Day 2
October 31, 2011
If yesterday was the day of emus and roadkill, today definitely belongs to the goats. Of all the animals I was hoping to see on this trip, goats were not high on the list. Yet there they were, scurrying along the roadside. The novelty of seeing literally hundreds of goats in the middle of Outback soon wore off due to their love of darting into the road just in front of our car, causing me near cardiac incidents, before skittering to safety, leaving me clutching the dashboard and gasping for air. Fortunately, Jamie soon discovered that goats hate the sound of car horns. We would see them lurking in the bushes, planning their next assault, and one well-timed blast of the horn would would send them scurrying for cover. How we laughed (especially Jamie, who seemed to take a sick delight in their terror..). Fortunately, goats weren't the only wildlife experienced, and we also saw tons of (live) kangaroos, including a mother kangaroo hopping across the road with her joey's head peeking out of her pouch.
If anything, the landscape was even more desolate than yesterday. Flat scrub streatched all the way to the horizon, and we went over an hour without seeing another car on the road. We clipped along at 120 km for most of the day, only slowing to pass through the tiny towns that appeared sporadically. In a country the size of the US with a smaller population than the state of California, "remote" takes on a whole new meaning. As beautiful as the landscape is, it is a harsh, rugged beauty. There are signs along the road reminding you that even as you drive through a sea of dead grass and cross parched, empty riverbeds, you are crossing a massive floodplain, with markers along the side of the road showing how high the water can get. Most of the "towns" we've driven through have been little more than a small cluster of houses, a church, a pub and a gas station. In one town, there were men sitting outside the servo in lawn chairs, just watching the cars pass by. As we drove past, one raised his hand to us in greeting.
The major stop of today was in Broken Hill, one of Australia's oldest mining towns. Mining is a massive industry in Australia, and driving a dump truck in one of the larger mines can earn you a six-figure paycheck. For skilled workers, paychecks are nearly unbelievable. The trade-off, of course, is that mining is almost always in remote, inhospitable environments. Broken Hill is no exception, and it has had over 100 years to develop. From the Miner's Memorial, on a hill probably 150 high, we could see the entire town. We poked around a bit, visited the Big Picnic Bench (just what it sounds like), and hit the road.
When we crossed the border into South Australia, the terrain seemed to instantly change. Grass became greener and hills sprouted out of the horizon. We were headed for the strangely named Peterborough (though not as strangely named as our originally-planned stopping place of Yunta, which Jamie kept accidentally calling Yemen and I kept accidentally calling Yalta). We had gone a bit brochure wild in the visitors' centre in Broken Hill, and had gotten about seven brochures on the various remaining stops. I entertained Jamie by reading from the Peterborough brochure as we wound our way through South Australia.
A former bustling stop on the railway, it seems Peterborough (founded by a German migrant as Petersburg but Anglicized due to WWI anti-German sentiment) is facing something of an identity crisis in its post-railroad incarnation. It seems they have decided to reinvent themselves as a tourist town, and the insistent chipperness of the brochure seemed to veil an edge of desperation as it outlined the various (limited) attractions one could enjoy in Peterborough. We could only surmise that tourism in a small town 400 km away from the nearest grocery store wasn't going to be its saving grace, and the utter silence of the town seemed only to support this fact. Nearly ten years after the reinvention, the town still only boasted one small gravelly caravan park.
It's all a bit sad, and it does beg the question: what will these people do? And not just the people of Peterborough but all of the remote Australians. Living remotely in the bush is as Australian as meat pies, but how much longer can it endure when growing channels of communication constantly remind people of what they're missing out on? And yet there is something intoxicating out here, a sense of exclusivity. So few people throughout history have has a chance to travel this part of Australia, and its beauty, though rugged, is spectacular. I have spent nearly all of the time in the car looking out the window at the passing scenery, and the sunrises and sunsets are otherworldly. I'm a pragmatist at heart and I know you can't pay a mortgage with a landscape, or feed your family with a sunset, but I like to think that remote Australia will continue to be inhabited for a while longer.
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