Travel Article by Matt Granfield
You know you're in trouble when the lady guarding the entrance to the train has been right through her list, twice, and has flipped back to the first page again.
'Garfield was it?'
'Granfield I said, with an n.'
'Oh.'
She flipped through once more, looking concerned.
'We don't seem to have you here Mr. Greenfield. When did you make your booking?'
I told her it was about two months ago, but I'd had to change my date of departure because of a bout of the flu.
'Hmm. Were you in carriage G?'
I told her I didn't know and pointed to some useful looking numbers on the bottom my Internet booking form which was stapled to my flight and hire car and hotel information and that sort of stuff. She thought about this for a while.
'Well, I'll put you in cabin eight then. You'll find it down the corridor to the right. 'Can I keep this page?' She said, and tore it off.
I asked if I needed any sort of boarding pass or something so they'd know I wasn't a stowaway. She said it'd be fine.
I stepped into the train, sans papiers, and looked for cabin number eight. It was down a curvy hall which was about as wide as my shoulders - If I was wearing a big shirt it would have touched the sides. After I'd unpacked everything, which wasn't much, another lady came and told be I was being put in cabin 13 because they didn't realize I was going to Perth and someone was booked into cabin eight from Adelaide onwards. It would have been rather snug with two of us in there.
Like its cousin Cabin eight, Cabin 13G was about as wide as my shoulders, and it looked like a very comfortable toilet.
I was traveling by myself, so cabin 13G was the most petite version of 'Gold Kangaroo' class accommodation. If you had a partner, significant other, or some other form of non-canine traveling companion with whom you didn't mind showering you got the not as small version.
Most people sarcastically describe the train compartments as 'rather cosy'. My first impression was that they were pokey. To go to the toilet in cabin 13G you poke a little cabinet and out it pops. To go to bed you poke the wall and the mattress falls down. To wash your hands you poke a cupboard and hey presto, a sink. To open the door you poke yourself in the leg, to brush your teeth you poke yourself in the eye. It really is tremendous fun, unless of course you are claustrophobic, or very large, or you can't lift a 30kg bag over your head to stow it in the rack, or you don't like rattles, or you get motion sickness, or you find yourself uneasy in the company of abnormal numbers of camera toting senior citizens.
Fortunately I suffer from none of these afflictions, and when it came time for the orientation session in the lounge car I was decidedly in spirit - even if it did take 45 minutes for the train to leave the station and another 45 before I was allocated with my meal ticket and allowed out of the toilet to meet everyone. By that time we were crossing the Nepean River (which marks the outer-western boundary of suburban Sydney) and heading up into the Blue Mountains. I was only the fifth person to arrive in the lounge car and as we crawled up into the foothills I could see my old house in the suburb of Glenmore Park on the plain behind us, so it didn't seem too socially obtuse to call my old flatmate Wayne to tell him where I was.
I had been up this way countless times before, usually bushwalking or mountain biking, but the last time I'd seen the Blue Mountains from the inside had been two years ago and the experience of moving through my old stomping ground on the Indian Pacific, on my way across the continent, was something that needed to be enthusiastically commentated to Wayne, and then my girlfriend, and then sizeable portion of the A-K section of my mobile phone's address book. When we finally went through a tunnel and the phone cut out the lounge car was full of expectant old people and blue champagne was being passed around.
I was the youngest person there, not married to anyone named Glynys, and not from the NSW Central Coast, so if I hadn't been in training it could have gotten messy. Fortunately my girlfriend's grandma had recently purchased a unit in The Domain retirement village on the Gold Coast and I'd spent 18 months worth of Friday nights discussing Labor politics over chicken parmigiana and a lambrusco or two in the club house dining room. I reckoned I knew old people. I knew what made them tick, and I knew what they found funny, which was pretty much anything, so when I was handed the Microphone by Barry who was from 'Manly, the greatest place in the world', and I said I was Matt from the Gold Coast, and that the Gold Coast was the second greatest place in the world, I was an instant hit.
For all my rowdy nights at The Domain retirement village I hadn't actually spent a great deal of extended time with a great deal of distended older Australians, so while I knew It'd be fun for a few hours, I wasn't sure if the novelty would wear off for either of us, and if so, how quickly it would happen. When it came time for dinner a few hours later one of the cabin attendants pulled me aside and said they'd noticed there were four of us who were about of the same age (under 60) and we were going to be seated together at the same table, I felt a little bit ostracized - I'd spent my whole life talking to people under 60, I was here to enjoy blue champagne. It had taken me 23 years to finally graduate from the kids table at family Christmas parties, I didn't want to regress right there and then.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed dining with the 38-year-old French consulate worker whose name I could never remember, and the 20-something couple from Perth, but we just didn't seem to have a lot to talk about. When you're on a train at night and the lights are on inside you can't see anything outside but black, so I found that I could only pretend to stare out the window for about ten seconds at a time before I had to gaze around the carriage at the Normas and Freds and Ethels and Leslies chatting away merrily while the kids table ate in awkward silence.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about the Indian Pacific is the landscape, but at night it also becomes the most boring. By the time we'd finished dinner we were somewhere between Lithgow and Bathurst, 150km west of Sydney in rural NSW, and without any well-lit streets or landmarks to gaze at, the only thing which aroused any interest were the red flashes and car headlights as we whizzed past level crossings at 100km/h. Soon even they became few and far between and by the time the most nocturnal passengers had retired to the lounge car for a night cap there was nothing to see outside at all.
I had been out this way before on the Mitchell and Newell highways and I'd seen the towns of Orange and Parkes, but there were smaller places on my map with fantastic names like Bogan Gate and Derriwong and I would love to have become acquainted with them too. When I was planning the trip I had seen the drearily named towns of Gunningbland and Boree and I had been pretty keen to find out what their residents got up to on a Saturday night - now because of the cover of darkness, I am only able to speculate that the answer is not much.
