Motorworld

Australia

For a country whose most notable contribution to the world of television is a programme called Neighbours, it comes as quite a surprise to find the nearest big city to Perth is Jakarta. But don’t expect a rugged, hairy-bottomed sort of town. Think more in terms of Milton Keynes and you’re about there. Interesting motoring stories? Er… no. Not really.

Okay, so what about Sydney, likened by many to San Francisco? Oh come on. San Francisco is the best city in the world, with fine vistas, extraordinary hills, the Golden Gate, wonderful restaurants and an endearing blend of character and cleanliness.

Sydney is a huge, soulless sprawl where the people are chippy and the architecture is reminiscent of Birmingham. Except that Sydney doesn’t have the International Conference Centre.

Again, if you attempted to make a motoring programme there, it would last about three minutes. ‘Er, everyone drives Toyota Starlets.’ The end.

I went to Queensland, too, where the coastline was tropical and unspoiled, but apart from a tendency to drive on the beaches of the Whitsunday Islands, I was still stuck. Cairns had nothing. Nor did Townsville. Australia was turning out to be a dead duck. Until I headed inland.

Peel away Australia’s coastline and you’re left with an area which is about the same size as America. And yet it has the same population as Leeds.

In outback Australia there is one person for every square mile and, to put that in perspective, in the Scottish Highlands there are twenty people for every square mile. Australia is enormous. And almost completely deserted.

Out here is where we would find the real Aussie action. Out here we could pose the question: what good is a car when your nearest neighbour is 300 miles away and there are no roads?

It’s not as though we’re talking about an arid desert. There are trees and, just below the surface, there are vast reservoirs of water which fell as rain three million years ago in Malaysia.

Obviously, the soil doesn’t provide lush green Anchor-butter-type grass, but it isn’t useless dust either.

This means that, every so often, you come across a farm which is so large it is rather hard for a European to get his head round the numbers. We needed to visit one, to find out about life in such remoteness, but were told, time and again, to get lost, in that polite way Australians have developed. ‘Fuck off you Pommy bastard.’ Something like that anyway.

Thick-skinned perseverance eventually saw us arriving at the truly enormous Wave Hill Station which is near… nowhere really.

It covers 13,000 square kilometres, making it the same size as Cornwall, Devon, Avon, Somerset and Dorset.

At any one time, 40,000 cattle are grazing on its paddocks, but even so it’s not the largest farm; not by a long way.

It isn’t the most remote settlement either, even though the nearest shop is 280 miles away. The nearest pub is a 100-mile trek and to get to the nearest biggish town by road takes eighteen hours.

To get there, we flew for four hours from Perth to Alice Springs, during which time the view from the window was an unending sea of nothingness.

Then we climbed aboard a chartered eight-seater twin-prop aircraft for another four-hour flight over another sea of brownness to Wave Hill.

Actually, that’s not quite true. We had to stop for fuel at a weird little airstrip which, quite literally, was in the middle of nowhere. And yet, in the departure hut, women in brightly coloured, floral-print dresses from the fifties were waiting for their bus to take them into town. A ‘bus’ in Oz is almost always a plane.

Our pilot refuelled on his own, switched the landing lights on by himself and took off with no clearance from air traffic control. There wasn’t any.

And two hours later we touched down on the Wave Hill landing strip. All the farms out there have such things because cars are useless. In the Wave Hill garage there was a plane and anyone who drops by does so literally, from the sky.

If they need a doctor, he comes by air. Schooling for the two children is done over the radio airwaves but if they ever need to get to a football match, it must be done by Cessna.

There are cars on the farm but they’re used for workmanlike things such as checking on bore holes and mending fences. Mind you, to get round all the watering holes is a three-day job.

And a damn dangerous one, too, because in the height of summer the temperature almost never goes below 120°F. When we flew in, it was 140°F, even in the evening, and that means it was hot enough to boil a tortoise.

Certainly, you don’t need charcoal and firelighters for a barbecue out there. Drop a rasher of bacon on the ground and in a flash, you have breakfast.

It sounds like a hoot but if, while you’re there, your car breaks down, you have 30 hours and then the eagles will be looking for the napkins.

Before you set off on a cross-country Australian drive, motorists are told to ensure that someone knows when you’re supposed to arrive. And that no matter what, if you break down, you stay with the car.

It’s all a bit of a fag to be honest, which is why everyone we met on our month-long tour of the outback had a four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser.

Until the end of the sixties, Land Rover had a 90 per cent market share and people took the endless mechanical maladies for granted. But then along came Toyota with a vehicle which just kept on going. It wasn’t as stylish but no one was looking anyway.

