The Nullarbor is a pilgrimage for Australians. Everyone must do the Nullarbor, even if you misspell it.
It is from the Latin, nullus (no) arbor (trees), named by the South Australian explorer Edmund Delisser.
It is not an Aboriginal word, though Aboriginal people have now regained their land along much of the route.
People do it for different reasons.
Some because it is there — you should cross the continent you live in. Others cross for work or family.
Let me tell you of a few.
In 1975 I crossed in a 1963 EJ Holden — the compulsory mid-20s round-Australia trip. The road was dirt several kilometres and had not been graded for months because they were working on the new sealed road which was to go right next to the coast.
Dead cars, old tyres and exhaust pipes littered the road — a dog-racing track of red dirt through the grey-green salt bush.
The great Bunda cliffs were inaccessible. Twenty-four years later I agreed to help my son-in-law (just posted to Perth) drive his car across. Not out of duty, but because I wanted to see those elusive cliffs. It was worth every kilometre of the 4000km. Worth every ball of the five-day test that coincided with the crossing. There are only two radio stations on the Nullarbor crossing — SA regional ABC which plays the cricket and WA regional ABC which plays the cricket.
Amazing how exciting a five-day cricket test is on a treeless plain. The plain was described by Edward John Eyre as “”a hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into bad dreams.”
In 1976 when the sealed road, the Eyre Highway, was opened, a tribute to the arduous nature of Eyre’s 1300km crossing in 1841 was put on a plaque on a grader at the side of the road. It said that he and his faithful Aboriginal Wylie “”survived hunger, thirst, desertion and death to reach Albany on 7th of July, 1841.”
I was pretty impressed by the surviving death bit. Had not been done for at least 1800 years before that.
The cliffs start and the head of the Bight and stretch like a broken Chrunchie bar for 200kms west. Eastwards lie endless sand dunes.
In 1870 explorer John Forrest described them:
“”We reached cliffs which fell perpendicular into the sea and, although grand in the extreme, were terrible to gaze from. We all ran back, quite terror stricken by the terrible view.”
Nowadays tourists crossing in their bubble of comfort are less awed. They seem to have little sense of danger, either of the cliffs or of what would happen if their bubble broke down and they were left waterless on the treeless plain.
Just metres from a warning sign you will see unsupervised children and foolish adults messing about as if they were in a park. The cliffs are too long to fence them from their folly.
The cliffs drop 90 metres into the sea.
Beneath I saw a pod of 30 dolphins. Alas we were too late for the whales. May to October is best.
There are six lookouts between the head of the Bight and the border with Western Australia where the cliff end. Every one is stunning, the cliffs and the great Nullarbor rightly dwarfing the attendant humans.
Some go to all. A road-worker we met in a pub went to none.
“”I had to get to work, mate. I drove straight past the bastards.”
Other took them all in. You keep coming across the same people. A woman who left New Zealand 30 years ago still so noticeably fush-and-chupping that there was no need to ask her where she came from, but rather tell her and receive the good-humoured but anguished reply.
That was near Eucla, where you can see the arrogant folly of the late Victorians. They built a sandstone telegraph station in 1877 right on the coast. The huge sand dunes have slowly subsumed it. Only the top of the walls and chimney are now visible.
There is so much to see on the crossing. Even the dead flat grey-green of the plain, often dismissed a boring, is a garden of diversity up close. Two dozen varieties on a small sand hump on the edge of the cliff looked as if they had been tenderly placed by some caring gardener.
A You can take a week or take a year.
Earlier, a mother and her daughter bemoaned losing a camping trip’s worth of fruit at a quarantine station earlier and were gutsing their last peaches just before the border. We crossed paths at most stops.
We had a longer conversation at Balladonia, the hotel and petrol station at the end of 146km of dead straight road — the longest straight stretch in Australia, possibly the world.
The daughter was helping to drive the mother’s car across. The mother was moving west to be with her son who had been rendered a paraplegic in a motor-cycle, aged 22, 10 years earlier.
“”He landed in a swamp. His spinal cord snapped when he was being carried out. His mate said he screamed so loud and kept screaming all the way to hospital.”
She was crossing the continent for her son.
Look at the diversity
Telegraph station