Tanami

Non-Fiction
Location - Halls Creek, Western Australia
Written - November 2008
[A spook story written during my time in Halls Creek. I haven’t submitted this to any publishers, but I don’t mind it. I tried to write it with the flavor of a yarn you’d hear on an outback pub stool.]


‘Tom, I think we should turn back.’

‘Give it a while,’ I say. ‘This might just be a bad stretch.’

We’re headed south along the Tanami Road, toward Wolfe Creek Crater. I’m fixated on the place, partly because it has proved so elusive – several opportunities to team up with a group of backpackers have fallen through due to bad timing, or them backing out at the last moment. We have to return the car in the morning. ‘We might not get another chance to go there,’ Amy had said, and that put the hook in me.

‘We’ll be okay,’ I say now, with that gritted, single-minded determination that precedes the death of teenagers in bad horror movies.

If ever the cliché about the adventure being in the journey and not the destination were true, then it is true for the Tanami Road. Nothingness, all the way from the Kimberley to Alice Springs. Over a thousand kilometres of it. The road is ‘unsealed,’ the sort of dust-dry understatement I can imagine an old-timer making at the pub with a crooked grin. ‘Unsealed…’ It’s corrugated dirt with loose bulldust on the sides and rocks spread across it like land-mines. Wide enough to fit four cars side by side, in theory. In practice you roam across the entire width of the road, ever-searching for the smoothest path through. Tourist season is over now, and the road has us all to itself.

Brad Murdoch used to run dope along the Tanami, into Broome, before he shot Peter Falconio through the head near Barrow Creek, and attempted to abduct his girlfriend, Joanne Lees. Murdoch is in prison now, but in his heart-spirit he might still be out here, barrelling his Landcruiser across the Tanami with his eyes on fire.

The Holden begins to vibrate, shaking the shit of the suspension.

‘This is crazy,’ Amy says. We spot a lone 4WD pulled over to the side. She stops, and we ask about the road conditions up ahead. They don’t know. They look dazed. I’m going on the word of a woman at the shire who told me the road is open. ‘You’ll be orrite in a two-wheel drive, no worries,’ she’d said to me. ‘Just be careful out there.’

We hit a large pothole with a sandy crunch.

‘Do you want me to drive awhile?’ She’s been behind the wheel too long. We swap seats. I don’t have my licence. But sometimes it’s safer to break the law.

‘We don’t have a spare,’ I remind Amy. We’re breathing harder with the creeping fever. The Shire woman hadn’t given me cause for concern, I hadn’t thought it’d be a problem. We’ve been on the highway up until now. Stupid. There’s no other cars on the Tanami, apart from that lone 4WD now long gone. If we burst a tyre out here we’re fucked.

How long? I wonder. How long can you wait by your car? Until your food runs out? Until your water? How long until you become delirious enough to leave your car, and how far can you walk when it’s forty degrees? Chasing mirages across the desert with open arms.

I don’t comment on the shredded remains of blown-out truck tyres on the side of the road. The wrecks of broken-down cars remain as tombstones to some forgotten tragedy. I point to one, burnt-out and rolled over onto its side in the Spinifex. ‘That must be what happened to the last punters who took a council car out onto the Tanami,’ I say, trying to lighten the mood, and making things worse.

I hold my hands loosely on the wheel. Once you find the well-worn path from other cars, the tyres seem to ride the groove of their own accord. I sit high in the seat to spot the potholes. Braking into them, rather than trying to swerve around them. We pass Ruby Plains Station, 40km in. The next human habitation of any sort is Billiluna community, 115km away. Next to Billiluna on our map there’s a note – ‘Fuel Supplies Not Reliable.’

The road is utterly deserted. We joke about the odds of seeing a cop out here. Nothing but spinifex scrub and the occasional mesa on the horizon – castles of jagged rock.

I see a 4WD in the distance. I’m on the wrong side of the road, following the smooth seam, and I gently ease the Holden over so they can pass. The 4WD is a comet across the earth with its long tail of red dust. Through the dust I make out the word printed across the bonnet – POLICE.

My heart seizes with raw panic. But I don’t react. Some dim survival instinct kicks in and I don’t touch the brakes or deviate from my path, I just continue on at a steady pace. I raise two fingers from the wheel in the outback wave of the road as they pass.

‘That was a cop,’ I say, sounding calmer than I feel. ‘Wait a moment, then look in the rear-view mirror.’