I had never seen the outback before, so when I woke up at 6.15am on Sunday October 26 2003 and found myself halfway between Menindee and Broken Hill I was giddy with delight. I hate waking up tired, and the previous night's ration of sleep was entirely inappropriate and sustained in only a small handful of 15 minute bursts, but it didn't matter. Framed outside the window, in a neat rectangle stretching between my navel and little toe was the scene I'd been dreaming about since I could spell 'Australia'.
It wasn't as flat as I thought it would be, nor as barren - secretly I'd been hoping for a big red beach - but I wasn't disappointed. This was the Australia I'd heard about for so long; red dirt, salt bush, spinifex grass, and not much more. There were a few hills scattered about the place in clumps, but nothing you couldn't comfortably roll down, and we were on the edges of farmland, so the odd windmill or tractor would pop up from nowhere and disappear just as quickly.
An announcement came over the PA that Broken Hill was in fact only half an hour away and that the people with the blue meal card should make their way to the dining car immediately. She also informed us that because of track work and a few speed restrictions along the way we were running rather late and the guided tour of the town, which I had secretly been looking forward to, had been cancelled.
Any Australian who's passed third grade social studies can tell you Broken Hill is a big, old mining town in the middle of nowhere. It's 1159km west of the state capital Sydney, 837km northwest of Melbourne, 514km northeast of Adelaide and there's pretty much nothing but desert between it and Papua New Guinea. It sits on a shit-tonne (not the official measurement) of nickel and silver and for the last hundred years or so people with engineering degrees have been figuring out ways to get the elements out of the ground.
There's plenty of old mining towns in Australia, and like Broken Hill, most of them are full of history, outback pubs, dust and sweaty locals with utes. Like Broken Hill, they'll all become deserted in about a decade when the minerals run out, because while there are plenty of minerals left on the continent, most of them now rest not in towns, but underground in barren remote places where the workers fly to work for the week.
Towns like Broken Hill grew up because the minerals below them were discovered at a time where getting a rock out of the ground meant hacking at it with a pick. A lot of rocks meant a lot of picks, and a lot of picks needed a lot of people to wield them. Naturally a lot of people needed a lot of food, a lot of water, a hell of a lot of beer, and a reciprocal number of pubs for beer storage and distribution (bar fridges being a relatively recent invention) so places like Broken Hill sprung up almost literally overnight to cater for them, which makes for a fascinating city, or so I'm told.
All I got to see of Broken Hill was the train station.
It's not a terribly bad train station - in fact it's one of the cleanest train stations I've ever seen, it's just that I kind of wanted to see a little bit more of Broken Hill. Since I was a kid I'd been watching commercial network travel programs talk about the town's history and pubs, and culture, and everyone I knew who'd been there recalled it with a twinkle in their eye. There's a romance about the place, and a toughness that I'd always felt epitomized Australia. When I stepped off the train I knew that it would be a long time, perhaps years, perhaps decades (perhaps an eternity) before I'd be in Broken Hill again and I was bitterly disappointed I couldn't even walk off the platform. I was tempted to go out for a run and see whatever I could, but we were only stopping for half an hour and the next train didn't come through for four days, so I wasn't particularly keen to miss this one. Besides that, it was on the nether side of eight o'clock on a Sunday morning and nothing was open, I was a little hung-over and I hadn't had more than an hour of sleep.
So I had to content myself with looking at the town from a distance.
On the left hand side of the train was a pile of dirt big enough to keep a four year old with a Tonka truck busy for the next few millennia. To the right were buildings of the kind you'd expect to see next to a train station in a large outback town; travel agents, tire shops, pubs, clubs and motels.
In the streets running away from the platform I could see a few more important looking buildings - the kind that adjoin parks and have clock towers, but beyond that the streets just undulated up and over an slight incline and I couldn't tell whether I was looking at all of it, or whether the town stretched on for miles. It all looked reasonably close, but I'd been to enough towns to know that they never put the best bits near the train station, so in the end I just wandered up and down the platform taking photos of signs that said 'Broken Hill' so I could at least prove that I had indeed been there.
Broken Hill has the longest platform of pretty much any railway station anywhere in the world, (if there's one thing Australian towns love bragging about its obscure records related to size and if it was in fact THE longest platform in the world I'm sure there would have been an appropriately large sign, or plaque somewhere announcing the fact) but even so, the Indian Pacific had to make two stops. If you stand at one end of the train and look back you can't really see the other end, even if the ground is flat and the tracks are straight - it just disappears into the horizon. I considered the considerableness of this fact for a few moments and then reluctantly made my way back to carriage G. It was with a sad sigh that I left my last footprint on NSW soil, my home soil, for what would be at least the foreseeable future.
Australia is a big place and big places tend to need proportionately large cartographical representation, so when I tried unfolding the second edition of Gregorys Map 149 of Australia I ended up with a macramé paper crane instead. I had Hobart in my ear and Perth in the posterior region before I was able to use my big thumb to work out that we'd be crossing the border into South Australia in about half an hour near a town named Cockburn. I wondered who'd come up with that name and whether they required surgery afterwards.
There are a lot of great place names in South Australia, but my favourite part of the state is a two million hectare conservation park in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert. It covers over an area roughly half the size of Tasmania and for some reason or other, nobody has gotten around to calling it anything yet. On the map it is referred to as simply the 'Unnamed Conservation Park'.
I don't know why it doesn't have a name. Perhaps the page of the meeting agenda which had 'think of name for unnamed conservation park' written on it fell out on the way to the photocopier, or maybe it's so far away from everything else that they can't afford to send somebody there to put up a 'Welcome to.' sign.
