Broome, Western Australia
September, 2000

STRANGE things happen after you've spent a week in the bush in Australia. Take my word for it. You can finish up throwing frizbees at the moon.

The place is a patch of wasteland in the middle of nowhere. Well, about 20km out of Port Hedland  going up the coast of Western Australia,
if you really want to be precise. But 'wasteland' and 'nowhere' will do to be honest. Because that's what Australia is - it's full of nowhereness.

For people like us, from Europe, the place is just enormous. And there's hardly anyone about. It's approximately  the size of North America but you could fit the whole of its population into New York.  Get the picture? Most of it is, well, just empty.

How come, I ask myself, that in this place of no bodies they have so many Somebodies? People like Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, Clive James and Dame Edna, Olivia Newton-John and INXS, Ned Kelly and Crocodile Dundee, Alice Springs and Flying Doctors, champions of the world in rugby and cricket, and a tuckerbag full of Olympic winners? It is really quite amazing. If there is a Lord above, he must have sprinkled some very concentrated stardust round here.

Anyway, back in the bush, when it's time to kip down for the night and the place is empty, then anywhere will do. We simply turn down an unmade track off a highway which goes presumably to somewhere a long way away.

The big 4-wheel Toyota landcruiser rumbles over the stones, just like it has every day, and most of the nights, for the last week. There are five of us on board, intrepid travellers on an adventure safari into the wilderness of this Wonderland of Oz, led by Phil, our  been-there-done-that guide/driver, who's our leader, inspirator, educator and changer of music tapes.

"This will do," he declares as a clearing of hard, flat earth miraculously appears out of nowhere.

We unload the wagon for the umpthteen time. Tarpaulin on the ground, sleeping bags inside their dark brown swags like insect cocoons;our beds for the night. Our last night under the stars in never-never land.  Now for the table, the cooking pots, the plates, the cutlery and the kettle called Billy... all the paraphanalia you need for an adventurous lot who want to throw away all their westernised comforts for a week and live like natives in the Outback of Australia. Paid good money for it, too.
 

It is, by now, a ritual. Each of us knows what to do. No need to ask. It's a team. We ARE natives goddamit. And tonight is the last night.

Soon the meal is over. Now what to do? It's nearly midnight. The moon is oh-so-bright, casting an eerie semi-light across the starry emptiness. Someone gets the frizbee out. I mean, what else could you possibly be expected to do when there are five of you, all cultured, civilized people feeling like natives in the middle of the night in the wilderness of western Australia? Of course it's frizbee time. No worries, cobber.

The first problem soon arrives. A wayward throw somewhere off into the darkness is retrieved by Carolyn, lately a carefree woodnymph from the Land of Billabonga and formerly a 26-year-old nurse from Edinburgh, who reveals with a strange exclamation to the assorted players, that she's found a railway line up there over the ridge. Really? A railway line in the middle of nowhere? And us about to kip down beside it too? "Oh well, what's a railway line doing here," we say. Or something like that. "So what?"  It's that kind of night.

Then there's a more substantial threat. We have heard already the sound of the dingos, those wolf-like howlers in the woods up yonder. But been-there-done-that-Phil has told us they are harmless. And we believe him. So that's OK then. No, it's the roar from the nearby bushes that really sorts out the girls from the boys. Unmistakable. It is the noise made by an extremely large bull in the Outback of Western Australia when he finds that his sleep is unexpectedly disturbed by the antics of several beer-crazed frizbee throwers in the middle of the night. Believe me, you only need to hear it once and you think you are shortly going to die.
 

Amazingly, Phil, the fountain of all things, still remains unfazed. Even when his flashlight picks out the huge frame of the rogue bull thrashing about, dazzled, in the undergrowth, he says not to worry.

"He'll be more scared of us than we are of him," he says with a reassuring confidence. M'm...
"The thing is, he won't be used to so many people, Toyota wagons, campfires, all that kind of stuff. It's him that's frightened." Oh yeah...
"Well look, if you're still worried, I'll sleep at the end (of our open-air dormitory ) and I'll drive the wagon round to block him off. He'll stay well away, I assure you."

