ACROSS THE NULLARBOR PLAIN BY TRAIN

Across The Nullarbor Plain By Train.                                    Virginia Gow 03/12/12

‘Take a good book with you’, advises the travel agent. ‘ There’s an empty, barren land for you to cross and three night’s train traveling to do.’  Having never left the Northern Beaches, this travel agent knows all about ‘a good book’. Trained in the right sales pitch to traveling folk of a suitable age, her eyes gaze at the seniors’ card and glaze over as if she could already picture Ginny in the Red Class. Ginny, blanked out for the entire journey, with the latest ‘Sisterhood of the Rose’ thriller. Dinner gong calling cattle to the canteen would enable the senior traveler to download money on a pie with peas, washed down by a tea-bagged mug. ’Yes, take a good book, if you don’t wish to fly’, she smiles.

Truth is Ginny has no intention of settling for the Red Class on the grand old train, ‘The Indian Pacific’. She intends to travel in the Gold Class, sleeping in a cabin by herself, as the train slips through the silky night. This would give dreams a chance to be vivid and carefree. Sharing a cabin with other folk would fog her memory. A journey like this she would do only once in her life. Far from imagining the land as empty, she envisages it as full.

Armed with her best rag paper pad and brilliant watercolors, she intends to paint an endless sky with red dust swirling around bluebush and saltbush plants.  She is aware that these humble bushes have a fragile existence. Drought-resistant and salt-tolerant, they cling to the land of the Nullarbor Plain.

Three meals a day provides one with ample sustenance. Gold Class passengers eat in a discrete dining car. The tables have white tablecloths with crisp, white napkins. Fine bone china accompanies dishes of a creditable reputation, whilst wine and water flank the dinner courses, dancing in their crystal glasses. The silver service encourages all to enjoy the repast and guests chatter and share their life histories as the memory of Daisy Bates hovers alongside the carriages.

Daisy Bates, who tempted fate and wrote about Aboriginals eating their babies, lived in a tent for 20 years beside these railway tracks. She lived her life on the edge of truth and became a legend with fame and glory.

Fields of wattle wave passengers onward and ochre canyons leap out of the way of the serpent’s breath.  The train is silver sleek rattling through towns like Broken Hill and Adelaide. Passing through open woodlands of Myall acacias, it moves forward to limestone ground. This is the largest limestone sedimentary landscape in the world. A gigantic plain, 200,000 square metres of the same rocks that built the great pyramids, it fills the windows of the carriages with its presence. Under the ground, the caves yet unexplored, tempt the miner with promises of riches.  The town of Cook, unadulterated by suburban bliss, gives passengers an opportunity to stretch their legs. There’s a sign. It beckons, ‘If you’re crook, come to Cook. Population five.’ In the shadow of an ancient gum, two corrugated iron lock ups stand tall. ‘Don’t play up on the train or you may end up in one of these, ready cooked, to be taken on to Kalgoolie’, laughs the shop owner’s wife.

Kalgoolie is a gold-mining town of fabled riches. Here barmaids wear little and show off their breasts.   ‘Lillie Langtrees’ hosts a famous brothel tour and one of the train party goes missing for an hour, or more.

It is the quality of passengers that gather in the saloon bar that makes this journey so interesting. Ginny meets an ancient safari guide who hails from Kenya ‘Before the war’, of course. Her clothes are yellowed from a different age, and her old bones won’t mount a horse so she rides this train instead. She remembers tales of another time when she was young and the world was ripe and rich for the taking and she hunted lion, deer and elephant.

Two mature French women travel with a beautiful daughter, a photographer of bike rallies and car events. They come from Leon.‘ This is our forth time on this train’, they explain with secret smiles. ‘Why don’t you speak French?’ they ask. Are they hunting for Aussie males?  Watch as they make passes at the men who ride on the Golden Line, with or without their spouses.  Yes, watch and study the parlor games.

There are conversations where people open up their pasts and honesty wears its hat.  One camera man goes to Perth to film “Cloud Street’ and shares a script with Ginny. Another brings out his guitar and plays a tune. An Irishman sings with glee.

Two older sisters tell of drought and how they ‘left the land’ but still have sufficient investments to travel in style. They have been to the North Pole, a momentous trip across pack ice with husky dogs. Caught a ship to the South Pole, too, just to compare the lights shimmering in the frosty nights. They sit and they hold hands. Ginny paints for them a shimmering scene as days and nights pass by. Their time is short, but they don’t mind, one tells her with a sigh.

A couple speaks of how they have come from Perth, played golf on the longest golf club in the world, across the Nullarbor Plain. This golf course links outback towns together along the Eyre Highway. Now they’re left their friends and are traveling back with their green uniforms and a Diploma of Golf.

Who needs a good book when traveling with people who are happy to share their tales?  Real life pages of mystery are listened to avidly. All of these folk have dreams and fantasies. They write in Ginny’s book and message her ‘Enjoy your time!’

“And why do you travel on this train’, one enquires thoughtfully.

Ginny answers, ‘I’m going to Perth for a party! An odd thing to do, it’s true. A special treat for a cousin, sweet, and it’s to be held in a zoo.’