‘They aren’t turning,’ she says. ‘It looked like they’re in a hurry.’

I glance in the mirror myself. Nothing. Just a hurricane of red dust behind us.

‘I guess we don’t have to worry about falling asleep behind the wheel, after all,’ she says.

I laugh, ‘nah, I’ve got more than enough separate strands of paranoia running through my head to keep me entertained.’

I ease up to 80 km/h. We come to an abandoned cattle station, rusted ruins. There’s a sign pointing the turn-off to Wolfe Creek Crater. The next 20 kilometres is on track so corrugated it looks like red waves, frozen in time. Deep ripples in the baked earth. Through slushy patches of dry bulldust, that wrench the wheel in my hands as if enchanted.

From the sparse vegetation and unending flatness rises the preternatural rim of the crater on the horizon. It distracts me, for long enough.

I turn back to the road to kite hawks flapping away from the blackened carcass of a ‘roo on the track. There’s no time to turn, and I run over the large tangle of bones and sun-charred flesh in a wet, sickening thump.

‘It feels like the land doesn’t want us here,’ says Amy. We’ve both felt it from the beginning. The sort of feeling you can’t talk about without sounding ludicrous, but it’s there, nonetheless. Like a shape crouched in the shadows of your wardrobe, laughing softly while your parents tell you there’s nothing to be afraid of.

We park the car and crunch up the short trail to the rim of the crater. I’ve seen photos, but I am unprepared for the sight.

The earth is wounded. The crater is an unhealed scar, a festering hole from some unimaginable spear. It’s almost a kilometre across. Fifty metres deep. When the meteorite hit, 300,000 years ago, the hole was over a hundred metres deep. It has since been part-filled by the shifting sands.

Angry winds howl in our ears. As if we have trespassed at this height, standing on the rim above the limitless expanses of flatness around us, on the edge of the Tanami desert. At the site of a cataclysmic violence, which still screams on the wind.

The Jaru people call this place Gandimalal. They say that a rainbow serpent emerged from the ground here, to shape the land. A second serpent remains. Laying curled up, dormant beneath the earth, and soon to awaken.

‘This is an angry place,’ Amy says. ‘It doesn’t feel welcoming.’

‘Of course, people will just say we’ve seen that movie,’ I respond. ‘But maybe the people who made that movie had been here, and thought this eerie sense would translate onto film. Maybe they felt the same thing we’re feeling now.’

We have to be home before dark. The lights on the Holden don’t work.

Amy drives a stretch. We reach the gate to the reserve and I jump out to open it. Looking at the abandoned house with wreckage scattered about. A rusted fridge with its door gaping, like a mouth. Wondering why all the houses out here are abandoned.

She spins the wheels, ‘fuck, Amy, stop!’ We almost became bogged in the bulldust. We back up, slowly. She doesn’t like driving on this road, so I take the wheel, headed home, racing against the darkness.

I drive until my eyes blur. We stop and I roll a cigarette.

‘Hurry,’ Amy says, ‘the sun is going down.’

The dashboard beeps a warning. LOW FUEL. I check the map, and estimate we’re about sixty kilometres from home. The sun is going down fast, blinding in the windscreen. Kangaroos emerge from the scrub at the first hint of a cool breeze. Bounding missiles. If we don’t spot one, we might end up with a thrashing, bloodied mass of fur and muscle on our lap.

For the tenth time today we fear we’ve made a Bad Move in coming out here.

‘Give it a minute,’ I say, ‘the fuel gage might go up.’

It does. Creeping back a few degrees above empty.

The car rattles and vibrates. Where’s the damn highway? At every corner we see only another stretch of red, dirt track.

LOW FUEL.

The highway appears like a mirage. It doesn’t seem real until we feel the heavenly smoothness of bitumen beneath our tyres. The headlights flash to life, of their own accord. Some automatic sensor system in the new car, they weren’t busted after all, and the spell of the Tanami is lifted – moments before the sun dips behind the hills outside of Halls Creek.

With the LOW FUEL warning still flashing on the dashboard we limp into town, after our 300km round-trip foray into the bad lands of the Tanami Road.

Safe.

But don’t mind me. Go out there sometime, out there along that long Tanami Road, and prove me wrong kids. A serpent awaits you, and He can’t sleep forever. Just don’t forget your spare tyre.