We settle down for an uneasy night cocooned in our swag bags: Carolyn, her friend Aileen, also a nurse; Dani, an aerobics teacher from Switzerland; Phil, the brave one; and me. The frizbee is near to hand. It's just the kind of weapon we natives need for frightening off rampaging bulls in the middle of the night.

The first goods train rumbles past barely half-an-hour after we have gone to sleep. Phil tells us in the morning. We didn't even hear it. The bull is nowhere to be seen; must have wandered off in search of frizbee-throwers somewhere else. Not even the friendly dingos have put in an appearance. So Phil was right after all. Worried? What,us natives?
You must be joking mate!
 
 

There were ,in fact, six of us when this whole escapade started a week or so ago in Perth. It was raining then,and cold. That was one of the reasons why a safari into the warmer weather up north, up into the bush and along the coast to Broome, seemed like a good idea. The other was the thrill of exploring where few of us have gone before. The kind of
adventure-themepark you won't come across in Seven Sisters Road. Or Sauchihall Street for that matter.

The sixth member of our bush-whacking gang is Jane. A real Aussie in her own right. Fourth generation and proud of it. Up from South Australia, she is a teacher who's had-it-up-to-here with the pressures and needs a break. Shame for her, she has to bail out after five days when duty calls her back to her other life - a 100-acre farm which she bought as an antidote to her stressy job. She didn't want to leave us. It made her cry.

It is quite a gang, us would-be natives, who set out to spend a week with each other roaming through the wilderness of the Australian Outback. Mornings, noons and nights. Character-building. Bonding. Team-working. All the kind of things you read about in those "Art of Good Management" handbooks.

Phil, the leader, is 32, single, and a real-life Mr Body Beautiful. He's built himself into a hunk through a regime of weight-training and exercise that would make an international athlete weep, and he keeps it that way with a constant stream of ecologically-correct potions and pills that he produces from a cavernous black holdall beside him on the driver's seat. By character, he's a shy man.  But as a specialist on all things Australian, ancient and modern, he's an absolute whizz; forever pulling facts and figures from his filing cabinet of a brain to keep us interested.

Jane, the stress deserter, is  soon swooning over him hotter than a kangaroo with sunstroke. The combination of her farming knowledge of flora and fauna is a perfect foil to Phil's facts and figures, and the pair of them bamboozle us with a never-ending stream of commentary. Being 40, divorced, and not often in the company of shy Adonises, she is frequently overcome by a kind of strange neurosis most often found in a quivering jelly. But not to worry cobber, it keeps us all amused.

Our route is up the coast to rugged Geraldton, and then to Monkey Mia, where the wild dolphins perform. Next comes Carnarvon, with the english-sounding name, and Coral Bay where the sea is so clear you can see the coral and its fishworld almost from the beach. Inland now to Tom Price's town, the iron-ore man who taught this country how to pay its way, then through Karijini park to Newman in the wilderness, and on to Port Hedland where the nightime frizbee championship is held. Stunning!

The towns are only blips along the way. Something to aim at. You soon learn that about this barren land . We would call them "rural communities" back home. There's really no one there. Just a roadhouse (filling station), a pub, a clutch of shops and a shower if you're lucky.

They are also, sad to relate, the places where the Aboriginal outcasts hang out. You see them in little groups, lolling about, drunk mostly; once-proud men of ebony black skin and white Brillo-pad hair now relegated, with their saggy-clothed women, to the fringes of life. The government, afraid of a blot on the landscape, has given many of them back their lands and told them to go home. But everyone knows they are being squeezed to death between the Rock of tradition and the Hard Place of progress.

Between the towns is our safari land - the wilderness where the spiniflex grass grows amongst the eucalyptus (gum) and the melaleucas (paper bark) trees, and the wildlife lives. The place is teeming with it - red kangaroos,rock wallabies,numbats, dingos. We even see, rare apparently, the rat/cat-like northern quoll. Then there's the birds - wedge-tailed eagles,kites,magpies, ungainly emus, the loud-mouthed cockatoos. Yes, it's all here, and more, for those who'll go a'waltzing Matilda with me.

And this is where where we build our campfires at night, this is where we sleep under the stars. "You may not know this," says Phil, pulling down the microphone in his cab like some kind of frustrated airline captain, "but the bush park we are now travelling through is about the size of Belgium." Cor!

