The Onward Road

The bus arrives with the kicked up dust: one last throb of engine and everything settles. Not that the desert is every truly still – there are lizards with their bellies to the ground, the darting bounds of kangaroo mice. The wind is often restless and frequently turns into the monstrous clouds of an Outback dust-storm. In the trees the galahs scream. When they fly their wings flash white, like glass turning in the sun.

William Creek, a town of three, sits in the palm of the Simpson Desert. This was once the Inland Sea but the form of the land, shaped once by sea, is now dry. Now there is only the memory of water and we move in its absence – the cavernous hollows history left behind.

The tourists duck inside with their trailing chatter of excitement and relief. They look around with fevered eyes at the walls covered every inch by pictures and flags and scraps of old shirts, business cards and hats, souvenirs and old photographs. This is the debris tourists have left behind – the flotsam and jetsam of decades’ travel.
‘Where are you from?’ they ask when they hear my accent. ‘How did you end up here?’
I smile and shrug. ‘I wanted to see something different,’ I say. ‘I’m travelling too.’

The bus tour has brought our first customers of the afternoon. This is October and the temperatures have crept steadily, day by day, towards forty degrees. The tourists are fewer every week. Sometimes I spend entire afternoons waiting for customers, like a character between acts abandoned on an elaborate set.

‘Are you on the road for long?’ I ask one of the milling tourists. She shakes her head.
'It’s a short tour, just five days up to Alice Springs.'
‘What do you think?’ I ask. ‘Do you like the desert?’
'Oh yeah,' she says, excited. 'We're sleeping outside every night – it's a real adventure.'
She buys two bags of crisps and a can of coke but the guide is shepherding the group back to the bus so we say no more. I lean on the bar in the empty room and watch the flank of the bus pull away and disappear out along the dusty highway.

With evening the galahs grow quiet. The moon rises red, then ochre, then white. The pub lights flick on, the jukebox jolts, and a group of cattle station hands arrive for a drink. As they swap gossip with the publican I take a beer from the fridge and slip outside.

I walk into the empty road and look up. The desert sky is its own revelation, each star distinct, and by night it becomes clear how vast and wide the desert is, how seemingly endless, how deeply old. Behind my lungs something like awe beats heavy wings; this is how the desert humbles. In the silent night the highway reaches to the furthest point of sky and stretches, always onward.