Journey into desert time

In 1984 the train from Melbourne to Adelaide, the Overlander, boasted carriages from an era when train travel was romantic — real leather seats, ornate latticed luggage racks, polished wood paneling, decorative pressed metal on every other surface and a particular acrid aroma of adventure, history and years of metal against metal friction — you could imagine the cast from an Agatha Christie tale to elegantly making their way down the aisle as you took your seat at Spencer Street.

Traveling overnight, the following morning I would be Adelaide, where I would have a few hours to kill before a connecting bus would take me north of the South Australian capital on the Spencer Gulf to Australia's longest railway platform at Port Pirie. From there, I would board the New Ghan — as it was then known — destination: Alice Springs.

It was not my first trip to Alice Springs; a year earlier I had flown up to visit my father for a week as a 17th birthday present from him. Dad was a virtual stranger who had called the Alice home for almost a decade, moving north just after I had last visited him at the Riverland town of our mutual birth. I had not been sure I would recognise him as I made my way across the tarmac to a crowd corralled like livestock in front of an unimposing shed that declared itself in signage to be: ALICE SPRINGS AIRPORT. As I searched the unfamiliar faces behind the fence, a stocky stern featured man in knee socks and shorts waved to me and called out, "What'cha think ya wearing girl?" before wrapping me in an awkward embrace as I passed through the gate.

I had made the pink and blue Madras cotton check pleated miniskirt and crop top and matched it with fluro pink ankle socks and red short stiletto sling-back winklepickers. This was — by my standards — a practical travel outfit perfect for the outback heat. My father begged to differ and sometime later confided he had been tempted not to claim me.

Twelve months later I was returning to the Centre by more terrestrial means. The train had been an economic choice by my father who financed my trip, but one I did not resent as it provided me with a few days to acclimatise physically and psychologically to the desert — essential for a girl more used to the temperate climes of southern Victoria.

The train trip also gave me a chance to acclimatise my dress sense. Even as I left Port Pirie I still sported the rags that had taken me several days to plat and sew into my hair and an outfit that made me look much like a ratty rag doll. A look that was well and good for St.Kilda, but as the made its way north it dawned on me that perhaps that was not the way I should look when my father came to meet the train. One by one I disentangled the rags from my hair, though my father would be far less disapproving of the latter look, my unwashed mop was not dissimilar to a sheep's fleece just before the shearer did his job. There was no way to rectify this situation with a shampoo before reaching Alice Springs though.

The original Ghan, named after the Afghan camel trains of the previous century, was still fresh in popular memory; it had been a famously unpredictable ride, sometimes taking over a week to reach its destination either from sudden desert floods covering the tracks or the heat taking its toll on the internal workings of the locomotive.

I gazed out the window at the vast planes of patchy blue-grey salt bush and small twisted eucalypt scrub — the service track that ran parallel to the line was a scar of orange-red dust. Ever changing — always the same. Alien — strangely familiar.

I had been raised in the rolling green hills of West Gippsland, but my older brothers had remained with my father after our parents separation. My eldest brother Don was gifted story teller; when he spoke of the desert I could taste the dust and smell the heat. For him, everything about the desert was beautiful and imbued with adventure. As a child I had greedily listened to Don as he enthused at length about the birds, animals and landscape around Alice Springs; tales of the exotic land where he had spent most of his teen years. How different — I thought — his life was from mine. Don never rode on the Ghan though.

Unlike the Overlander, the New Ghan was just a few years old; the train as well as the tracks that had been moved from, or raised above, the salt planes that became shallow lakes when a periodic super wet season in tropical Queensland caused normally dry rivers to flow again across state lines and flooded the desert.

In April small white fluffy clouds teased the desert by day, I supposed they had formed by sucking up what was left of the tropical wet season run off; there was no danger of precipitation. The desiccated air absorbed any drop long before it reached the earth; still the clouds made for glorious sunsets and gave me something else to look out at.

At the end of each carriage where passengers boarded the train, cut off from the main part by a door that was meant to keep travellers comfortably air conditioned, smokers congregated. The top half of the door opened up the same as a barn door. Although a non-smoker, I found standing by the opening an exhilarating experience. After a day, air conditioned or not, the carriage became stuffy.

The journey was meant to take about a day and a half, but on that trip we had a taste of the old Ghan as the overheated engine crawled along at walking pace in the scorching desert, sometime pulling to a complete halt so the engine could recover. This was a lesson about desert time; you can't hurry if you want to survive the desert, even machines had to acquiesce to its power.

Twenty-four hours late, the Ghan finally rolled through a narrow gap in the Macdonnell Ranges into Alice Springs station where I was greeted by my father who made no comment on my appearance. Instead we made jokes about the new engine having been possessed by the old train; no-one was worried, upset or anguished; we were on desert time.