Outback adventures: the desert garden in our big backyard
Stephen Scourfield heads deep into the desert on the Connie Sue Highway.
It was almost exactly at this spot in 1962 that a little girl stood for the first time in a bassinet made from a tea chest.
Her name was Connie Sue Beadell, and that moment is why this remote track through the Great Victoria Desert is called, rather grandly, the Connie Sue Highway.
Six-month-old Connie Sue was with her parents — her father Len Beadell, with wife Anne, did the reconnaissance for the track, which was part of a network of access roads for the Weapons Research Establishment at Woomera, in South Australia.
As Len himself would later tell it, the British government had been looking for somewhere in the empire to let off rockets and fly them over places with little inhabitation, and shooting them north-west from Woomera over inland WA towards Eighty Mile Beach seemed just the job.
Len was contracted to put access roads in so that the flights could be observed. He had already surveyed the 1500km of the Gunbarrel Highway.
And then, four years later, Len and Anne and Connie Sue had already come almost 300km south from Warburton, cross- country in a Land Rover, establishing the route to Neale Junction. From there the track would continue on to Rawlinna, east of Kalgoorlie. Today it ends at the Trans-Australian Railway.
A red sand dune on Connie Sue Highway between Great Central Road and Neale Junction. Picture: Stephen Scourfield
The Connie Sue Highway cuts 650km north-south through red dunes and the pretty swales dipping between, weaving through stands of mulga and marble gums, crossing gibber plateaus and breakaways, and dropping through low lakelands.
Getting to the northern end near Warburton unfolds like this. We drive the first day from Perth to stay at the Grand Hotel Kookynie, 195km north of Kalgoorlie, making an easy 810km run. The second day, we drive on north-east through Laverton and up the Great Central Road towards Warburton, with a camp along the way. That night I step out of the tent into one of the most extraordinary nights I have ever experienced. It is totally still and totally silent. A night so motionless that it feels time and the world has stopped. No wind, no insect noise, no movement at all. So silent that the only sounds I can hear are internal.
Day three and we are in Warburton, 770km from Kookynie, filling with fuel and topping up water ready to take the Connie Sue south.
The northern end of the Connie Sue is, somehow fittingly, marked by an understated green 44 gallon drum with the track’s name written freehand on it. Ah, the Connie Sue, heading south.
Drum and tyre marking the northern end of the Connie Sue Highway – the junction with Great Central Road at Warburton. Picture: Stephen Scourfield
Beside me in my old LandCruiser is my wife, artist Virginia Ward. Just ahead in his HiLux is Grady Brand, senior curator of Kings Park and Botanic Gardens, and his partner Lesley Hammersley, who’s director of horticulture and conservation at Kings Park. They are botanical specialists, naturalists, interpreters of the landscape, and on annual leave, deep in the environment they both appreciate. Regular readers might recall that two years ago we drove the Great Central Road to Uluru and back, last year we travelled the Anne Beadell Highway and this year we are back to scrutinise the desert even more closely. In every way, we are moving deeper and deeper.
Six million people a year wander through Grady’s garden, Kings Park and its botanical garden, which displays more than 2000 species of WA flora over its 18ha and this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. For, though the botanical garden was established to showcase the State’s plants to those visiting for the 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games, the official opening was in 1965. That anniversary is celebrated all year but particularly during the month-long Kings Park Festival in September which promotes WA’s native wildflowers, and for which Grady is responsible.
He draws inspiration and ideas for Kings Park and its botanic garden here — from the natural environment of the State’s remote places.
Grady Brand, Lesley Hammersley, Virginia Ward and Stephen Scourfield at the end of the Connie Sue Highway. Picture: Stephen Scourfield
For this desert is not deserted but covered in plants. The flora is largely at eye height — spinifex circles with space between to walk, shrubs and small trees.
This is a wild garden at the human scale, as Grady puts it. And it is a beautiful garden. We have watched a pair of rare Major Mitchell cockatoos investigating a big hole in an old marble gum. We have spotted white-winged trillers and four raucous yellow-throated miner birds chasing each other with harsh calls.
We have all just been walking the red dunes, collecting specimens, photographs, impressions, ideas (whatever our speciality is) but now, as I write this, Grady is torn between water catchment and billy hook handle making.
For things have played out like this ...
Breakaway, about 90km south of Great Central Road. Picture: Stephen Scourfield
We know there’s big rain behind us, in a 400km wide band, coming in from the coast. We are early in the season for this journey, July and August being the most reliable for sunshine and dryness.