In the very early pioneering days, people only ventured into the outback if they had the toughest vehicle money could buy. Most opted for a Rolls-Royce, not because of the prestige or that flying lady but because it was less likely to break down than a Model T.

The Australians went mad for the Land Cruiser and in just twenty years, Land Rover’s market share was down to 2 per cent. They had been wiped out, along with most other British memories too. The pound became the dollar and the mile became a kilometre.

Wave Hill manager Gavin Hoad explained that he would never switch from Toyota. ‘They’re pretty reliable and we’ve had them long enough to know what will go wrong and when. That way we can keep the right spares here.’

Well they’d have to because the nearest Toyota dealership is a cool 280 miles away on roads which are basically dirt tracks.

In the Northern Territories there are no speed limits but don’t get excited because realistically, 60 mph is your top whack.

First of all, there is the wildlife to worry about. A small kangaroo is no big deal — they just burst when you plough into them — and you needn’t worry about emus either. But the eagles, they’re a big problem.

Say there are twenty vehicles on one 300-mile stretch of road and in one night, they kill twenty animals each. That’s fairly realistic. This means that as dawn breaks there will be 400 fresh carcasses in the ditch.

So the eagles come down and gorge themselves stupid. And just as they’re enjoying the coffee and mints, you come bumbling along. Mr Eagle is scared and needs to take off but he’s so full he has to face into the wind, which may well be the direction from which you’re coming… at 60 mph.

It is by no means uncommon for the giant bird with its ten-foot wingspan to be at windscreen height when you collide. Thank you. And goodnight.

The eagles, however, are less of a danger than the road trains. These gigantic trucks can tow three articulated trailers at speeds of up to 100 mph thanks to engines which just defy belief. Each cylinder is 3.1 litres and for that little bit extra, a turbo is fitted as well.

The unit is 150 feet long. It does one mile to the gallon. If you were to fill it up in England, it would cost £1,000. Its stopping distance is measured in light years, and that’s only if the driver bothers to hit the brake pedal.

The problem is simple. There are no tachographs in these huge trucks so there’s nothing to stop the freelance operators doing a thousand miles without a proper break.

To keep awake, and to make the deadlines, many use speed — the drug, that is. Some are so stoned they can have an accident and not even know.

Others thunder along while reading a book. If the wheel gets a bit wobbly in their hands, they know they’ve strayed off the road. Some use speed and read.

So, if you see a road train coming towards you, it’s best to pull off the road. Right off it. Fifteen miles is the minimum safe distance.

It’s worse if you come up behind one though, because on some roads the rear trailer can sway by as much as fifteen feet. And with sixteen axles, you can’t begin to imagine how big the dust cloud is. We’re talking here about a nuclear explosion on wheels.

The only way to go past is to keep your fingers crossed, hoping that the rear trailer is swinging the right way and that there’s nothing coming from the opposite direction. There usually isn’t, of course, because oncoming traffic is safely moored up fifteen miles from the road. Usually. But not always.

Small wonder most people fly everywhere. They even take to the air when they need to muster cattle.

Now in the course of making this series I’ve been in some spectacular and dangerous situations, but none even gets close to the hour I spent with Fox, a heli-musterer and certifiable lunatic.

Here’s a fact. To fly any helicopter, and especially a Robinson R-22, you need both hands. And yet Fox could whizz along at 100 mph, six feet up, while rolling a cigarette. He could even light it — not easy as the doors had been removed and it was a bit draughty in there.

It was somewhere between awe-inspiring and terrifying before we saw any cows. But afterwards, all hell broke loose. Fox engaged what can only be described as ‘plummet mode’ and we simply fell out of the sky to a height of three inches.

In the process, the dashboard had lit itself up like Regent Street on Christmas Eve. Warning buzzers were drowning out the rotors and a massive red light in front of me warned ‘low rpm’.

Whoa. Now we were going backwards and wait, what’s this? A spin turn in reverse. New lights were coming on. New buzzers were joining in.

We were working in tandem with another helicopter and two trail bikes. Well, ‘tandem’ is probably the wrong word because there didn’t appear to be any coordination at all.

It was surprising, therefore, to note that after a minute or so, a giant herd of maybe a thousand cows was heading at full speed for the pens. Whenever the stampeding mass passed close to more cows, they’d join in, and if they didn’t, we’d simply dart down to encourage them a bit.

One cow, though, was not going to play. He’d found a Michelin three-rosette piece of grass and he wasn’t going to budge. He held his ground until the very moment when our helicopter’s skids landed on his back… and began to push.

As soon as he did the decent thing, we had reversed into the ionosphere in a lurid spiralling move that very nearly resulted in a breakfastular explosion.

