Great Red Land

Three and a Half Weeks Off-Grid in the Aussie Bush

When I left the UK, autumn had the Suffolk coast well and truly in its blustery grip. The country was wrapping itself up and closing in for the dark months. I arrived in Australia three days later to see chicks being born, flowers opening, and the days lengthening. I’m the other side of the planet, two hours shy of the International Date Line. Shadows fall a little differently here, the sun sets a deep shade of red, and the moon looks positively alien! This is another Earth, and yet the same one.

A different Earth…

I touched down in Adelaide on the back of a two-day continental odyssey that had taken me up the Great Wall of China and down again, before dropping me from a great height into this Great Southern Land. A little lady picked me up, dazed yet restless, from the airport. Annie my host, had the dubious pleasure of being shorter even than I, and I chuckled at her dirt-stained trousers.

“I considered them clean,” she guffawed.

“Yeah, I remember in Spain whenever I went into town from my mountain, I’d feel like everyone had been sterilised! My feet and hands were always tinged brown,” I replied.

Annie laughed like I do. Loud and full, unashamed to enjoy life. Hauling myself into her trusty old Ford truck, I smiled at the prevailing dust. We drove off through the star-spattered night. Houses and street lights soon petered out as we belted through a Nowhere that was Everywhere. The road went on and on.

“We’re coming to B. Blink and you miss it!” said Annie about two hours later. I blinked and missed it. Later, by daylight, I would realise why. The “town” consisted of about three run-down buildings and a few ancient scrapped trucks that appeared to have been pulled straight out of the Midwest.

The night was now punctured by a morass of illuminated shrubs. They crowded at the road edges as if they were trying to grab a view. Suddenly there was a flash as something crashed through them onto the road. Annie hammered the brake. I watched a deer-sized mammal bounce, yes bounce, past the headlights.

“Agh, damn roos! I hate it at night. They’re suicidal,” said Annie. I turned and gripped her arm. “Oh my God! A kangaroo? I’ve only been here two hours and I’ve already seen a kangaroo!” I pressed my nose to the glass, half hoping, half not hoping another would appear.

“Welcome to Goyder’s Line,” said Annie. “This is where the rain stops falling. We get about 250 mm of the stuff a year.”

A stumpy-tailed or sleepy lizard.

Goyder’s Line

Unknown to some, Adelaide wasn’t built on the back of convicts, and South Australia was a British colonial province which was settled by choice (at least on the part of the new immigrants). Back in the early days of the white man and woman, the farmers needed some sort of guide as to where they could farm. So in 1865 a can-do (and presumably very saddle-sore) fellow called George Goyder hopped on his horse and trotted something like 3200 kilometres to chart the boundary between the areas that received decent rainfall, and those that were prone to drought. The line demarcating the two is now known as Goyder’s Line. It’s a fascinating scrubland edge where a small rabble of aberrant folk, and a much larger rabble of wildlife, have absconded to escape the manifold ills of modern society.

On Goyder’s line the soil is red, the sky is blue, and the mallees, acacias, and blue bush that swim over the landscape are a generous flotsam of aquamarine. It’s a marvellous palette, invigorated further by luminous green parrots, the pink breasts of the cockatoos, and the gentle strum of grasshoppers.

I didn’t know any of this that first night though. The truck slowed in a cloud of dust, and Annie jumped (from quite a height) to open the gate to her land. As the headlights hit the arcing mallee branches, all I could think was...hmm, I guess there are a fair few critters around here.

The colour palette.

On the Edge

Goyder’s line is an edge. Now, I love edges. I’m never more at home than when wriggling around the in-between. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a certain tremor of anticipation running down the back of my neck at the thought of hunkering down in the middle of effing nowhere, on some random fringe of the outback, with someone I’d literally just met who happened to be called Annie…Remember that name from somewhere?

When we Poms on our little northern island talk about this massive hunk of southern land that is Australia, it’s usually to discuss the various ways we could die: deadly spiders, venomous snakes, jellyfish that sting you once and leave you gurgling in agony as you sink beneath the waves, leg-chewing crocodiles, baby-nicking dingoes, and sharks that munch on surfers like canapes. The possibility for calamity is endless. Thus for the first time in my entire life, I’d actually bought travel insurance.

