Chapter 14: The Nullarbor

I had wanted to do the Nullarbor for as long as I’d been driving. Some things you just carry around as ambitions, no clear reason, and crossing the Nullarbor was one of mine. A rite. A real one.

What it means, in practice, is the drive between Ceduna in South Australia and Norseman in Western Australia: twelve hundred kilometres of more or less wall-to-wall nothing. It includes the famous Ninety Mile Straight — ninety miles of road without a single bend, the longest straight stretch of road in the country. We’d given ourselves a few days for it. I’d been waiting decades.

The name, by the way, isn’t Aboriginal, though it sounds it. It’s mock-Latin — nullus arbor, no trees — dreamed up by some surveyor, and it is exactly, literally accurate. You leave Norseman in actual forest, and as you drive the forest slowly gives up. The trees get shorter, and sparser, and lower, petering out by degrees as though the country is gradually losing the will to grow anything tall at all, until you’re left with scrub about fifty centimetres high, dead flat, in every direction, for five hundred kilometres. No trees. They told you in the name.