"Oh look at that," says an exultant Jane, not to be outdone. "People have survived for days out here by drinking the juice from Sturt's Desert Peas" (spectacular blood-red flowers we have just passed on the trackside). Like I say, this tit-for-tat stuff is just what you need when you are an apprentice native on an intensive training course.
 
 
 

All through the first few days while we are visiting strange lunar-landscape rock formations known as the Pinnacles, deserted beaches at Lucky Bay where the sand is white as snow, clambering down hidden gorges in the Kalbarri national park, and communing with those dolphins at the inappropriately-named Monkey Mia, poor Jane wears the hang-dog expression of a labrador who wants to play  but can't persuade her master to throw the ball.

Finally, after a day of snorkel-diving to see the rainbow-coloured fish at wonderful Coral Bay, she tries the alcohol trick to haul down Phil's defences. It's her last night with us natives. The hotel bar we've found provides the atmosphere, the day's warm sunset makes the perfect
stage. But then, oh woops, suddenly the heavens open and there's a mad dash to cover up with hats and waterproof clothes and plastic things. Dampened ardour. Game over. Isn't life a bitch?

The nurses from Scotland, as you might expect in a job where they have seen it all before, and more, take everything in their stride.Carolyn, a spinal injuries specialist from Edinburgh, clucks about like the ward sister she wants to be, organising things here, supervising there; all the while issuing timely warnings about the danger of snakebites, food poisoning, breaking legs and other such minor irritations.

Aileen, her pal of seven years, another 'aged-20-something' nurse, this time from Glasgow, giggles through it all - peering out myopically through little porthole specs perched on the end of her nose, puckering up her cheeks in a permanently chubby grin. Such is the nature of things, she probably finds all of this adventure lark more difficult to cope with than the rest of us. But she does the best she can, and we love you for it, possum.

In fact, of course, it's turning out to be just the kind of textbook experiment in human relations which we thought it would. A bunch of people thrown together, not exactly on a desert island, but a deserted island continent certainly. Will they/won't they get on? Will there /won't there be fallings out? Who'll emerge as leaders /followers? Who'll keep the spirits up/pull them down? Who'll pair up, or not,  with whom? Let's put them under the microscope. Let's see what happens to this batch...
 

But the answer is: We all get on like long-lost chums. Seven days and more of mornings, noons and nights and there are no fights. No quarrels. No coupling ups. No fallings out. Just lots of fun, hard work, helping each other out, and all the rest...

Maybe Dani has the hardest task. 25, a policeman's daughter from Lucern. Used to discipline, yet with a fiercely independent mind. But my God she's Swiss. A foreigner! Aussies, Scots, English - how can she possibly cope with the dialects of a language which we often have trouble understanding ourselves?

Answer: She gives it her very best shot - and more; never once backing away from trying to find the words which for her are so difficult; polishing up on her schoolgirl english, until, with each passing day, she masters it some more. Once, in complete exasperation, she decides to shock us all by learning as many swear words as she can. "What a bloody, fucking, shitty, piddle," she exclaims as she spills the morning coffee. After that, she can do no wrong.

Anyway, the days come and go. Days when our happy band trundles through the wasteland in the big Toyota truck without seeing another living soul. Nights with our bush camps and wood fires. Washing in streams, swimming in rockpools, sleeping under the stars, cooking our food, washing the dishes. Keeping our dignity, keeping our humour. More than 3OOO long kilometres through the Australian bush on an experience of a lifetime.

And now, at last, the journey is ending. Here is Broome, the final destination; the flower across the other side of the Great Sandy Desert; the tourist town where there are hot showers and cold beers, and supermarket shelves and food served to you on plates, and internet machines, and shops to develop your photos.... We rumble into the place with the windows open, singing our hearts out to that pop-rock classic "hooked high on a feeling". It seems the perfect choice. Even the sun takes its cue - sinking down, red and glorious, below the horizon on Cable Beach just as we drive into the carpark.

Now where's that frizbee, someone asks. Let's give it one last throw.

 
                                            (c) Richard Meredith
                                            - all rights reserved