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Myth buster
It takes just two and three quarter hours to fly from Perth to Adelaide, but more than thirty to complete the return journey by road, that is if you do it in a Kenworth rig hauling three big trailers stuffed to the gunnels with plasma televisions, computers and other electronic goods for cashed or credited-up Western Australians.
This is big country, theirs a big rig and this was a big journey across the Nullabor Plains over two nights and one day, but if that was a big trip, think on this; our friends and former neighbours, Terry and Barbara Anderson do a return journey from Perth to Sydney every week. Four thousand miles each way leaving Perth on a Tuesday night and getting back late on the Sunday night, or in this case at 2.30am Monday morning. Each drives a four hour shift while the other sleeps, or at least tries to as much as you can while their rig, with its tyre pressure three times that of a car, bounces, kangaroo-like, across a pot-holed continent.
To get some perspective, this rig has eighteen forward and three reverse gears, its four fuel tanks hold 2600 litres of diesel all up and at one stop we took on board $1900 worth. The return journey between Perth and Sydney consumes around $5,000 worth of diesel, their truck has clocked up 1.3 million kilometers but has an expected life of 4 million, the whole shooting box weighs more than seventy tonnes, is almost 40 percent the length of a rugby field and its twelve axles support wheels with tyres worth up to $800 each. This is statistics city and it would be easy to be overwhelmed, but we aren’t and cannot afford to relax; the roads across the Nullabor are so narrow in places that these huge beasts pass each other at 90kph with only 12 inches or more between them.
At more than 4.3 metres tall and with its three trailers this Kenworth is described as a long vehicle in South Australia and a road train in Western Australia. The cab has a small living room, the ceiling is at least 7 foot high, and there are two bunks, a fridge, cupboards and even a little cooker. What a life? Barbara, a superb and generous cook at home, plans this trip with precision. Cornflakes, fruit salad and yoghurt for breakfast, meatballs and lasagna for lunch and mince for dinner, there are chocolate treats to keep driver and passengers alert, and then there is the curious custom, once sated, of watering the wheels; while women use roadhouse toilets, men engage in the selfless art of cooling the tyres.
The Nullabor itself is hard to describe. Never ending with flat, short, scrubby bushes as far as the eye can see, a huge sky, bright stars, straight roads and trucks. Dozens of them, but only a few cars and camper vans, many home built. There are roadside trees decorated with shoes, bras and underpants, there is the occasional farm, more trees, and then the nutters of which there are a few. We passed a man pushing a wheel barrow carrying a life size brown bear, he had been on the road for weeks, a lone cyclist in the middle of nowhere, apparently without water or pannier bags for supplies, and a woman in pink walking across the plains raising money for cancer. Then there were the chaps in a tractor towing a mud-splattered caravan, and cops checking permits, driving licenses and running alcohol tests; it was as well I had banned my hosts from drinking while driving.
From Ceduna at one end of the Nullabor to Norseman at the other is 1,000 kilometers, in between only an occasional roadhouse with petrol pumps, greasy overpriced food and souvenirs the price for which a small mortgage is required. And a golf course. Billed as the longest in the world, the eighteen holes of the Nullabor links stretch 1400 kilometers along the Eyre Highway, from Ceduna to Kalgoorlie, and is billed as par 71 or par 72 course depending on which guide you read.
There were a few myths shattered on this trip, the first being that Kangaroos exist in the wild. No matter what may be claimed to the contrary, they do not. No question about it. We had been told by almost everyone that Kangaroos are plentiful, unavoidable and every day hazards, menacing innocent cars by bounding unexpectedly onto highways and being left as road kill for the eagles, dingoes and crows to devour and complete the eco-cycle.
But that was not our experience; previously when venturing north there were none to be seen and the same south. This time, east to west, day time, night time and dusk, not a single solitary one, except for Mitch, a tame thumb-sucking marsupial and its Joey at the roadhouse it shares with American space junk. Legends that the outback roads are paved with the bones Roos are just that, legends, perhaps even stories from the dreamtime.
But if that was a shattering discovery, what about this? There is no wrestling through eighteen forward and three reverse gears, doubling d' clutch, graunching cogs and fighting a recalcitrant gearstick here, these rigs are automatic with a dinky little push-button box on the dashboard for the manual override. But what's worse, and I saw with my own eyes, is that modern truckers wear slippers while driving. This is without a word of a lie and there was only one question to be asked; where have all the real men gone?