand - the wheels coming up to my chest, the still bulk of the sleeping train above, light from the open carriage door an oblong patch on the gray grass.


After ten minutes, I hear something come the other way on the main line. A cyclop eye brightens to a glare and then hurtles past, and the thunder and clatter of a diesel pulling a hundred BHP boxed freight cars to the east.

                                                                                              ***

Early Saturday morning, the third day. We slide into Tarcoola at 5 in the morning, the first proper Nullarbor stop. We'd call this a junction in India - a line branches off through mulga brush to the north towards the Northern Territory, bearing the Ghan twice a week to Alice Springs.

The Ghan, Australia's other famous train, is a story in itself. Presented with the task of exploring and claiming the Australian desert, the
British fell back on something that had worked in the past for other sandy patches in the Empire: teams of Afghan camel drivers running
caravans to keep outposts supplied and survey teams mobile. In Alice you can see pictures of gloomy eyed mustachioed Pathans posing before their drooling mounts. Over the years, the 'ghan and his feats became part of the outback lore - what better name for the train that took you to the heart of the continent?

When rails were laid between Tarcoola and Alice Springs, dry creek beds were naturally chosen. Alas, the meteorological data acquired since colonial settlement began proved to be an unrepresentative sample; shortly after the line was inaugurated, a cycle of drought was broken, and deluges of sheet floods swept the tracks away. Of course, the builders were not sure whether it was the rain or the drought that was the anomaly, so they kept patching up the tracks, and the Ghan kept turning up in Alice ten days late.

Today, of course, there is standard gauge track built on high ground for the refurbished Ghan. There is some footage, I believe, of the old track being torn up, Hollywood style, in one of the Mad Max sequels.

No journey is fulfilling without some super-numeral; as a kid, I remember no trip on South Eastern Rail through Kharagpur was complete without someone remarking, with quiet pride, that the station possessed the world's longest platform. (If no one happened to make this observation, my brother or I would gravely intone it ourselves.) Shortly after Tarcoola begins the world's longest stretch of straight railway track - close to 500 kms straddling the South Australia-West Australia border. The small stations - huts, really - that we thunder past and engulf in dust are named, hodge-podge, after Prime Ministers as well as men who built the railway -- Watson, O'Malley, Fisher, Hughes, Deakin, Cook.

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During the day, I wander up and down the length of the train. Passengers congregate around the dining areas. I watch people accrete by nationality and age and attractiveness. The rest of my carriage consists of a bunch of metallurgical engineering students, accompanied by their hard-drinking elderly professor, traveling on an 'educational tour' to some mining town in the west. There is a small 'lounge' tagged on to the end of the Mathilda, and this is the least passable part of the Indian Pacific - for it has a VCR. Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's finest watch old episodes of Melrose Place with slackened jaws and shallow breath.

There are eight or so conductors on the train, checking tickets, stowing baggage, helping people fold or unfold their berths. They also double as waiters in the dining car, and act as general dogsbodies, hauling cables at refueling stops, filling water from overhead tanks when we stop. This crew is in funereal mood. The conservative Howard government, just voted in, is trying to privatize loss-making Rail; there is talk of industrial action, and many are gloomy about the prospects of their jobs being stable beyond a few months. But these are middle-aged whitefellas - I harden my heart and walk away.

The strange thing about Australia's 'red center' is that it looks green from any altitude - even from the 2-metre vantage of a train window. The spiky clumps of spinifex grass have tenacious hold on the soil everywhere. When you part the grass, of course, you see the redness
underneath, the color of clotted blood.

I prise open the bathroom window and stick my body out, dizzily surveying the track spinning away below. The line is so straight because
the land is flat - in traveling from east to west between Port Augusta and Kalgoorlie, we will descend only 77 feet over 2000 kms - a gradient of 1 in 10000. Flat, and dry - from the last carriage, I see our dust trail, many miles long, a clearly visible wake. In these 2000 kms, not one stream or creek or pond will cross the tracks.

