A Week Where Nobody Was

We turned south out of Hebel with the border country opening flat and wide ahead, and made one small concession to tourism before the day was done. Lightning Ridge sat just off our line, a town famous around the world for its black opal, and it felt wrong to pass so close without at least laying eyes on the place. So we turned off, drove in, and rolled slowly through the streets, Grammy's van holding station behind us in the mirrors. We did not stop. A look was enough. Touristy things had never really been our thing, and there was something almost satisfying in the honesty of it: we drove through, said we had done it, turned around and headed back out the way we had come.

The drive itself settled into a rhythm of two animals. Emus stalked the paddocks in twos and threes, all neck and indignation, and wild goats grazed the road edges in scruffy mobs, lifting their heads as the convoy rumbled past. If the country out here belonged to anything, it belonged to them.

Google Maps, meanwhile, was having one of its days. We were tracking toward a campsite just north of Walgett when we realised the town itself was nearly upon us. For reasons known only to itself, the app wanted us to drive an extra seven kilometres in, negotiate a roundabout, perform a U-turn and come all the way back out again. We declined. A U-turn of our own on the empty highway solved the problem in about ten seconds, and we doubled back to the turn-off we had almost sailed past.

The track in wound through river red gums, and we watched it carefully as we went. Rain was forecast sometime in the coming week, and this was black soil country again, the kind that turns to glue under a wheel and holds a bus fast until it decides to let go. We wanted to know, before we committed, that whatever fell we could still get out. The spot itself we had picked from photos on WikiCamps, and for once the photos had undersold it.

Compared with every other camp on this leg, the place was deserted, probably because of that slightly harder track in. No grey nomads, no ring of caravans, no generators muttering into the evening. Just us, the trees and the river, our two vehicles settled in among the gums on the banks of the Barwon, the water sliding past brown and unhurried on its long journey toward the Darling.

We were closer to the highway than we would have liked. Trucks rumbled over the bridge within sight of camp, a low thunder that rolled through the trees at intervals all day. But by about eight each night they thinned to nothing, and the dark that followed belonged entirely to the river: the slap of water against a snag, something small moving through the leaf litter, the cold pressing in at the edges of the fire. During the days Anth collected firewood, dragging back fallen limbs with bark that left its dust on his sleeves, and we cooked on the Pomoly almost every day, the smell of woodsmoke settling into our clothes and hair until it simply became the smell of us. Dinner tasted faintly of the fire it was cooked on, which is to say it tasted right. A few people came and camped around the bend during the week, but nobody where we were. We had no visitors at all, and did not miss them.

Being a remnant pocket of forest, the birdlife was prolific. Not the great shrieking flocks of cockatoos we had grown used to further north, but small birds everywhere: flickers and chatter in the understorey, quick shapes working the bark of the red gums, a dawn chorus that arrived each morning before the light did. It was a different register of birdsong, closer and busier, the sound of a place still doing what it had always done.

The rain came, as promised. It fell, moved on, and the track dried out behind it, and with that the last small worry of the stay dissolved. When we eventually had to leave, we knew we would make it out easily.

One day we got the bikes down for a small explore, nothing huge, just a couple of kilometres looping through the remnant forest. There were campsites everywhere, good ones, tucked among the trees along the river, and in all of them only one other person. A whole quiet world, barely used.

After a week we decided to head off. We were on a schedule again, the calendar tugging at us the way it does, making sure Sal got to Melbourne in time for her workshop. So out we went along the dried track and into Walgett: a quick resupply at the expensive IGA, a pickup and post at the post office, a refuel, and then the highway south again. Behind us the Barwon went on sliding past the empty campsites, brown and unhurried, keeping a schedule no workshop could touch. We had somewhere to be. The river, as ever, did not. the Barwon and its red gums sliding away behind us.Read more