Leaving the outback behind

GEOFF HILLwraps up his Australian odyssey with a ride back to his starting point of Adelaide

AT NUNDROO, after a day of featureless plains, came the first signs of civilisation: wheat fields, little windmills pumping water from the soaks below, then farms and a house. Suddenly, late in the golden afternoon, we crested a rise to be smacked in the face by a cool sea breeze, and 20 minutes later had descended to the coast at Ceduna, the first town we had seen in the five days it had taken us to cross the Nullarbor.

Edward John Eyre, the first man to cross this desolate plain in 1840 and 1841 from east to west, had taken five months in a trek which saw the deaths of three of his party before Eyre and his native tracker Wylie reached the little settlement of Albany, where they had long been given up for dead. Compared to that, our troubles had been paltry, but he was not the explorer I wanted to pay homage to. No, that was John Ainswsorth Horrocks, whose grave lies in Penwortham, a smattering of houses huddled around a church for comfort.

The next morning, after a night at the venerable Flinders Hotel in Port Agusta, we rode south, frozen solid by the rain and wind of the approaching winter.

On our left rose the sullen lump of Mount Remarkable, presumably named with the same sense of irony with which redheads in Australia are invariably called Blue. On the stroke of noon, we dismounted in Penwortham, walked up a grassy path past the little church, and found ourselves standing before the grave of Horrocks, who set forth from these parts in July 1846 to find good pastoral land.

From the very start, his expedition was proof of WC Fields’s later adage that you should never work with children or animals. Particularly animals: first the goats took great delight in leaping on the tent and eating it. Then Harry, a psychotic camel who was the first of his species to be used on an Australian expedition, tried to eat one of the goats, bit the tent-keeper and chewed to bits the precious bags of flour. As if that wasn’t enough, one evening as Horrocks was unpacking, Harry lurched to one side and discharged Horrocks’s gun, which was unfortunately pointing at Horrocks at the time.

Harry was subsequently shot, although it took two bullets to kill him, but Horrocks died of his wounds two weeks later, and 164 years after that, we stood in mute homage before the plain grey cross and matching slab which marks the last resting place of the only explorer in history to be shot by his own camel.

We got back on the bikes and rode the few miles into Clare, a pleasant little town where the contrasts of Australia yet again surprised me. Half an hour north of here, we had been riding through endless grassy plains with no sign of life in any direction, and yet here we were ensconced in a little pub, with rooms upstairs, a roaring fire against the late autumn chill, and a bottle of Black Bush beckoning from behind the bar.

Truly, this country is a land of wilderness interrupted by tiny outposts of civilisation, and after so much of the former, today we were most glad of the latter.

It had, I thought as we sat down to bangers and mash washed down with pints of foaming ale, been the strangest of adventures. The previous ones, from Delhi to Belfast on an Enfield, Chicago to Los Angeles on Route 66 riding a Harley, and Chile to Alaska on a Triumph, had all involved a destination, but this time the destination had been exactly where we had started.

At lunchtime the next day, we finally rolled past the Adelaide city limits, and parked in exactly the same spot outside the same apartments we had left from. There was even the same girl on reception, to add to the surreal sense that it had all been a dream. Except for the fact that all afternoon I wandered around with my mouth open at sights I had not seen for the past three months. Delicatessens! Day spas! Fashion shops! People wearing suits! Restaurants! For a simple chap who had been too long in the Bush, it was all too much to take in. Back in civilisation.

Series concluded