Rain and remote travel in Australia aren’t usually seen as good companions, but we’re working with it.
From Warburton, we find easy travel on the red sand track and then up the first jump up. This breakaway is showered in purple, pink and orange shale and there is old evidence of stick nest rats. Miniritchie trees, with their pretty, curly copper-coloured bark, twisted trunks and delicate leaves bear testimony to Grady’s thoughts — an eye-level, sparse, bonsai forest, indeed.
Travellers might visit Harkness Gorge but the local indigenous community has a sign on the track to Waterfall Gorge asking people not to enter.
We pass the distinctive Hanns Tabletop Hill, named for Frank Hann, who has more than 500 WA geographical features named after him — more than any other European explorer.
But most notably, to the west, there are then the short drives in to the Point Lilian lookout and Point Sandercock, where there’s plans to explore along this great bluff, and maybe a camp.
Miniritchie trees. Picture: Stephen Scourfield
The four of us are compatible travellers — each with our interests in the landscape, in the flora and fauna, in the geology, in photography and painting.
So, with our three-day permit for Ngaanyatjarra lands, to cover the northern section of the Connie Sue, we have been calmly “on the run” south in front of the rain, getting out of clay country, where one turn of a vehicle’s tyres might cake them in a thick, sticky red glue; where bogging to the bellypan is always possible. Where shovels and plastic tracks and snatch straps give way to winches.
But, of course, rain is only a problem if you are moving.
And we have planned just this — to be far enough south to be out of the main belt of it, and then to stop, set up camp, and let it pass over us.
And so we have stopped on the edge of the track, in the swale between dunes, and put up our awnings and tarps on the leeward side of the two vehicles parked at right angles, and added tarps, and set up rainwater collection into buckets and bowls, collected wood and made ourselves comfortable, and dug in for the rain.
Mulga camp on the Connie Sue Highway, between Neale Junction and Rawlinna. Picture: Stephen Scourfield
Here it is, in soft waves from the grey sky, with dry spells in between when we walk and explore.
We are not just travelling now. Weather and circumstances have forced us to just be here.
I am writing this; Virginia is painting; Lesley is filling in the beautiful books she makes of ecological impressions; Grady has two loaves of bread baking in the camp ovens in which we often roast our evening vegetable meals (just add Persian fetta and hummus) and is ducking from one tarp to another, cajoling the big bulbs of water collecting in them into buckets.
Last night we heated some steel rod in the fire’s coals and bent it into long-handled billy hooks.
We are rained in, stopped in our tracks by the downpours, and that has led us to live like a family in the desert, rather than just pass through it. Not quite like the Beadell family, of course, but it gives me a taste of the thrill that a family moment would have brought. Like the moment a toddler stood for the first time, in her tea-chest bassinet, just about on this spot.
It is still damp as we pass through the pretty Neale Junction Nature Reserve and, a little south, take the track east to Neale Breakaways, a big, natural pit with scree of colourful rocks.
Last light on trees at Rawlinna on the Trans Australian Railway. Picture: Stephen Scourfield
Neale Junction and these associated areas were named for Wing Commander Frank Neale, a British World War 1 pilot who came to Australia and, among his many other achievements, carried out private aerial surveys in the area from 1930 to 1935.
South of this the track moves through classic Goldfields landscape, with grey-green foliage against red earth, then into the open Nullarbor Plain landscape, and finally rough tracks with limestone coming through.
And then we are at the southern end, on the Trans Australian railway at Rawlinna. From here, it’s 370km along this big unsealed track back to Kalgoorlie.
The Trans Australian Railway at Rawlinna. Picture: Stephen Scourfield
It makes a great loop — Kalgoorlie to Warburton, Warburton south to Rawlinna, now back to Kalgoorlie along the dusty Trans Access Road.
From sunny and windy days to the rain, the weather has been a big part of our trip, forcing us to think about the landscape differently — to think about clay and sand country, and low-lying lakes and safe dunes. And I have felt very comfortable in this small part of Australia’s biggest desert.
After all, for Grady it is a wild garden and for Connie Sue, it was a kindergarten.
And for all of us, it’s our big backyard and it cultivates the garden within.
FACT FILE
Both Great Central Road and Connie Sue Highway require permits. Visit dia.wa.gov.au and clc.org.au.