The Nullarbor is the world's largest expanse of exposed bedrock. As such, it houses the largest collection of meteorites after Antractica - some 30,000 in all, brick- to boulder-sized. The surface shield hides a huge sheet of limestone, which is elaborately eroded into labyrinths of subterranean caves. On a warm day, hot air rising out of these warrens can sound like an approaching hurricane.

In the evening, we go over a section of the track which has been laid directly on the rock, the sleepers nailed to stone like crampons clinging to a cliff. The noise of the train's passing takes on a splintering, crystal quality. A large yellow moon rises across the pock-marked face of the shield. The beauty is almost extraterrestrial - in an inverted way, it feels like watching earthrise from moon. I sleep that night with a heightened sense of mortality.


                                                                                                  ***

Cook. The mid-point of our continental crossing. We pull up into the station and get off for the first time in 15 hours. There is no platform, the train just pulls up next to a water tank and some cabins with tin huts We will wait two hours here, for diesel to be pumped from
underground tanks, and then for the down train - the Indian Pacific which left Perth two days ago. After we pass, silence will descend on Cook - the next train, a local freight hauler, is due in three days.

Two young aboriginal women clutching infants are chatting in a room behind the station office. I try to understand the pidgin kreol that
laces the conversation -- "I was puzzled" becomes "I luk koschenmak" in the vernacular of the aboriginal youth. They look up as I darken the doorway - "Can we help you?"

The flatness of the land has the peculiar effect of hiding the immensity of distance. The mind cannot comprehend the horizon-to-horizon
bleakness that stretches out for days. As we prowl around the hot dusty tin-sided cabins at Cook station , Tricia discovers and points out the Flying Doctor's hut and landing strip in the distance. Somehow this makes Cook's remoteness come alive - I think of a doggerel poem about the opening up of the continent -

I was the convict, sent to Hell
To make in the desert, the living well
I broke the rock, I felled the tree
The nation was - because of me.



                                                                                                        ***

Evening falls. I'm bored stiff. I've slept, eaten, read for hours, played chess against a laptop, exhausted the conversation-potential of the other passengers. There is nothing to do but watch the red sunset.

Suddenly Tricia sees a bunch of brownish animals moving halfway to the horizon, the size of small cows, but moving too fast to be cattle. Before I can sit up straight, the kangaroos have vanished into the scrub and the twilight.

                                                                                                       ***

Picking up one of a stack of gaudy business-cards left in a corner of the mens' room, I realize that they advertise brothels. "Hay Street - put the SEMEN back in AMUSEMENT!" This is Kalgoorlie, Queen of the Golden Mile, a booming gold-mining town again, now that prices have climbed high enough to make chemical extraction viable. It is nine o'clock at night - the previous halt was Cook ten hours ago. We will stop for a couple of hours.

We get down and go out for a walk to stretch aching limbs. The bayonet-wielding statue of an ANZAC soldier rears out of the continental cold outside the station plaza. "Belgium." The station also appears to be a hub of social life for Kalgoorlie's teens. The passing of a train from Sydney and Adelaide, on a Saturday night, too. The solitary pay-phone is surrounded by a sea of acne. "Where you from?" some kids ask, trying to chat up passengers.

I hang around for a bit with some boys as they smoke surreptitiously, try to spit, and play 'two-bits.' The 'banker' who runs the game takes two ten-cent coins, and chisels out a cross on the 'tail' side of one to make it lighter. The players then bet on two heads coming up together in successive throws. The flock of German tourists has also alighted - once used to the motion, it becomes difficult to sleep when the train stops - and they stand in an abject flock, overcoats flapping around nightgowns, surveying our game suspiciously.

                                                                                                        ***

We're woken at 5 am on Sunday morning by the fruit police, agricultural inspectors who climb in on the outskirts of Perth and poke their heads into each cabin. I smell sea, the Indian Ocean at last. Along Railway Parade, whitish sand lines the roads, and Tricia remarks how much like frost it looks in the still-dark early morning cold.

Perth East Terminal at 7 o'clock on Sunday - banksia bushes ablaze with red in the still-soft light, the neighboring church parking lots just
beginning to fill up.