To take my mind off it, I engaged the intercom button and told Fox that the Robinson has a poor reputation for safety in Britain. He mumbled something about not losing too many each year and turned off the engine.

We were now in ‘super plummet mode’ and I was scared like I’ve never known scared before. The ground was coming at us like we’d pressed the hyperspace button and then we hit, the rear tips of the skids first and then the front.

We slithered along the ground for a while, by which time Fox had the Porsche engine restarted. And we took off. ‘No worries,’ he said.

Apart from the mess in my pants, I guess he was right.

Now I have a deep-seated fondness for helicopters, and it was patently obvious that the heli-musterers knew exactly what they were doing. The camel musterers of Alice Springs, on the other hand, did not.

Camel is now a fairly regular main course in some of the more fun-filled Aussie eateries, but you can’t just wander round the bush shooting them.

Here’s why. There are more camels in Australia than there are in the Middle East and a booming export trade is the result. There are a few quid to be made but everyone in the business is hoping one day to catch a fast one. In Saudi Arabia, top racing camels fetch up to $8 million.

Primed, we arrived at a 10,000 square-kilometre farm out towards Ayers Rock where our hosts turned out to be a bunch of men who, at the age of seven, had walked into a hospital and had their brains amputated.

They’d invited us down for the hunt, saying we could stay at the Million Stars Motel, which turned out to be a patch of grass by their chow house. Crawling into my sleeping bag was like doing a lucky dip where the first prize was life. Just what was in there? A snake? A funnel-web spider?

It was a poor night’s sleep for several reasons, chief among which was the enormous thunderstorm which passed by at 2.00 a.m. Then there was the ever-present threat of creepy-crawlies treating my nose as a light snack. And every rustle in the bushes was a large and fierce animal that scientists had believed, until that night, was extinct.

I spent most of the time shining my torch into the void until at 5.00 a.m. we were up, eating beans and clambering aboard a wide variety of seriously knackered old Toyota off-roaders. One towed a trailer full of spare wheels. ‘On a bad day, we can use maybe 40 tyres,’ said Gun, Denmark’s only camel-catcher.

‘We have Michael Palin coming here next month,’ he added. ‘Do you think he’d mind if we picked him up from the airport dressed as Gumby?’

Probably.

And off we went in search of camels who, it is said, have the intelligence of a nine-year-old child. Like hunting in Britain, therefore, the prey is brighter than the pursuer.

A lot brighter, because at 2.00 p.m. we’d seen diddly squat; no tracks, no shit, nothing. Motorcycle outriders had been to the top of every hill for a better view and each time they’d come back to say we were at the epicentre of a completely camel-free zone.

Except once. After half an hour of waiting, one outrider hadn’t come back and we were concerned. His Australian colleagues didn’t care less, though. ‘What if he’s injured?’ I asked.

‘He’ll crawl home,’ came the reply.

‘But what if he’s dead?’ I went on.

‘Well then it doesn’t matter.’

The conversation dried up because, 200 yards in front, Mr and Mrs Camel had wandered out of the bush with their three children, Janet, Wayne and Paul. And the chase was on.

I made the mistake of leaping into the back of the lead vehicle, a Toyota pickup truck which took off into the scrub at, oh, about 80 or so.

Wherever the camels went, we had to follow and this was a big problem for little old me in the back. I had to stand up, holding on to the rollover bar, which, under the tropical sun, had become hot enough to fry an egg. Within twenty seconds my hands had become fountains. There was blood everywhere.

Then there was the ride, which was bad enough for the first mile when all four tyres were intact, but over the next six miles each one burst. To absorb the bumps, I had to keep my knees bent, which is fine for a few seconds in a stationary room, but in the back of a bucking off-roader which had no tyres, for two hours, it was intolerable.

Worse, though, were the trees. Regularly, our driver headed under a bough which, if I’d been looking the other way, would have taken my head clean off. This was abject misery.

When we finally caught up with the camel, Gun leaped off the Toyota, attached himself to its neck, and wrestled it to the ground. It was barbaric and when I asked why they don’t just use tranquilliser darts, I was told ‘Where’s the fun in that?’

And all we had to show when the chase was over was a manky little bull worth about three quid and half-a-dozen shagged Toyotas.

Which kind of answered my original question. What good is a car in outback Australia? Well for catching camels, it’s vital. And for doing bits and bobs round the ranch, it’s essential.

But as a means of transport, as a device for getting from A to B, it’s no good at all. I was going to say that outback Australia is the only part of the civilised world where the car doesn’t work. Distance defeats it. But I’ve just thought of something. Outback Australia isn’t civilised.