The Pumpkin We Carried South

Town days are a transaction. We hand over a morning, sometimes a whole day, and in exchange the bush lets us come back with full cupboards and full tanks. Some travellers love a town for its own sake, and good luck to them. For us Dubbo was a list, and every line crossed off it brought the trees a little closer.

We divided and conquered. Sal and Grammy took the groceries while Anth chased the post office and the scattered handful of supplies that always seem to live at opposite ends of any town. The bus zigzagged across Dubbo, back and forth, sometimes retracing its own route entirely. A bite to eat, diesel in the tank, water topped up, and the town finally let us go. By then the afternoon was leaning towards evening. Our camp lay forty-five minutes away according to the GPS, which meant an hour. Five and a half tonnes of bus does not like to be rushed, and we stopped asking it to long ago.

The turn off the Newell felt like a held breath released. Wanda Wandong, in Goobang National Park: of every camp on this run south, the only one that overlaps the first trip, that January of 2024 when the whole country still lay ahead of us and we barely trusted the life we had chosen. We pulled in not quite on dark and did a slow lap of what remained. School holidays. We had to laugh at ourselves. Our children are adults now, one in a van of her own, one just off a New Zealand trail, and the school calendar that once governed everything has become a foreign country. These days we discover term dates the way we discovered them that evening, by arriving at a national park full of other people's children. Still, the sites were spaced well apart, and we took the best of what was left.

That night we finally ate the pumpkin. It had ridden with us since Maidenwell, our very first stop after Grammy's, pressed into our hands by a generous fellow traveller before the trip had properly begun. For a month it travelled quietly aboard, ripening at its own pace while the country outside turned from red dust to river gums and the nights grew teeth. Into the instant pot it went, then the blender, and out came the most amazing pumpkin soup: thick, sweet, steaming against the cold air, the bus smelling of it for hours. A stranger's kindness from the start of the leg, finishing its journey in our bowls a month down the road. Exactly the thing for the weather.

We gave the first site two nights. It sat in shade, and though we chased the sun's patches through the trees with the portable panels, shifting them every hour like slow sundials, the cold settled in beneath the canopy and would not leave. So we moved, to the exact spot we had camped in that first summer. Full sun, and full earshot of the holiday children a site or two over. An acceptable trade, we all agreed, mostly while standing in the sunshine with our eyes shut.

The memory of that summer stay kept surfacing. Same clearing, different weather, different people standing in it. In January 2024 we had sweated through a washing day here and kept a respectful distance from the biggest redback either of us had ever seen. We were sixteen days into this life then, still checking over our shoulders for the catch. Now we came back in jumpers and beanies, two and a half years of road behind the bus, and the same clearing held us as easily in winter as it had in heat.

A trail map promised a ten kilometre loop, and from camp the country looked flat in every direction, so we called it easy and got the bikes down. The trail had other ideas. It ran out to fifteen kilometres and found every hill the horizon had been hiding, and our legs, soft from a slow winter, were honest with us about it. We worked hard. Conversation thinned out on the climbs. But rolling back into camp, sweat cooling on our backs, the satisfaction was out of all proportion to the distance, the way it always is when a thing asks more of you than advertised and you pay anyway.

Then, over a few days, the park emptied. The holiday families packed down one by one, the noisy children beside us among the first to go, and quiet moved back in behind them like water finding its level. Everyone was heading north, chasing the warmth up the map in the great winter migration. We watched them go and decided to stay a few extra days precisely because they had. Soon only one other camper remained, a single tent far off through the trees.

We were heading the other way, of course. South, into the winter, against the whole tide of sensible traffic. But the arithmetic suited us: every week from here the camps would grow quieter, the firewood would matter more, and the fire would pull our three chairs in a little closer. That evening it had the clearing almost to itself, smoke rising straight into the still dark, and the last tent's light small among the trees.Read more