Or maybe there's just nothing there to see. That seems the most logical explanation. Any place in Australia that has nothing worth visiting is usually dubbed by the local tourism board as the gateway to the nearest thing worth seeing; the Unnamed Conservation Park is next door to Maralinga - where we dump our nuclear waste, and Woomera - where we dump our illegal boat people. I wouldn't like to be president of the Unnamed Conservation Park Tourist Authority.
There are two roads in the Unnamed Conservation Park - one, a dirt track ambitiously named the Anne Beadell Highway which starts in the middle of nowhere and finishes in Coober Pedy; and the other, a dirt track ambitiously unnamed, which starts in the middle of nowhere and finishes at Cook, a town whose claim to fame is that it's the remotest re-fuelling stop for the Indian Pacific.
Getting to the park isn't easy either, if you don't mind a 450km four wheel drive along some of the remotest tracks in the country, you still need permits from three separate governing bodies to actually enter the park.
The Unnamed Conservation Park has remnants of aboriginal history, but if you go to its official webpage no one seems to know when the place officially went from nowhere to unnamed. Tourist draw cards of the Unnamed Conservation Park include its listing as one of the world's largest biosphere reserves, its relative abundance of birds including the Princess Parrot and the Australian Bustard, and let's face it, you're probably not going to be kept awake at night by reveling teenagers.
As bizarre and intriguing as the place is, The Unnamed Conservation Park quite succinctly typifies most people's notion of South Australia itself - it's a place a while away, in the middle of nothing, with not much in it. Most people think it's fairly small, or at least fairly medium sized, but in fact, South Australia covers just under a million square kilometres, and would swallow the whole of NSW and three Tasmanias.
While the Unnamed Conservation Park has its bustards and biosphere, there is a lot of hidden beauty in South Australia as well - The Flinders Ranges, Lake Eyre, The Simpson Desert, Kangaroo Island and The Barossa Valley, to name a few; but only the latter is a real household name, and only because it's written on the backs of the country's best wine labels. The Indian Pacific visits none of these places.
It's not that the train purposefully goes out of the way to avoid the interesting stuff, it's just that the train doesn't go out of its way. When the first railway tracks were laid in Australia they were for carting around stuff rather than people, and the engineers who built them rightly figured that wool, and minerals, and containers weren't going to complain if the scenery got a bit monotonous. This became apparent when we crossed the border into South Australia.
If you look at a map of the route between Broken Hill and Adelaide you soon realise that while the path is practical, it's going to be pretty boring. The countryside is just on the edge of a great red nothing, but it's not quite featureless enough to be interesting. The train tracks follow the Barrier Highway for the first few hundred kilometres, so every half an hour or so we passed through a town with a pub, a petrol bowser and a power pole.
By the time I was called for my three-course lunch the semi-outback had succumbed to gently rolling farmland and the only thing to do was wait for Adelaide to arrive. What made the wait worse was the fact that Adelaide is a de-tour south rather than a stop en route and every kilometre we traveled after lunch had to be retraced that evening before the real part of the journey began across the Nullarbor. When, after 450km of not much, Adelaide did finally appear in the window, I realised that although they live in a beautiful, well planned city, Adelaideans, like people everywhere, put all their shit near the train tracks.
It was a Sunday afternoon, so I was expecting to see happy people kicking footballs around the city's famous parks, or couples sharing a glass of Barossa Shiraz in sidewalk cafés, but instead I got empty factories, car parks, train yards and cemeteries.
I'd also been foolish enough not to book myself onto the guided tour of the city, so when we finally got to Keswick terminal I had nothing better to do than wander through the car park and try and thumb my way through a 925 page edition of The Complete Published Works of Franz Kafka, which made the dullness of the morning's travel feel like a New Years Eve celebration at the Playboy Mansion.
After an hour of listless aimlessness I began to get hungry and realised with alarm that I'd left my wallet (along with my laptop computer, phone, CD player and camera) on the train, which was of course now locked. That surprised me - nothing is ever locked on the Indian Pacific - the doors to all the rooms are left open, there are no keys separating first, second and third classes, and even the dining and lounge cars are left unattended most of the time. Adelaide marks the logistical half-way point of the journey and when the train pulls in to the station all the hospitality staff change over and cleaners go through to spruce everything up. I noticed that some cleaners and new hospitality staff were going in and out of carriage H, the next one along from mine, so I asked one of them if I could duck in to carriage G and grab my wallet. He said it would be fine, so I did. He didn't follow me, or ask for ID, or wait for me to get back, or even look suspicious, so I probably should have seized the opportunity to rifle through a few other cabins while I was in there and see if anyone else had left behind their wallet, or their mobile phone, or their computer, or their camera, or their CD player, and then ducked off to the nearest Cash Converters, but I resisted the temptation.
When we were finally ready to leave Adelaide at about 6pm and the doors were officially unlocked for passengers to board I realised, with the sense of unease I get whenever I arrive with an Internet booking in a place which was invented before computers, that it was entirely possible no one even knew I was supposed to be on the train. I didn't have a boarding pass or any official-looking document to say I was supposed to be there because the confirmation email I'd printed had been taken from me in Sydney, and although all my bags and my toothbrush were in my cabin, there was nothing that actually identified them as belonging to a Mr M Granfield from Queensland. I'd recently read an article in the Weekend Australian about an Iranian man who arrived at a Paris Airport in the 1970s without the correct papers and to avoid being deported he had spent the last 30 years living in the arrivals lounge surviving on McDonalds - while the Keswick terminal cafeteria wasn't too bad, I didn't want to be celebrating my 50th birthday with a Chiko Roll and I started to panic a little.
'Granfield,' I said to the conductor. 'With an n'.