I thought about that insurance as I pulled my rucksack into the caravan that was to be my home for the next month. Especially as the door had been replaced by a curtain, through which many things far larger than a king brown could easily slide, crawl, or jump.

“You should be fine,” said Annie.

It was the word “should” my mind stuck to, like red clay to a boot.

I hope I don’t need these!

Sunlight

The next morning I awoke, somewhat amazed I hadn’t been stung or bitten or mauled. But more amazing still was how well I’d slept. Yes, my body was still loping about ten hours behind my soul, trying to catch up. But as I rolled over in my surprisingly comfortable bed and stared out through the caravan windows, I knew Annie’s place was special. The sunlight illuminated the land in front of me. There was nothing as far as the eye could see, and there was also everything.

As I blinked, a bird piped up with the most beautiful song I’d ever heard—a chirrup so rich and syrupy that for a moment I thought I was in a rainforest. One look outside proved I was far from rain. Red dust pathways stretched between green-blue tufts of bush, and as the mallees swayed in the breeze, the land began to speak. It wasn’t a whisper. It wasn’t a shout or a gurgle. Here the land chortled for joy, which was something I simply hadn’t banked on at all. This was a desert. It ought to have been a harsh, unforgiving kind of a place, but it wasn’t. It was colourful, chirpy and very alive.

My beautiful morning singer was a shrike thrush, and she was to be my daily wakeup call. Even a “not a morning person” like me was enthralled by the shrike thrush. She was one of many gorgeous winged beings I’d encounter in Annie’s wonderland. I had two green parrots that would drink from my water bucket and forage in the garden next door, and cockatoos would yabber and squawk in the evenings in the trees above.

Sunset.

There’s so much I could say about that time on Goyder’s line. The sheer amount of wildlife I encountered has scored magnificent trails in my memory that I’ll wander down until the day I die: herds of emus, necks dipped in watering holes, fat sleepy lizards chugging across the road like small crocodiles, and the kangaroos...

One evening as we drove down the road, the sun setting crimson over the plain, I saw about twenty or thirty kangaroos. Some stood gaping at us, front paws hanging in front of them, others were neck down grazing, then suddenly they all turned and jumped away at great speed across the field. It was one of the most impressive sights I’ve witnessed, these huge red and grey furry beasts hopping (they can reach a good 60kph) over the russet land, leaving a haze of dust in their wake.

Kangaroo.

Fear and ignorance always go hand in hand. Name any country on the planet and there’s an accompanying horror story about it. While these tales may have a grain of truth in them, it’s pretty much just that. A grain. Any horror story is a narrow periscope trained on one tiny mote of dust in the great wonderland of reality.

I never used my travel insurance, of course. I never saw a single snake in fact, nor was I bitten by a white-tip spider on the composting toilet. The land herself was so kind to me, so welcoming, generous, and vibrant, and after a month walking through the mallees and touching the red dirt, I knew we’d forged a bond.

On my last evening at Annie’s, I was ambling to the far edge of the land, dusk settling onto the tufted mallee heads. A sadness had set up camp in the back of my heart, because although I still had almost a month left in Australia, I knew nothing would compare to this. It was then I realised that I hadn’t seen the green parrots for a while. Pausing under a large old mallee tree, I wondered where they had gone. In my mind’s eye and voice, I reached out for those delightfully raffish birds.

“Ah, visit me tomorrow morning before I leave, my friends,” I whispered.

Now, this will seem like the stuff of Disney, but hand on heart, it’s true. Seconds later, I turned to see two birds flying over the horizon. They soared overhead, circled, and returned to land on the very tree I was standing under! The two green parrots. There they perched, swaying in the evening breeze, their bright green backs twinkling among the eucalyptus leaves.

The green parrots.

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Annie’s wonderland is an incredible place, made all the more so by Annie herself. I’m immensely grateful to her for organising this adventure, for supporting me, and accommodating me for the duration. I shall be writing a full article about her and her unbelievable project in The Mud Home this coming month.

Relevant Links:

• The shrike thrush call

• The land of parrots

I’m posting more photos, audios and videos about this adventure for supporters of my work on both Patreon and paid subscribers here on Substack.