1.             Plenty Flying Fish

Plenty Highway, Northern Territory

Urandangie. You need to spell it correctly. The first two syllables could be misleading. Many find delight in visiting these tiny outposts, far from maddening crowds. You wonder how people can live their lives in such isolation?

In the 1930s it boasted almost 400 residents. The town served as a trading centre for stations in the area and travelers along the stock routes. Population in 1960: 21; number of buildings: 14; number of humpies: forgot to count. As someone said: Planning for a trip to Urandangie? Step one: Forget it.

It had electricity — as long as you had your own generator. It had a pub and a police station. It had a cemetery: its population dwarfed that of the town. It gave an insight into the history of this tiny town, over 200 kms from Mount Isa.

Small? Indeed. Urandangie is surrounded by the million-hectare Headingly Station, which had a working population of over 30. Like so many settlements (why don’t we call them villages?) in the west, blink and you’d miss it. Yet another cattle grid; a few derelict cars rusting away along the fence and you have arrived.

The heart of the town was the Urandangie pub. Bougainvillea crept around the sagging verandah.  A hitching rail outside used to provide a spot to tether your horses, but even in those days you did not hitch 4WDs to hitching rails.

Dogs lounged in the bar. One slept on one of the stools. Hygiene? Next question? We had one of our own: Deefa. He was along for the ride. We needed a snake dog. He belonged to my friend Lawrence. Deefa was a blue heeler. Mixed with Dingo. Deefa? D for dog.

We planned to take the Plenty Highway to Alice Springs — 850 kilometres away. Ours was to be a two-car convoy: for safety. Along the entire route there were no facilities. We carried enough fuel, food and water to last us for our three-day journey. We had bought our fuel back in Mt Isa. In Urandangie, it cost lots more

Why had we chosen the Plenty Highway? We could have gone north towards Camooweal and take the far better Sandover Highway. Both led across the no-man’s lands of the eastern half of the Northern Territory before reaching the Stuart Highway. Why take the harder route? We were driving a Land Rover and a Jeep. What could go wrong?

We spent the evening relaxing and going over our plans. Occasionally we’d duck out to the back yard and look west. Nothing much was happening in the front of the pub: out the back door saw a little action. Goats and chooks scratched around amongst rusting machinery.

Grass? None: the drought was biting.  The publican assured us that during the floods when the Georgina bursts its bank, the place becomes an inland sea. The locals sit on the verandah and see the turgid mud of the flood but dream of rivers of flowing blue water.

We set off after a breakfast of tea, eggs (from the hotel’s chooks) and bully beef fried with bubble and squeak: leftovers from the previous night’s vegies (spuds and punkin {sic}) and t-bone.

The track to our first point — Lake Nash — led north-west through Headingly Station. Signposts? No. The publican at Urandangie had given us a mud map drawn on newspaper. He had marked a couple of rivers in blue crayon. It would have been more useful had we had a topographic map. No demand: no supply.

Much of the track was washed away. We had the enthusiasm and innocence (I use the word loosely) of youth; but we were bought up in Mount Isa and excelled at the art of bush bashing. Bush bashing? Brother Len taught me this. You drive out of town along a road then drive where there is no road. Point the car anywhere and weave through the rocks and spinifex. Great fun.

We had done this before. We were veterans of the tracks to Birdsville and up to the gulf. The road to Katherine?  We looked down our noses: sealed already. Boring. Same with Sandover. Yawn!

’That scour there? Is that a road or a creek?’

‘Could be either.’

‘OK. Let’s follow it.’

Or on a flat stretch across a bull dust covered, table top flat plain: which way? Follow the flattened spinifex bushes.

Winter is the only sensible time to travel these roads. We had little mechanical trouble. The Jeep’s fuel tank developed a leak when a rock pierced the tank. Chewing gum solved that. Just chew the gum up to a soggy mess then throw it into the tank. It gravitates to and plugs the hole.

Scenery? As we approached where we assumed we would find Lake Nash, the road eased across a gibber plain. We could see low hills in the distance. For the rest, clear blue skies, occasional emus and kangaroos, and miles and miles of peaceful nothingness: the sounds of silence that soothe the soul. Deserts are places of incredible beauty. Brooding, lonely, almost spiritual.

Grassland (with no grass), mulga shrubs, endless vistas of spinifex and outcrops and rocks and — well — desert. Occasionally, along a dried up river bed, stands of tall eucalypts provided dramatic sentinels to a brooding magnificence.

A couple of cattle stations straddle the route: at Tobermorey and further on at Mt Skinner. We visited them. We had no need of fuel or supplies. We knew not to ask for water. We had brought enough for our trip.

All were hospitable, welcoming us in for a cuppa and a chat and an invitation to camp anywhere. After all, few visitors passed by. These days both the Plenty and Sandover see regular hordes of tourists on much improved roads: gray nomads to hitch hikers. The world changes.

We know about pot holes. These are created by bunyips to destroy vehicles that dare invade the isolation.

They (the potholes) hide under dust and behind clumps of random grass. The car dives into them without warning. Anything on the dashboard flies off into the car and ends up under the clutch pedal.  Your head hits the roof. You wear your hat inside the car.

Just as you rearrange the brim, you hit another bump, often deeper than the Grand Canyon, and it goes on and on and on and…

Of necessity, we would sometimes squat behind a clump of mulga: for research purposes.  Look carefully: snakes, scorpions and spiders. You had to watch your bum when ‘researching.’ It is a long way to a hospital and first aid kits are not always enough for a bite from a brown snake or a scorpion.

This was where Deefa came in handy. Whenever we needed to squat and study termites we would stop and look the other way whilst whoever needed to went with Deefa. If Deefa barked or fretted, we went somewhere else. He was a good dog, but then I am a sucker for dogs — especially blue heelers. As long as he was around, we felt safe.

We were about one hundred kilometres from the bitumen. Clouds had built up: unusual for the winter. We did not expect rain. As we drove into the setting sun, it got darker and darker. A huge black cloud hung so close to the ground we felt we would run into it.

The storm hit us. We stopped the cars. Large dollops of rain fell. Something else fell with the rain: fish. On the windscreen; on the ground tiny fish threshed around in the dust.

We were used to seeing fish and crabs emerge from the beds of rivers after rain: one of the miracles of the desert — but these were falling from the sky.

'The fish are alive! They must have been flying around the sky. Flying fish?’

One of our colleagues. Nick, was a chemist at the Mines laboratory at the Isa.

‘Hey! scientist,’ asked Lawrence turning to Nick. ‘Explain?’

Nick scratched his beard, dislodging a bean from yesterday’s meal. (Or from the day before? Hard to tell with beans in beards.)

‘It could have been a bedourie’, he surmised.

We looked puzzled. We knew bedouries: small tornadoes that cause similar havoc.

‘A bedourie could have sucked up water and fish from the waterholes in rivers miles and miles away and just dropped them here. It has happened.’

It seemed plausible, but incredible. After all, Nick was a Pom. What would he know?

‘Pity they were not bigger. Wouldn’t mind some grilled fish,’ observed Lawrence.

The rain stopped falling. So did the fish.

‘No one will believe us.’

But they did. We told our tale in the bar of the Todd Hotel in Alice Springs.

‘Yup, we’ve seen it’, said one old codger.

‘When?’ I asked.

‘Just last year.’

He looked at me as I tried to get his measure.

‘I was doing my chores out the back of the pub.’

‘Your chores? What chores?’ asked Nick.

‘I’ll have a middy please mate’, he said.

Nick paid. Strange. After all, he was a Pom.