He checked the list.
'Matthew?' He asked.
'Yep,' I said, wondering if that meant I was allowed in; wondering if another family member was staying in carriage G and hadn't gotten around to telling me.
'Coming through from Sydney?' He asked
I nodded.
'Welcome aboard,' he said, and waved me through.
I sighed with relief and wondered how long it would be until the bar opened.
The reason I was this train in the first place was to cross the Nullarbor Plain.
I had originally intended to make the journey by car, but when I bought a map of the country and started planning the route I realised it would have taken me almost two weeks to get from the Gold Coast to Perth, and then I'd have to turn around and retrace my steps. The length of the drive didn't particularly worry me, but I simply couldn't afford to take all that time off work and I didn't know if my car was up for it. By the time I factored in petrol, food and almost a month's worth of Motel nights it was also starting to look like a pretty expensive exercise.
Flying to Adelaide and hiring a car was also out of the question because by the time I'd either driven the round trip, or paid relocation fees to get the vehicle back from Perth, I would have forked out enough cash to single handedly fund the recovery of the South Korean motor industry.
Then I remembered about the train.
After a few hours of Internet researching, a couple of beers and a number of intimate moments with a calculator and my latest credit card statement I realised I could fly to Sydney, catch the train, first class, to Perth, see the bottom corner of Western Australia and then fly back for less than the cost of 1978 Volvo 240GL.
A day later I'd booked my ticket.
When I woke up at dawn on Monday, October 27 I'd barely slept for two nights and wasn't even half way through the trip, but when I saw the Nullarbor plain starting to take shape outside the window, I felt like was finally on the edge of the 'real' Australia.
I'm not a morning person by any five o'clock shadow of a doubt, and the first glimpse I caught of red dust and saltbush from the window of the train was fairly non-eventful, especially through eyes which were now as red and flat and dusty as the landscape - but it was without doubt the defining moment of the trip. It was the scene I'd been waiting for since I'd seen my first Leyland Brothers documentary, and it was breathtaking.
By the time you get to the edge of the Nullarbor you're in the kind of country that makes visiting city politicians pull out their bush hats and say G'day a lot more than you know they did when they were completing their Rhodes scholarships at Oxford. It's the kind of place you see on TV and identify with sweaty blokes in RM Williams boots. It's the region organisers of opening ceremonies have in mind when they typify rural and regional Australia with song and/or dance and/or pantomime.
It's remote.
But when they call you for breakfast and ask whether you prefer Earl Grey or English Breakfast tea, whether you want your eggs scrambled or friend, and when you look at the table and realise there are five varieties of gourmet jam, three of which containing fruits you never even knew existed, you can't help but feel a little urbane.
The Nullarbor Plain has a history longer, older and more mundane than most land masses in most continents. Roughly 25 million years ago it used to be the floor of the sea. Over time the waves retreated into the Great Australian Bight. Now it looks like what you'd end up with if you had a large flat sea and took the water away. Only redder. And flatter.
Nullarbor is of course Latin for 'where the fuck have all the trees gone', and even if you're a conservative sort you'll have that precise translation running through your head once you arrive at Cook, population two. Cook is actually a very social place - unless you are the pope it's not often you can visit a town for the first time and meet half the population before morning tea.
Cook is most probably named after the Captain who charted the east coast of Australia, but it clearly wasn't inspired by the Royal Navy - it's hot, dry and dusty, and it's a hell of an endeavor to get there.
According to the map the only traffic thoroughfare in Cook is a track which neatly bisects the town. Head north and you travel through the Aboriginal land of Maralinga-Tjaruta and arrive at the Unnamed Conservation Park. Head south and you end up on the Eyre Highway at a point in the middle of nowhere, roughly 2000km from Perth and 2000km from Melbourne.
Although you could count the current population of Cook using your thumbs, the town itself is a lot larger. From memory there are about 20 buildings per person (based on present population statistics). Once upon a time it used to be a thriving little community, but even though I'm sure we were told what it thrived on, I can't for the life of me remember now. I presume it had something to do with trains, because there's nothing much else in the general vicinity.
There's nothing much else in the town now either, except for some basic train refueling and watering infrastructure - although I don't know where the water comes from, because it didn't look like it had rained in Cook since Noah got into boat building, and judging by the broken beer bottles strewn across the desert it didn't look like there'd been much else to drink since.
Even in October, with the Southern Hemisphere's summer still a couple of months away, the heat was astounding. For most of the passengers, myself included, it was their first visit to a real ghost town, let alone an outback Australian ghost town, and everyone was keen to poke around and see what could be found. The answer was a resounding not much.
The thing that really struck me about Cook was the large amount of incidental rubbish strewn hundreds of metres all around the settlement. There was nothing too large or offensive, it was mostly just old beer cans, bottles and small rusting train parts, but the ground was literally covered in most places with this junk. I couldn't believe all those people had been careless enough to just toss their trash onto the stark, and glorious desert landscape. But when I thought about it, the municipal garbage trucks probably only came on the second Thursday of every century, and there weren't any hills, trees or ditches to hide a rubbish tip behind; I guess it had made sense to just throw whatever you were finished with as far as you could. I'll bet you shot put was the most hotly contested event at the Cook primary school athletics carnival.
Still, it was a surprisingly beautiful place. The town had an improbably desolate charm, but you'd have to be a fairly unique sort of person to want to live there. Although you can only look sideways out of a train window, when the Indian Pacific sounded its horn and we got on our way I think everyone wanted to look back at Cook - it would have been like watching a grain of sugar dissolve into a large cup of hot brown tea.
