drive on the beaches of the Whitsunday Islands, I was still stuck. Cairns had nothing. Nor did Townsville. Australia was turning out to be a dead duck. Until I headed inland.
Peel away Australia’s coastline and you’re left with an area which is about the same size as America. And yet it has the same population as Leeds.
In outback Australia there is one person for every square mile and, to put that in perspective, in the Scottish Highlands there are twenty people for every square mile. Australia is enormous. And almost completely deserted.
Out here is where we would find the real Aussie action. Out here we could pose the question: what good is a car when your nearest neighbour is 300 miles away and there are no roads?
It’s not as though we’re talking about an arid desert. There are trees and, just below the surface, there are vast reservoirs of water which fell as rain three million years ago in Malaysia.
Obviously, the soil doesn’t provide lush green Anchor-butter-type grass, but it isn’t useless dust either.
This means that, every so often, you come across a farm which is so large it is rather hard for a European to get his head round the numbers. We needed to visit one, to find out about life in such remoteness, but were told, time and again, to get lost, in that polite way Australians have developed. ‘Fuck off you Pommy bastard.’ Something like that anyway.
Thick-skinned perseverance eventually saw us arriving at the truly enormous Wave Hill Station which is near… nowhere really.
It covers 13,000 square kilometres, making it the same size as Cornwall, Devon, Avon, Somerset and Dorset.
At any one time, 40,000 cattle are grazing on its paddocks, but even so it’s not the largest farm; not by a long way.
It isn’t the most remote settlement either, even though the nearest shop is 280 miles away. The nearest pub is a 100-mile trek and to get to the nearest biggish town by road takes eighteen hours.
To get there, we flew for four hours from Perth to Alice Springs, during which time the view from the window was an unending sea of nothingness.
Then we climbed aboard a chartered eight-seater twin-prop aircraft for another four-hour flight over another sea of brownness to Wave Hill.
Actually, that’s not quite true. We had to stop for fuel at a weird little airstrip which, quite literally, was in the middle of nowhere. And yet, in the departure hut, women in brightly coloured, floral-print dresses from the fifties were waiting for their bus to take them into town. A ‘bus’ in Oz is almost always a plane.
Our pilot refuelled on his own, switched the landing lights on by himself and took off with no clearance from air traffic control. There wasn’t any.
And two hours later we touched down on the Wave Hill landing strip. All the farms out there have such things because cars are useless. In the Wave Hill garage there was a plane and anyone who drops by does so literally, from the sky.
If they need a doctor, he comes by air. Schooling for the two children is done over the radio airwaves but if they ever need to get to a football match, it must be done by Cessna.
There are cars on the farm but they’re used for workmanlike things such as checking on bore holes and mending fences. Mind you, to get round all the watering holes is a three-day job.
And a damn dangerous one, too, because in the height of summer the temperature almost never goes below 120°F. When we flew in, it was 140°F, even in the evening, and that means it was hot enough to boil a tortoise.
Certainly, you don’t need charcoal and firelighters for a barbecue out there. Drop a rasher of bacon on the ground and in a flash, you have breakfast.
It sounds like a hoot but if, while you’re there, your car breaks down, you have 30 hours and then the eagles will be looking for the napkins.
Before you set off on a cross-country Australian drive, motorists are told to ensure that someone knows when you’re supposed to arrive. And that no matter what, if you break down, you stay with the car.
It’s all a bit of a fag to be honest, which is why everyone we met on our month-long tour of the outback had a four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser.
Until the end of the sixties, Land Rover had a 90 per cent market share and people took the endless mechanical maladies for granted. But then along came Toyota with a vehicle which just kept on going. It wasn’t as stylish but no one was looking anyway.
In the very early pioneering days, people only ventured into the outback if they had the toughest vehicle money could buy. Most opted for a Rolls-Royce, not because of the prestige or that flying lady but because it was less likely to break down than a Model T.
The Australians went mad for the Land Cruiser and in just twenty years, Land Rover’s market share was down to 2 per cent. They had been wiped out, along with most other British memories too. The pound became the dollar and the mile became a kilometre.
Wave Hill manager Gavin Hoad explained that he would never switch from Toyota. ‘They’re pretty reliable and we’ve had them long enough to know what will go wrong and when. That way we can keep the right spares here.’
Well they’d have to because the nearest Toyota dealership is a cool 280 miles away on roads which are basically dirt tracks.
In the Northern Territories there are no speed limits but don’t get excited because realistically, 60 mph is your top whack.
First of all, there is the wildlife to worry about. A small kangaroo is no big deal — they just burst when you plough into them — and you needn’t worry about emus either. But the eagles, they’re a big problem.
Say there are twenty vehicles on one 300-mile stretch of road and in one night, they kill twenty animals each. That’s fairly realistic. This means that as dawn breaks there will be 400 fresh carcasses in the ditch.
So the eagles come down and gorge themselves stupid. And just as they’re enjoying the coffee and mints, you come bumbling along. Mr Eagle is scared and needs to take off but he’s so full he has to face into the wind, which may well be the direction from which you’re coming… at 60 mph.
It is by no means uncommon for the giant bird with its ten-foot wingspan to be at windscreen height when you collide. Thank you. And goodnight.
The eagles, however, are less of a danger than the road trains. These gigantic trucks can tow three articulated trailers at speeds of up to 100 mph thanks to engines which just defy belief. Each cylinder is 3.1 litres and for that little bit extra, a turbo is fitted as well.
The unit is 150 feet long. It does one mile to the gallon. If you were to fill it up in England, it would cost ?1,000. Its stopping distance is measured in light years, and that’s only if the driver bothers to hit the brake pedal.
The problem is simple. There are no tachographs in these huge trucks so there’s nothing to stop the freelance operators doing a thousand miles without a proper break.
To keep awake, and to make the deadlines, many use speed — the drug, that is. Some are so stoned they can have an accident and not even know.
Others thunder along while reading a book. If the wheel gets a bit wobbly in their hands, they know they’ve strayed off the road. Some use speed
So, if you see a road train coming towards you, it’s best to pull off the road. Right off it. Fifteen miles is the minimum safe distance.
It’s worse if you come up behind one though, because on some roads the rear trailer can sway by as much as fifteen feet. And with sixteen axles, you can’t begin to imagine how big the dust cloud is. We’re talking here about a nuclear explosion on wheels.
The only way to go past is to keep your fingers crossed, hoping that the rear trailer is swinging the right way and that there’s nothing coming from the opposite direction. There usually isn’t, of course, because oncoming traffic is safely moored up fifteen miles from the road. Usually. But not always.
Small wonder most people fly everywhere. They even take to the air when they need to muster cattle.
Now in the course of making this series I’ve been in some spectacular and dangerous situations, but none even gets close to the hour I spent with Fox, a heli-musterer and certifiable lunatic.
