The Kimberley’s road less travelled
Niall McIlroy recounts the noisiest, dustiest route he’s ever driven.
Ah, the irony of the Duncan Highway.
It skewers off the Great Northern Highway at Halls Creek, past a truck yard and the racecourse, bitumen flat and easy, fooling with expectations because that doesn’t last long.
A blue sign warns NEXT SERVICES Wave Hill (NT) 407km.
And then after a couple of kilometres, reality turns rust red.
Highway? Only in name. Road? Forget it.
The Duncan Highway is a rugged old corrugated track, the noisiest, dustiest route I’ve ever driven.
Neither high nor fast, it’s great fun. The rattle and hum, rock and roll, eastward trundle ceases only for rest stops and I take plenty on the Duncan.
In the first 20km out of Halls Creek, there’s a good bit to see and I relish the still and quiet out there... here.
Car door swings shut behind me then there’s no sound but the tick of the engine cooling down. I tramp off the track to China Wall — a quartz vein that coruscates over the ropy knot of low hills to the north.
Driving on, street and children-crossing signs point aimlessly into the long grass, rough-hewn stone steps lead nowhere, old spoons, broken glass, shattered china on a wall belong to no one.
Welcome to Old Halls Creek. Pop. 0.
The town at the terminus of the Canning Stock Route up and left long after the drovers stopped coming when the Great Northern Highway was built to the west. The last resident moved on ages ago. I sit by the deep green pool of Halls Creek, once the town swimming hole, and pretend the whole place is mine.
The Duncan snakes, gets uppity, undulates, ribbons over raised ground not quite hills out on the Antrim Plateau. I’m an Antrim man myself, this place is nothing like it.
A puff of dust in the distance is oncoming traffic, maybe a cattleman from one of the expansive stations the size of small countries.
But that hardly ever happens.
Towards the Territory border, Marella Gorge on the Nicholson River is a place to cool off and has been, possibly for tens of thousands of years.
It’s visually refreshing, too.
Reeds and trees, deep green, cool waters. An oasis. Respite from the dusty old Duncan, ever-eastward, flat and rusty red.
I told you it was irony.