Although there's little to see on the eastern side of Cook, when you start heading west towards Perth it really is an austere vista. You begin wishing you were accompanied by a poet so they could put the view into words, but like so many other places in Australia, it's the people who name the municipalities who are the most cunning linguists, this becomes apparent when you see the first tree on the Nullarbor Plain and realise it's in a town named Forrest.
When you hear people talk about the Nullarbor Plain you tend to get the impression it's a desert wasteland with nothing but a few trillion grains of red sand and a fractionally smaller number of red Kangaroos. It's not until you start getting into the business end of the landscape that you realise the whole thing is actually covered in what a Government audit refers to as 'chenopod and samphire shrublands, mallee and casuarina communities, other shrublands and tussock grasslands'.
While that does sound like an awful lot of plants, when you spread it in small clumps over 200,000 square kilometres, up close it looks about as vegetated as Yul Brynner's scalp. However, in a grandiose case of not being able to see the chenopod for the desert, or the desert for the chenopod, if you look more than 200 meters in any direction all you can see is a sea of faded green - which is probably exactly the way it looked 25 million years ago.
There aren't that many kangaroos either. In the harshest, driest part of the plain west of Cook we didn't see any, and it wasn't until we got near the West Australian border that they started to appear in any great number, bounding along the scant perimeter fences in groups of three or four. This delighted the foreign travelers to no end, most of whom had never seen a kangaroo before, and I have to admit I was pretty excited to be seeing giant red ones the wild, but after the hundredth bouncing marsupial it started to get a bit monotonous.
By about three o'clock in the afternoon a lot of the passengers appeared to getting a bit bored with things as well and were snoozing in their rooms. Of course, the plain wasn't to blame, the bane falls mainly on the train. I'm sure I could have spent days simply staring out the window at what must be the flattest expanse of mother earth in the world, but after spending 48 hours in three rooms, one of them the size of a broom closet, if I didn't do something remotely adventurous soon I was seriously going to have to consider having an afternoon nap.
So I decided to head all the way back to Red Kangaroo class.
The official Great Southern Railways spiel describes Red Kangaroo class like this:
"Travelling on a budget does not have to mean cramping your style. Red Kangaroo Daynighter Seating is in comfortable two abreast reclining arm chairs upholstered in woollen cloth trim. Features include generous leg room, individual reading lights and video entertainment and you can swivel seats around to face each other for a bit of socializing (sic). Toilet and shower facilities are located at the end of each carriage. Towels and soap are provided for all guests. Daynighter Seat guests can enjoy the facilities of the Red Kangaroo Diner, Buffet and Lounge (dress codes apply)." (taken from the official Indian Pacific website )
American travel writer Bill Bryson describes Red Kangaroo class like this:
"Looking up, I discovered with a start that we were in the forbidden coach section. I have never felt so stared at in my life. As we (walked) through the two coach carriages, 124 pairs of sunken eyes sullenly followed our every move. These were people who had no dining carriage, no lounge bar, no cosy berths to crawl into at night. They had been riding upright for two days since leaving Sydney, and still had twenty-four hours to go to Perth. I am almost certain that if we had not had the train manager as an escort they would have eaten us."
.It wouldn't be in the interests of fair and accurate train travelling if I didn't check it out for myself.
The Indian Pacific is just under a kilometre long, so actually getting to Red Kangaroo class is quite a trek in itself. Walking a kilometre is a reasonable enough undertaking in normal circumstances, but when your journey is through 20 moving train carriages with stubborn doors at each end and hallways the width of your shoulders, you need to pack a picnic basket and make sure you go to the toilet before setting out.
I didn't time the journey, but I think I was actually puffing when I reached the locked entrance to some sort of machinery carriage which marked the end of the passenger zone. I was kind of hoping I'd be able to knock on the locomotive door and have a bit of a go at driving (how hard could it be going in a straight line on rails for 400km) but someone had the foresight to make sure people like me didn't get anywhere near the steering wheel (if indeed there is one).
Red Kangaroo class wasn't anywhere near as good or bad as Great Southern Railways and Bill Bryson made it out to be, but I wouldn't want to spend three days there. Apparently I wasn't the first person to have had such thoughts either, because when I started heading back to the Gold Kangaroo section I had the distinct feeling I was being followed. As I'd reach the door at the back of one carriage I'd notice a man in a train uniform just coming through the door at the front. I picked up speed to try and shake him, but his pace gathered too and it became quite clear that we were involved in a good old fashion chase.
I usually have the utmost respect for all relevant authorities, but as we scrambled through the carriages I was reminded of the time the City Rail train revenue protection officials were going to wrongfully arrest me for not having a ticket at Rooty Hill station, even though I hadn't even been on a train and I decided that Karma was now dealing me revenge - I had the chance to get my own back and this man in his satin waistcoast and name tag was going to pay with a brisk walk.
'Hey you!' He finally called out a few carriages later, a little short of breath.
I turned to face him.
'Hmm?' I said, pretending nothing was the matter, smirking.
'Are you supposed to be in this section of the train?' He asked, crossing his arms, dreaming of the promotion he'd receive when his superiors found out he'd stopped an uncouth youth.
'Yeah, I'm in cabin 13G,' I said.
'Oh. OK. Yep,' he said.
And that was the most excitement either of us had that day.
All we had to look forward to now was Kalgoorlie.
It was a dark and stormy night when the Indian Pacific ground to a halt in Kalgoorlie, steam rising from the blackened platform. The rain coursed down the train windows in earnest, as if trying to escape the thunder by hiding under the carriage. Passengers disembarked briskly and scurried to the shelter of the tiny gift shop. Some eyed trinkets for loved ones, others sought only a warm meal and an inert seat. A tall man wearing dark clothes ran up and down the siding, a look of panic marring his chocolate eyes and dimpled chin. He was about to go on a sightseeing tour and had forgotten his camera. Granfield was his name. Not a local boy.
