What I Cooked Last Night

Wednesday morning, 15 December 1971 It was five in the morning when we slipped out of Eucla under the heavy cover of an oppressive darkness, car headlights blazing. The sultry heat hung over the desert like a wet tent. The landscape fell behind us faster than yesterday because we were back on a real road again and the tyres were humming instead of crunching.  At six o’clock, Uncle switched off the lights as the first rays of the sun slowly throttled the long shadows. Black turned to gold.  Seven o’clock passed, eight o’clock. If it was hot earlier, now it was like someone had switched on an oven. At twenty minutes past ten, the Valiant rolled to a stop off the road at Madura, a town that was just a fuel stop. We parked in the shade of nothing and climbed out of the sticky car into more heat.  You could just about pick it up in your hands. We took refuge in the van where it might have been 95 instead of 100.  Aunt pulled a meal out of nowhere as she did the whole j...

Tuesday morning, 14 December 1971 A threatening humidity lurked under a blanket of darkness as we hit the highway out of Ceduna around half past five in the morning, dawn a threatening red streak on the east horizon. You have to start early to make headway before the heat hits. The nearest large towns are Port Augusta, 300 miles to the east and Norseman, about three times that distance to the west. The road west runs along the bottom edge of the Nullabor Desert where it meets the section of Southern Ocean called the Great Australian Bight. Cliffs run along the coast for hundreds of miles and the sea, over millions of years, has gouged tunnels deep into them. These surface as blowholes in the plain and people, straying off the road, have fallen into them. What a horrible fate.   Today, we’re aiming to reach Eucla, driving across a red desert with nothing in it except a dirt road. The car has run like a Swiss watch so far, hasn’t missed a beat. It was a steamy, dusty, unforgettabl...