The Towns of the South Australia Tracks

After riding the traffic-laden Stuart Highway in early June, I was anxious to get back on a dirt road, where I knew the traffic would be much less. That would be the 383-mile Oodnadatta Track and the 321-mile Birdsville Track, which I rode in the latter half of June.

Out of the 700 miles, there were only two towns. Actually, I’m not counting the two towns that start and end this route: Marla at the beginning and Birdsville at the end. Marla, on the Stuart Highway, caters to those traveling on the highway and I really didn’t spend much time there. So I never saw the town. I simply stayed at Marla’s Travellers’ Rest, a tourist roadhouse and caravan park on the edge of town. I arrived there, checked into a room, and checked the weather forecast. Marla’s Travellers Rest was a hectic road stop as hundreds of people passed through it traveling up and down the Stuart Highway. As for Birdsville, I’ll touch on that later. Other than those two, in traveling the 700 miles, I have only two towns to pass through: Oodnadatta and Marree. (William Creek is on the track, too, but it’s really just a roadhouse/caravan park to service tourists that pass through, and not a real town.)

OODNADATTA and MARREE are real towns. They have people living in them and have a real history. They both formed when Australia tried to establish a railroad going from south-north (thus the hopeful name Transcontinental Hotel in Oodnadatta), a goal that was not fulfilled. Nowadays, though, they depend heavily on tourism to fund their existence (as most of the towns I travelled through in the outback) with both towns having railroad museums and artifacts of yesterday’s “wild west” days. This is akin to the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route I rode two years earlier, with those towns displaying their American “wild west” roots.

But what I enjoyed about real towns are real people. I had a great time in Oodnadatta, due to the Transcontinental Hotel’s manager, a story I recounted elsewhere. The second night, the pub was more crowded than the first night, with a couple of aboriginal folks hanging around. Unlike Western Australia and Northern Territory, where I found aborigines were kept away from drinking, they could freely drink here. And told stories to the tourist folks that passed through the pub. They obviously used the tourists for their own gain (“I’ll tell you more if you buy me another drink.”), but sometimes what they said was enlightening. For instance, I always wondered whether the “Do Not Enter” signs of the aboriginal communities were the aborigines’ own idea or someone else’s (i.e. the government). Someone dared ask that question, and the Ruby answered that it was their leaders’ idea– but then said it was the government’s. She was obviously a little tipsy by then, so her answers can’t be counted on. But it did surface a question I’ve had developing for quite some time: Is the “Do Not Enter” sign in their communities their own idea or the government’s. But more on that later (maybe).

But I felt really welcomed in Marree, due to two people who hung around on their sidewalk porch area, watching all the tourists twit back and forth. Max and Irene’s home (they are cousins) is smack in the middle of the crossroads of where all tourists pass, and they sit there every afternoon observing everything that goes on. I was in Marree for 3 days, and every day I would pass by them and talk with them– because you can’t miss them. They’ve been there since they were born, and their great-great (or more) grandparents were the cameleers that drove the camels when Marree was a thriving town. Max and Irene call themselves “Afghans” by descent. They would have the latest buzz of what’s happening in the town. In one sense, they are like the town’s de facto news gazetteer.

So, on the second day, I asked her where there might be a tire service/ad hoc caravan repair place. I was missing a tiny screw in my camera accessory and was hoping I could find something to fix it. Irene just said, “My father might have what you need.” and took me into her house, where I met her father, and then into his workshop, where there were millions of odds-and-ends screws, along with a sundry of machine tools. She spent time trying to help me find the right screw among that haystack. I couldn’t find what I needed, but was able to fix my accessory with an ad hoc solution.

She then told me about the Telstra bigwigs who were coming to town the next day for the cutting-ribbon ceremony of the new Telstra (a cellphone service in Australia) service that was being installed in town. (There already is cell-phone service in Marree, but in a sense, the arrival of Telstra means that the town will get higher-end communications.) I went there, as she indicated, and watched the Telstra folks cut the ribbon to launch the service (the town was there for the service– like all 40 of them). She told everyone about the refreshment reception after the ceremony. I didn’t go, and she caught me later that afternoon. “I didn’t see you at the reception.” “Well,” I sheepishly replied, “I’m not really part of the community, so I felt I shouldn’t be there.” She scolded me: “Anyone here now is part of the community. There were some other tourists there, and they were grabbing the sandwiches and drinks. You should have been there too.” Nothing like that speech to make one feel at home.

There’s nothing like real people in real towns to make one feel like one has really been to that part of the country.