He'd asked the female bus driver not to leave without him. He'd be back in three minutes; wouldn't let her down. He returned, two minutes and fifty five seconds later, puffing, Olympus lens in hand.
'I've saved you a seat,' she said.
'This one here is it?' he replied, pointing to the chair with the steering wheel - her chair. It was a joke. There was a pregnant pause, followed by the laughter of the elderly, bubbling, worn, warm. It was humour they understood. This man knew old people.
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The tour guide was a rough talking (but endearingly charming) 40-year-old Kalgoorlie local who used to drive the giant excavators that lugged ore from the open cut mines on the edge of town and had only recently joined the tourism industry. She had pretty nice legs for a truckie.
We pulled out of the train station at about five kilometers per hour and crawled up the street and around the corner into the center of town without accelerating. It was clearly either the first time she'd seen a wet road, or the first time she'd driven a bus - possibly both. Second gear appeared to be giving her some trouble.
Still, the pace and local insight allowed us to see things that brisker travelers would almost certainly have missed, like the block of land where Alan Bond wanted to build a hi rise in the 1980s. The building where Kmart used to be. The Jacaranda trees under which 'some of the locals like to sit and drink their beverages during the day' - it was riveting stuff and it was a pity the rain outside was causing the windows to fog up. I was sitting on the right hand side of the aisle next to an elderly woman from Brisbane and was being fairly vigilant in wiping it with my sleeve so we could both see out, but the man on the opposite side of the bus didn't seem to care about the condensation, only brushing the window lightly with his bare hand every ten minutes or so and I almost missed seeing the house of former American President Hoover because of his lax attitude to wiping. I wondered if he used the same approach when he went to the toilet and made a mental note not to shake his hand if we were introduced.
After struggling with second gear for the length of Kalgoorlie's main street the driver forgot about it all together and jumped straight to third. The engine quickly realised what was going on, and after threatening to stall for a few awkward metres we suddenly picked up speed and hurtled out of town towards the open cut gold mine, which was the main attraction on this particular tour.
Gold was discovered in the Kalgoorlie region in 1893 by a group of three 50-something miners, led by an Irishman named Paddy Hannan. To be still mining at that age you had to be reasonably unsuccessful or outstandingly committed. These guys were well bestowed with both virtues. They had all been prospecting for some time without finding anything of real value and as a result they had ridden their horses across the desert in the hope of striking it rich in an area east of where Kalgoorlie now stands which was fast filling up with miners and was rumoured to be full of gold - riding a horse into the Australian outback looking for shiny rocks takes a hell of a lot of dedication, but their commitment was nothing compared to their endowment of luck.
As luck would have it their age and transport had left them a fair way behind the rest of the mining pack and on this particular day in June one of the horses decided to do a runner on them. Chasing a horse across the outback wouldn't have been the most enjoyable way to spend an afternoon and the words being plucked from the vocabulary of three old miners would probably have curdled cottage cheese, but at some stage during the search for the missing animal Paddy stumbled across what turned out to be the largest deposit of gold the world has ever seen, and you wouldn't find a bookie who would give you odds against the horse being forgiven.
Not surprisingly the trio set up camp for the evening and abandoned their plans to push on to the area everyone else was headed and within two days they had unearthed 100 ounces of Gold, most of which was lying about on the surface. Paddy wasted no time heading back to the nearby town of Coolgardie to register their find. The news spread rather quickly considering no one had CNN, and within a week 1000 men had arrived in Kalgoorlie looking for somewhere to sink a pick - it ended up being the largest gold rush in Australian history.
Once people started digging seriously they realised there was pretty much an entire square mile of gold lying under the ground and wasted no time in getting it out. Which is why, when I stepped off a tour bus on a stormy October night and stared through a chain mesh fence into a square mile hole in the ground, I wasn't particularly surprised.
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I've never been to the Grand Canyon, but I suspect it looks like a longer, prettier version of the open cut mine at Kalgoorlie. The rain was absolutely pelting down by the time we got there to see it, and nobody from the tour group stayed off the bus longer than the time it took to open and close the shutters on a camera, but everyone agreed it was a pretty good hole. I'd been pretty handy with a trowel and a sandpit when I was five, but this really was a couple of steps up from that.
Once everyone had climbed back onto the bus and shaken themselves dry and I'd placed mental bets on which senior citizen was going to slip on the lino and break a hip first we headed back to town via Boulder. Boulder is Kalgoorlie's sister city, like Tweed Heads and Coolangatta, or Albury and Wadonga, but without a state border. Boulder and Kalgoorlie started off as separate towns, but become congenially joined twins as the population boomed. Each town has a lot of history and apparently plenty of famous people have lived there over the years, the houses of which were pointed out to us as we passed, and it's all very interesting, but it's nowhere near as exciting as the fact that the streets of the towns and the railway station were once literally paved with gold.
It sounds a bit hard to believe, but it makes sense if you think about it. If you're going to have a town you need to build roads and railway platforms and that sort of thing, and to do that you need lots of little rocks to make asphalt and concrete. If you live in the desert and transfer things with horses and carts you're hardly going to be bringing in rocks from somewhere else when there are plenty of them lying underneath your feet. If those rocks happen to be from the area which has the world's richest deposit of gold, chances are, there's going to be some shiny yellow stuff in them.
Obviously the rocks were screened fairly carefully for large nuggets before they were put into the road, but there were always going to be little seams left over which were too small to extract using 19th century technology - so what the town ended up with were streets, and railway platforms full of traces of gold. Which isn't a bad story really. Except it gets better.
