Word: nullarbor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Western Australia's Nullarbor (meaning no trees) Plain is an arid, limestone plateau that lies east of the old gold-rush towns of Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie, southeast of Comet Vale and northeast of Grass Patch. It is a barren, almost unpopulated land of sand and saltbush. Out of the blackness of the southwestern sky one night last week, the fringe of this isolated region was visited by a fiery symbol of the Western world's most advanced technology: the final, fatal fall of Skylab...
...hours the Indian-Pacific rushes over a kaleidoscope of landscape. From the steep Blue Mountains of the Great Dividing Range it speeds toward the stark-naked Nullarbor Plain. It flashes by farms with earth so red that the livestock watering holes seem to be filled with blood. It races past nickel, lead and gold mines, flocks of fleecy merinos, smelters, slag heaps, ports and forests. It passes signs exhorting WELFARE NOT WARFARE and OUR HOSPITAL NEEDS YOUR HELP: PLEASE GET SICK. A big painted rock aimed at shooing away pilots seeking to land says PISS OFF. To the north, lights...
This ditty is recited by the children of Cook. They are up at dawn to watch the train refuel before it heads across the 500-mile plain of Nullarbor (Latin for "not any tree"). The desolate limestone plateau is covered with sea fossils, saltbush, and red-flowering wild hops. Weird subterranean winds whistle through caves honeycombing the limestone, and whoosh with an eerie trumpeting from gaping blowholes. Over one stretch known as "the long straight," the track runs dead ahead for 297 miles, the longest straightway railroad in the world. There was a "loco" driver at Cook named Kevin Smith...
...there, all right," said Hunter Ron Sells, insisting he had spotted a white girl running wild with a herd of kangaroos across the Nullarbor desert in southwestern Australia. "When she saw us, she watched us for a few minutes, and then she dashed off with the 'roos into the scrub...
...that time, two enterprising cameramen had managed to produce some pictures of a girl running with the kangaroos-and actually pulling their tails. Desert-wise oldtimers in the sun-parched Nullarbor, however, were not convinced. "Any bird go flitting around in the scrub here with nothing on," snorted one bushman, "would bloody soon burn off what's bobbing, I can tip you." Added Sheep Farmer Harvey Gurney: "The water holes are all dried up. She'd be burned to a crisp...