Peter Be Sensible

Our sole breakfast companion in Norseman was a slightly odd woman who was waiting for the mail. She mentioned it 3 times. It’s all she could talk about. You’ve heard of Lost In Space, the intergalactic version of Gilligan’s Island. Well, this woman was Marooned In Norseman. Waiting for the mail. I do hope it arrived.

We refuelled, our first need for a top-up since Perth, and we dialled up the cruise control for Balladonia, where Skylab crashed to earth in 1979. A surprising large piece of it is in the museum located within the roadhouse. You pay nothing to see a room full of meat coolers, Singer sewing machines, the spacecraft fragment and a lovely display of racial stereotyping by way of a stuffed camel and what is supposed to be an Arabian man standing next to it. Paying fine attention to detail, the mannequin’s now-decaying cloth face was painted a dark coffee brown.

Balladonia, broadly speaking, is the western end of the Nullarbor Plain. There are signs about proclaiming its starting and end points, but really, it’s a bit like Madonna’s Dream…no end and no beginning…

It’s also the beginning of the longest section of straight road in Australia, 90 miles in our old imperial language.

All but truckies and seasoned travellers see it as an essential photo stop. One other bloke in his camper van had the same idea as us, but used his drone for the photography. Now, that’ll be a thing for another time. We did mill about a bit, and he became a little impatient with our presence, motioning us to get out of the way of his picture. You meet some weirdos out here.

The Eyre Highway gets some rare elevation by way of the Madura Pass, just heading into, well, Madura. As a tourist, you’d spend perhaps 15 minutes there for a bit of photography at the lookout before cranking up a bit of zippedy-doodah action and getting on the road again. The higher ground is seen to your left for quite some time after the roadhouse stop. The stop’s essential for rest reasons, even if you do shell out $4 for a make-it-yourself Nescafe Blend 43.

At the end of Day 2, we reached the WA/SA border. We danced around crazily in the wild purplish grey sunset colours enclosing the Roadhouse at Border Village, our stop for the night. The corporate Shell colours mixed their brightly illuminated reds and yellows perfectly against the sky, and a gigantic fibreglass kangaroo added a little comedic incongruity for us tourists.

Here is where you get an appreciation of the sheer industry and scale of keeping this country moving. There’s virtually unlimited space for road trains to park, unlimited space for them to turn, and unlimited facilities to keep their drivers fed and comfortable. Us, not so. There’s no competition here, so the motels are a little dusty, and they get the greatest possible mileage – a recurring theme in this part of the country – out of the equally dusty bed linen.