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It started off as a coast-to-coast four-wheel-drive odyssey across Australia's top end.

4WD Odyssey

Nickjenkins
2003-11-20 16:52:02

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about this time we came across the local ranger who was preparing to fight the fire. His troops consisted of four guys with two dozers and a grader and the fire consisted of a couple of hundred square kilometres of tinder dry bush. Their strategy was going to be to drag a chain about 250km down the side of the Frank Hahn National Park and west across vacant crown land to cut a fire break. As the ranger pointed out the fire on a map, the plane we'd seen earlier at Lake King flew low overhead marking trails in the bush for the guys and spotting for the fire.

Reassured by the Ranger's description of the fire and the direction of the wind we continued on towards Peak Charles. We had only gone about ten kilometres when we encountered another startling sight. Rounding a corner in the road we were confronted with a brolga! For those not in the know a brolga is a reasonably rare form of Australian flightless bird. It looks a bit like a stunted emu (ostrich) with black and white plumage and a big beak. The brolga, somewhat affronted by our dusty, one-hundred-kilometre-an-hour appearance gave us a penetrating glare and before I could bring my camera to bear, buggered off into the bush.

We pushed on the remaining 100km to Peak Charles, keeping an eye on the fire. Peak Charles is a fairly large national park set about 200km from Norseman, the jumping off point for a Nullarbor crossing. The park consists of a single lonely peak rising out of hundreds of kilometres of flat brown scrub.

By the time we reached the isolated peak it was just shy of midday and the sun was baking. While we'd left the coast looking for sunshine we hadn't quite expected this much of it. Richard and I estimated the temperature to be 40°C if not in the region of 45°C or more. There was little wind and the country was as dry as a paraffin martini. The ranger had said that they'd had no rain in Peak Charles ...