2006/08 Australia trip - Nullarbor Plain |
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We set off early on a sunny morning, expecting to put on lots of miles across the Nullarbor Plain on the Eyre Highway. Early on, we came to the “90 mile straight”, the longest piece of straight road in Australia. Most of the desert roads are straight anyway, so this wasn’t very exciting. There are no towns for hundreds of miles, just the occasional road station. Much of the Nullarbor lives up to its name, but there were only a few places on the road where we couldn’t see a tree.
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Nullabor blue-tonque (4.31) |
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Mostly the road passes through sparse bush with straggly acacia trees and plentiful wildlife: roos, birds, and “shingle backs”, fat, 
foot-long skinks. I don’t know what their official name is but I’ve heard them called “blue tongues”, “shingle backs”, and “stumpy tails”, and they had all of these characteristics. Unfortunately, they have a suicidal need to creep across the highway. Their response to a threat is an open-mouthed hiss and a flash of their blue tongues, but that doesn’t save them from road trains, and the road is littered with their flattened bodies as well as those of dead roos.
Up in the Tropics it seemed that every other vehicle was towing a caravan. Down here in the frozen south there were few caravans and every other vehicle was a road train, as this is the only practical road between Perth and the cities of Australia’s south east.
The Nullarbor runs from Western Australia through a series of road stations and into South Australia. This area has an unofficial time zone called “Central Western Australia”, 45 minutes ahead of the rest of the state, but don’t bother trying to configure your computer to that one in Windows! In a short time we crossed into South Australia, a further 45 minutes ahead.
We were now in the Nullarbor national park. At that point the highway runs close to the coast. We stopped to look at the view towards Antarctica, over the Great Australian Bight, part of the Southern Ocean. We found that the ground there was covered with mats of bright purple noon flowers, known for some reason to the locals as “pig faces”.
It was a warm evening and we couldn’t leave such a beautiful spot so we parked on the clifftop and watched the sun go down. We could still see the lights of the far-off road trains, but the waves crashing far below us were the dominant sound over the ocean. A strong north wind came up in the evening, threatening to blow 
our chairs into the sea. We were grateful that it was coming from the warm desert rather than from Antarctica.
As we’d crossed into the state we’d seen a warning that there is a fruit-fly quarantine checkpoint at Ceduna, so all our remaining veggies went into the pot for dinner.