The Nothingness Of Travelling To The Big Red Bash.

I didn’t expect nothingness to be so intriguing.

I’m Ballarat born and bred. I used to call it the seven-minute city; you could pretty much get wherever you needed to be in seven minutes. But the town has stretched and swelled over the years and now there are a bunch of big chain supermarkets, a McDonald’s on every main road, and KFC or Hungry Jacks bookending the other side.  Shopping centres, carwashes, more childcare centres than you can count and, with a petrol station on almost every block you’d have to scratch your head if anyone ever ran out of fuel. The yard space between houses is getting less and the time it takes to travel from A to B is getting more.

My father and his family hail from nearby Avoca and my mother and her family, from Maryborough. As a kid, visiting my grandparents in these towns didn’t feel ‘nearby’ at all. It was a long and boring drive that warranted packing toys, colouring books and pillows, and in my later years, my Sony Walkman and a couple of cassettes. We used to go camping at Lake Hindmarsh in the state’s West, and as a working adult, I drove as far North West as Mildura, as far South West as Portland, and over to Gippsland in the east a few times. Throw in a family driving holiday along part of the Western Australian coast when I was pre-teen, another WA journey in a Britz van for our honeymoon, and a few Jetstar chauffeured trips to the Gold Coast, Sydney, Byron Bay, Newcastle and Tasmania and you pretty much have my portfolio of travelling Australia.

The popular ‘Australia-trip’ has always appealed to me, but has been too overwhelming. I’ve been in awe of fellow parents of school-aged kids who have bundled the family into their SUVs and decked-out caravans (or in some cases, tents!) and hit the road for weeks, or months.  I’ve gazed at their Facebook photos of picture-perfect waterholes, secluded sandy beaches, iconic signs and outback pubs, but tossed the idea of joining them into the too-hard basket. Instead, we opted for family holidays to places like Vietnam and New Zealand where brochures from travel agents, online reviews and up-to-date websites made fact-finding easy and booking a breeze.

I have done a decent amount of research into outback Australia—Birdsville and the Simpson Desert specifically—for a novel that I started working on many desert moons ago. I’d toyed with the idea of taking myself there under the guise of an aspiring author but realised that an unpublished manuscript was hardly capital enough to justify it.

But, when friends invited us to go to The Big Red Bash—in Birdsville, in the Simpson Desert my well of excuses was bone dry. No overwhelm, not a lot of time away from my seven-minute-give-or-take-fifteen-city, reviews and information aplenty (shoutout to all the chatty folk on Travelling to The Big Red Bash Facebook group), and Bash-experienced friends, new and old, who were wholeheartedly willing to give us advice on tackling this epic journey. 

I’m a visual person. I knew we needed to stick to sealed roads (we’d decided to hire a van from Breakfree Caravans for the trip and it was a sealed-roads-only deal). But when my husband explained where we were going, I had no bearings. The towns beyond Echuca were new territory for me. Google maps didn’t help me; Australia doesn’t squeeze well onto a 6-inch screen. It wasn’t until we drew it out on an old-school foldable map that I got some sort of picture of our trip: a candy cane-shaped route from Ballarat up through the guts of Victoria, NSW and QLD, a curve towards NT and then a drop into Birdsville; considered to be one of Australia’s remotest towns.

With that accolade to its name and the research I had done—being an aspiring author and all—I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the remote-situ.

Turns out my grasp was weak.

After our first stop at Hay (which is, in sorts, akin to Avoca and Maryborough) we travelled almost the entire length, vertically, of NSW in one day to find ourselves at the Barringun Roadhouse and Caravan Park (NB this is where my interpretation of Caravan Park started to be challenged somewhat). Any other day of the week, I would have given my husband instructions to the tune of “hell no, drive on,” but given there wasn’t much else showing on the map—Google or otherwise—this seemed like our only option for the night. This caravan park (FYI not a BIG-4) had been recommended to us by our Bash-advisors and, given there were so many other vans pulling onto that patch of dirt, I was able to quiet the imaginative little thinker on my shoulder suggesting that this could be the scene of a real-life murder-mystery. It had one shower and one toilet in a tin shed, and loosely translated: a café-restaurant kind of thing. Despite the tear-shaped bright red flag advertising COFFEE, it didn’t really feel like the right establishment to ask for my almond latte, and I doubt the kitchen would have been able to cater for this gluten-free, vegetarian.

Without the usual caravan park trimmings – you know, a swimming pool, games room and ride-on carts,  we kicked the footy; the Sherrin attracting a lethal amount of prickles if you failed to mark it. We admired the sunset, cooked ourselves some dinner, sipped on a nice red, and as the lights went out on all the vans around us, I thought this is remote.

Huh. Cute.

We had Charleville pencilled in as our lunch stop for the next day. I was expecting Charleville to be a Target-Country kind of town, on account of my understanding that it is one of the regional centres that supplies places like Birdsville. Target-Country was probably a bit too ambitious, but there was a bakery (that served sushi: wouldn’t recommend), the closest thing to a supermarket that we’d seen since leaving home, a camping shop, a newsagency, and a few other stores that earned Charleville its badge of being a hub to the outer-lying areas.

Between Charleville and Longreach (another Target-Country kind of town, sans Target-Country) I was starting to get my head around the remoteness: wild goats on the side of the road that were unperturbed by road trains doing 100 kilometres an hour, signs pointing to farming stations, with no station in sight, and alerts indicating the status—open or closed—of roads that joined one remote town to another.

But the remote version of Australia was just starting to trickle in.

After Winton—where we camped at the showgrounds, no biggie—this intriguing nothingness started to present herself.

The road from Winton into remote, real remote, Australia is one long skinny stretch of bitumen; a zipper up the middle of red dirt country. Eye Spy in these parts is one hell of a tricky game. Once you’ve ticked off grass, road and tree you’ve played the full deck of outside-of-the-car options; no fences, no reflectors, no road signs, power lines, or farmhouses; even sheep and cows weren’t reliable enough for eyes-to-spy.  

It’s flat. Dead flat. You can actually see how the sky domes itself around the Earth. It felt like being in a snow globe, only replace the cartoon-colours of a snow globe, with red, grey and yellow dirt, and streak it with sun rays rather than snowflakes. It was only some elusive stubble-covered sandy mounds in the distance that interrupted the 360-degree view of the horizon.

It's nothingness country. And it’s absolutely fascinating.

Fascinating to think that this land out here belongs to someone, that it is their livelihood, that somewhere (bloody where? I don’t know) there is a house, that people live in, some sheds, machinery, kids doing school of the air—maybe? The only hint of ownership is the very occasional flag-shaped sign—the writing not big enough to read as we drive past—pointing towards the nothingness. The nothingness that to someone, is somethingness.

The degree of nothing intensified the closer we got to Birdsville—save for some waterholes and wetlands that, thanks to some recent rain, were exploding with activity from birdlife. I would never consider myself a bird enthusiast (in fact, I teeter towards having ornithophobia) but had the road allowed for some stopping space, I would have happily whipped out a pair of binoculars and sat on those banks for hours just watching all of the different types of birds fleeting in and out of those waters.

Birdsville eventually became the dot on top of the “i”; and with the Big Red Bash only days away, it was suddenly anything but nothing. The “remote” town was abuzz with orange-dirt-covered cars and vans lining up to restock water tanks, 4WDs adorned with all manner of camping equipment queuing for fuel, and excited (albeit a little journey-weary) Bashers wandering along the few streets of the town to collect their Big Red Bash tickets and to stop in at the iconic hotel.

For a few days, the captivating land of nothing was behind us, and the thrill of attending the Most Remote Music Festival in the World was ahead of us.