With friends at Muloorina

It is said, of the contacts you meet travelling like this, that you meet a new best friend every day. It rings true because it seems the people you do meet and get along with, are met all in good spirit. It was a delight to meet up again, and we carried on as if we had known each other for years. Jill had purchased a large round of pork to roast, and we had corned beef and chicken, and good champagne suitably iced in the wash bucket beside the main road in the mud! Muloorina Station is where, in 1963, Donald Campbell and his team set up camp and attempted the world land speed record. They were thwarted by weather and so they mothballed the Bluebird at Muloorina over winter, to return again in 1964, when Campbell successfully broke the record at over 400 mph. This was stuff of boyhood dreaming and it was special to arrive on our first morning when we drove out to the Lake’s edge, and read an old bronze plaque set up on the edge, overlooking a seemingly endless and so flat salt bed. His record was set 20 kilometers out, as far from humanity at that time as it would have been possible to go. Strange to achieve something as abstract but of our world, out there, where its irrelevance was complete. Another sign advises not to drive out onto the lake bed, especially because the tyre tracks may stay there for the next twelve years. So there were of course graceful figures of eight and sweeping S curves heading off into the distance! And it is a shame really, because the sense of something special is strong and it is thoughtless to go there. But hey, when you’re eighteen! The variety of plant species in such a hostile environment is amazing – Daisies, Chenopods, Grasses and the Pea families can be seen all within a few square metres.

The waterhole at Muloorina is about 1.5 kilometres long and is charged by a hot spring that smells typically sulphury, but is good to sit in. The hole itself is deep though, and very cold. Helen predictably was straight in and loved it for ten minutes whilst the rest of us retired after 1. We played solidly for two days and three nights, covering a lot of ground in the process. The last night was very windy. Tables and chairs blown over, dish cloths into the bushes, and a neighbour’s rubber dinghy swept across the lagoon and left, winded and forlorn, crumpled against a fence. Bill was not happy after a night spent tossed around in their Ultimate van. We were pleased that the Crossover only rocked a bit and felt very secure.