The Flying Dentist's visit was a great way to meet the neighbours! All the local station owners came in. The dentist turned out to be only a third year dentistry student but she was a very pretty English girl so none of the men minded. We set up her surgery in one of the old motel rooms. She used an old recliner for her chair! We did brisk business in the bar that day.

On a lighter note - we had an airstrip way down the back of the site. It was for the Flying Doctor mainly. Johnny Crocker, the owner of Balladonia sheep station, had the job of grading it. (He had a grader!) Every so often we'd hear a rumble and it would be Johnny come to smooth the airstrip out. If a plane needed to land at night we had to light stacks of old tyres positioned either side of the runway. We were out there during the pilot's strike, when Bob Hawke grounded all commercial flights in Australia. It was a remarkable time with light planes hopping across the country. The airstrip was very busy, not to mention the highway. I will never forget the sight of a small plane fueling up at out petrol bowsers!

A highway horror story now. One day a beige HQ Holden drove slowly in and as soon as we saw it we knew something was wrong. It had no windscreen and across the roof there was a dark, red smear. When it got closer we saw the driver was covered with blood. A little boy in the seat beside him was the same. Both had eyes like saucers. When he stopped the driver explained they hit a roo. It had gone through the windscreen and landed in the back seat. The smear was from its head. It had been decapitated. Its big, powerful legs had kept kicking. The driver had had a hard time getting it out. The whole of the interior of the car, (upholstery, windows, everything,) was covered with blood. The little boy had been asleep in the back... 

We got called out to do a patient transfer in the ambulance once. (We had to meet the Cocklebiddy ambulance then take the patient back past our place to meet up with the Norseman guys.) We were half way down 90 Mile straight when we started seeing the GHOST TRUCK. A legend on the Highway it was exactly how I'd heard it described. Green tarp, like an old army truck, spread over a frame. I said to Terry, 'Do you see that?' He nodded. 'Let's try to catch up.' I tried. Believe me, I tried. The faster I got the further away it looked. Sometimes it would disappear then reappear. We thought perhaps the road rose and fell imperceptibly, by maybe a meter, but that was wishful thinking. It didn't. It is the longest, flattest bit of road in Australia. A mirage? Perhaps...

The police did fortnightly runs up the highway, from either end, Eucla or Norseman, and we always knew we could rely on them. A fax would roll out of the fax machine with a baddie's photo and a warning and we'd know to watch out for someone dangerous. And it was remarkable how quickly the police would arrive if we recognized someone. (Where did the baddies think they were going? There was only one road.) But it WAS the wild west and there were cowboys. Cowboys with fast cars and great, big guns. I remember one pair decided to see how fast their new patrol car would go so they raced a local station owner down the highway in his Corvette Stingray. I also remember making up the beds in the homestead for a couple of constables and for a laugh one of them discharged a pump action shot gun under the house, sending clouds of dust up through the floorboards and nearly giving me a heart attack! He always claimed he was only shooting a feral cat. They did save us though. On many occasions. And they were always there if we had an ambulance call out. I'll relive one of them for you in the next installment... 

We survived getting lost in the bush, just, but a few months later I did something really dumb. I killed a dugite. With a broken shovel. It was slithering toward the roadhouse kitchen and I couldn't imagine what we'd do if it went inside so I grabbed a shovel head and chopped it in two. The new cook, (an aboriginal lady called Joy,) came running out and said, 'You got to bury him now, in different places or he'll come back together!' One bite and I would have died. When the police heard about it they bought us out a 'snake' gun. It did a great job turning crows into cartoon explosions of black feathers. Remind me to tell you more about the 'police runs' next time.. 

We had no idea where we were when the lights failed in the Ute. We HOPED we were heading back towards the highway, but who knew? The 'track' was just faint tyre marks. No one had driven down it for a long time. Fortunately we had a torch so I got out and walked in front searching for tyre prints while Terry followed behind in first gear. Then the torch died too. I heard Terry scrabbling around in the bottom of the Ute and then a tiny flame appeared. He'd found a cigarette lighter! So now I'm walking in front of the Ute with only a cigarette lighter to guide us. I remember my thumb blistering as the flint got hotter. The flame got smaller and smaller and then finally, it died too. We were completely in the dark with no radio and no way of knowing where we were. I will never forget the relief when I saw a little red light through the canopy. Not aliens but the beacon on top of the telecommunications tower, the one you could see from the roadhouse...

But the evening with the Maccas happened months into our year when we were really missing civilization, (and hamburgers.) I need to go back to the beginning, to our first insane week. The week we got lost in the bush... We'd driven 20 minutes down a dirt track to the bore pump, (our only source of water besides a tanker.) Terry, serviced it, (don't forget, he'd fixed a generator a few days before,) then we decided to go back via a water hole we'd heard about. We found the water hole alright, down an even smaller dirt track, and it was amazing. Afgans used to water their camels there. We sat on the rocks drinking Bundy and Coke feeling like we were the only people on earth then we set off down an even smaller track that supposedly led back to the highway. Ten minutes down the track the bush got really dense and the track was almost impossible to see. Twilight didn't last long under the canopy and pretty soon Terry had to turn the lights on. Five minutes later, when it was completely dark, the lights failed...

Where did we have the Big Macs? Around sunset I loaded a card table and two chairs into the ute and then I drove Terry down to the airstrip. Our assistant manager turned up with champagne then Joy, our cook, came stomping through the salt bush with a tray. When she lifted the tea towel, voila! Two Big Macs! A big red kangaroo came over to see what was going on at one point. What an evening.. 

Obviously there are no supermarkets in the Nullarbor so all our supplies had to come by truck. Once a fortnight everything we needed arrived - frozen milk, frozen bread, frozen meat, frozen veges, canned everything, a chemical waste dump of cleaning chemicals, an alpine range of toilet rolls, enough linen for all the beds in Buckingham Palace, but mostly beer. VB and Emu. The real fuel of the Nullarbor. Once or twice something really interesting came though. Like the time I ordered Maccas for Terry's 25th birthday. The story made the West Australian. Wayne Tagg, the manager of Fremantle MacDonald's, had a mate in the port who snap froze 25 Big Macs for me. They experimented with leaving the lettuce in but in the end decided to send a fresh lettuce separately. Tomorrow I'll tell you where we ate them...