You see, as gold processing technology advanced into the 20th century scientists began to figure out ways of getting little traces of gold out of little rocks - presumably by some sort of crushing and melting method. With all the easily findable big chunks of gold now long gone it wouldn't have taken many beers for the locals to start mining the road, and that's exactly what happened. Apparently anyone who could wield a pick began doing so and pretty soon they'd ripped up the streets and the railway platform.
Everything has of course been replaced with concrete and gravel and there's no gold left in the streets, but when we finished the tour and arrived back at the train station more than a couple of people were carefully examining the stone walls of the waiting room, just in case.
The train had apparently made up some time and we were no longer running behind schedule so in order to arrive at Perth at nine in the morning we couldn't leave Kalgoorlie station until after midnight - which left me with two more hours to kill. Only one lounge car was open but it was full of Germans who either didn't speak English, or weren't the least bit interested in talking to me. I realised I hadn't read or heard any news for days and for all I knew Perth might have succeeded from the rest of the country and closed the train lines, so I went and bought a copy of the West Australian newspaper to make sure. Evidently nothing had happened that day, and nothing was happening on the train, so I showered and went off to bed on the Indian Pacific for the last time at ten thirty and a little disappointed.
There were green hills and streams and flowers and houses when I woke up the next morning and the outback was gone - I'm fairly certain it had forgotten about me as well. Perth was now a welcome formality tucked just over the horizon.
The scenery was the kind of undulating temperate farmland I had seen all my life and I wasn't too keen on staring through the looking glass any more, so I spent breakfast time comparing the benefits of Vegemite and Swiss Watches with a lesbian backpacker from Geneva and we both outlined where we were headed once we pulled up in the West Australian state capital.
I told her I was meeting my lady in waiting and we were going down south to Margaret River and Bunbury for some wine tasting before flying back home to the Gold Coast. She had another month left in Australia and still hadn't decided whether to head up to Broome and the Kimberly in the state's tropical northwest, or follow almost everybody else on the train down south to look at wildflowers for a few weeks. I reckoned she should do both and she said she thought she might.
As we entered the outer suburbs of Perth the conversation drifted briefly back to Swiss bank accounts and terrorists before we both went back to our toilets to pack up and prepare to depart.
On return I found that some sort of magic train fairy had left me a certificate stating officially that I had completed the journey on the Indian Pacific. While it was a nice touch (if not half an hour premature), I didn't think it was going to end up on any of my walls. After not cleaning out the waste paper basket since Sydney I was also a little peeved that someone had now not only emptied the bin, but also gone to the trouble of climbing up to the top baggage rack and cleaning out all the train paraphernalia and daily schedules I had been saving up to use as notes - it was probably the guy who had chased me the day before getting his own revenge.
Still, it was a small gripe and if all I had to complain about was a few missing notes and a few missing days of sleep then the journey didn't shape up too badly. I had numerous friends who wouldn't rate a weekend as unless they'd missed at least two days sleep and a proportionate number of bank notes, so by any standard I'd had an absolute ball.
When the train finally stopped in Perth and I realised we were at the end of the line I audibly sighed as the door to cabin 13G shut behind me and squeezed through the corridor for the last time. Stepping down onto the platform I could see the rails beneath the train and realised they were the same ones I'd first sighted more than 4000km, three days and three states ago at Central Station in Sydney. It was the most fantastically romantic length of steel I'd ever seen and I began to get an insight into why so many middle-aged men spent so many weekends building miniature train lines in their backyards, garages and spare rooms. I didn't think I'd ever feel the need to join them though. If the Indian Ocean is Australia's back fence and the Pacific Ocean the front, I had just crossed Australia's backyard on the biggest model railway in the world.
The Indian Pacific has got to be the easiest and most comprehensive way to give this country a big warm hug. Although you don't actually see the Indian or Pacific Oceans (or much water at all for that matter) I can't think of any better way to embrace Australia, its people, and its culture than a bolt across the landscape on the Indian Pacific. It's true that when you travel by train you see the shittiest side of the cities - the dark and seedy underbelly as it's often put - but the graffiti on the factory walls in Redfern is more of an insight into our culture than the opera house, and the kids at the skate park in Rooty Hill are every bit as Australian as the lifeguards in Surfers Paradise or the publicans in the Kalgoorlie Hotel. Then of course there's the stuff out the thrown up by nature: The Nullabor plain, the Blue Mountains, the green and yellow and purple farmlands north of Adelaide, the wildflowers in the Western Australian desert and the saltbush scrub around Broken Hill. You can't see flowers from a plane, and you can't read graffiti in a car (not the best stuff anyway), but if you catch a train across Australia and I think you'll be a lot closer to knowing what makes the country tick.
The food on the Indian Pacific is truly outstanding. It's unique without being too adventurous, arrives quickly, and reflects the kind of diversity you'd expect in a menu spanning a continent. You get to devour just about every kind of mammal, crustacean, bird and fish in the country - only the reptiles are spared. Every person you see is enjoying it too. There was one Canadian traveler who didn't realize cuttlefish wasn't really a fish and was a little put-off to find a pile of white rubber bands on his plate, but apart from him there were no other surprises of the kind you'd find at your nearest Office Works store. I can at this point also confirm after extensive testing with a Swiss chemist, a Perth greenkeeper and a West Australian farmer that two out of three Australians would rather give up chocolate than vegemite if they were forced to choose.
When I was at uni and traveled between the Gold Coast and Sydney every few holidays or so the train was only for people who couldn't afford a plane ticket. Not only that, but the train between the Gold Coast and Sydney was also the train between Northern NSW and Sydney. I have nothing against the people of Northern NSW, in fact they live in one of the most beautiful parts of earth and I envy that, but the people of Northern NSW also smoke 17 times more pot than the rest of Australia and wash their hair at a similarly inversely proportioned rate - which makes for some of the liveliest odours and not so lively conversations you'll ever get to experience in a train carriage. Don't get me wrong, I love Byron Bay as much as the next backpacker, but the people on the Indian Pacific are a completely different breed of traveller.
For a start, it costs about $300 to fly to Perth and $1600 to catch the train - if you are a pensioner, a student, or can sleep un-prone it's a bit less - but anyone with even remote access to a broken calculator could tell you that if you're catching the train to Perth it's because you're either shit-scared of flying, or you've got a bit of a thing for trains. You can of course have too much of a thing for trains, just ask Coca Cola man, but there's something about a first class sleeper cabin, the smell of diesel and a stainless steel toilet the size of Barbie's Jacuzzi that arouses something in people, and they're good people to be around. Nobody yells on the Indian Pacific, nobody fights, nobody complains. Nobody is frightened terrorists will hijack anything nearby, nobody smells bad and nobody looks at you funny. Everybody smiles, everybody backtracks out of the way so you can fit through the corridor and everybody, everybody, starts drinking at ten in the morning. I liked Indian Pacific people. I liked them a lot.
Even though they work 16 hour days and are almost never at home, the staff who work on the Indian Pacific are some of the nicest, friendliest, most hospitable people you're ever going to find. They all seem to love their job, laugh heaps and know what they're talking about. They go to bed after you're asleep and start making your coffee before you wake up. When the train stops they stand in the sun in dark blue uniforms in the desert to make sure you don't get run over by a locomotive or eaten by a snake, and when it takes off again they know what beer you drink and most importantly, what your bar tab number is.
Hotel bars (as opposed to pub bars) are usually pretty boring places, full of lonely businessmen and locals with no friends and no taste in music. The bar on the Indian Pacific is full of travelers exactly like you. You're all there to have a good time, you all had no sleep the night before, you all love the train, you all want to chat about stuff and you all have something interesting to say. Better still, this bar has a view of Australia on both sides of the room and it's cool to drink at 10.00 in the morning.
The trip is hailed as one of the world's great train journeys and it is, but the Dolly Parton, John Denver, Michael Bolton and Tommy Emmanuel rubbish they pump through the stereo is truly shameful. Bill Bryson refers to the soundtrack selections as 'Party Time in the Nursing Home' and 'Songs you hoped you'd never hear again', and he is absolutely spot-on. With the breath-taking Australian outback providing the visuals, it awful and down-right embarrassing that holiday makers from around the globe can't hear something better. I'm not asking for Nirvana, but what about The Waifs, or Paul Kelly, or Something For Kate, or Slim Dusty for heavens sake. Whoever chose the music needs to be dropped off somewhere between Cook and Kalgoorlie with nothing but a Walkman and the best of Dolly Parton collection to have a little think about what they've done. Although they'd probably enjoy that.
The Indian Pacific journey is not one continuous trip across Australia, it is a trip from Sydney to Adelaide and a trip from Adelaide to Perth. They trains are based in Keswick Terminal in South Australia and when you get there on the second afternoon from Sydney (or the third afternoon from Perth) the crew swap over, the train gets cleaned and people with walkie talkies who mustn't have been good enough to work at an airport drive around the place on yellow go karts handling baggage and looking official. Like the other hundred or so people who've been to Adelaide before and figured $16.50 was to much to pay for a guided bus tour, I figured I'd go for a bit of a walk in the greater train station region, grab a bite to eat at the café and perhaps have a snooze in my berth. Oh how wrong I was. Had I checked my map a bit more carefully I would have realized that Keswick Terminal is not just a jump skip and hop away from Victoria Square. It is a train yard in the middle of an ugly industrial estate, backing onto a cemetery and a highway. I tried walking to the city to kill some time, and I could of if I really felt like it, but I didn't really feel like it (see worst thing about the Indian Pacific #3) and after my 15min hike up a featureless arterial road was rewarded with an expansive view of concrete netball courts my will to go on was diminished to the point of return. When I got back the train was locked and I couldn't get my stuff. They could have at least have told me we were parking in a shithole for a few hours. Oh, and when they were cleaning the train they didn't even empty my rubbish bin.
Even though the journey is technically pretty flat and smooth, from a small bunk bed it feels like you're in the back of a Toyota troop carrier crossing a parking lot full of speed humps built by blind people trying to write the bible in asphalt braille. By the end of the trip the dark swaying cabin has an almost maternal feel, but for the first night it's pretty hard to warm to. I reckon anyone who goes from Sydney to Perth in the overnighter seats deserves to go for free just for having the balls to give it a shot.
Not everyone wants to have breakfast at six in the morning and you'd think that people smart enough to build a train which can carry 250 people across the continent would also have enough wire left over to build a public address system that allows the addresser to select which addressees are addressed. Instead, when it's time for the six o'clock people to have breakfast, everybody on the train gets to hear about it, really, REALLY loudly. The people that have breakfast at six o'clock also have dinner at six o'clock and look at you funny when you walk through their dining car on the way to the bar, even though six o'clock, as everyone knows, is in fact beer o'clock. These six o'clock people are issued with a maroon card. I call them the maroon card people and I don't like them.
Whenever the Indian Pacific stops at a station there always at least two or three people with video cameras there ensuring the moment is captured forever on film. A few times at railway crossings in the middle of nowhere I looked out the window to see my every movement, bowel and otherwise, being taped by an idiot with a raincoat and a silly hat. In Adelaide while I was waiting for the train to board a man wearing an official 'Coca Cola Memorabilia Club of South Australia' jacket (and matching bag) started ranting wistfully to me about the train. When I told him I was in fact a passenger on said locomotive he touched me in the way a Catholic might embrace said Virgin. The sad thing is, only people like Coca Cola man are ever going to end up reading this.
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