Word: nullarbor
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...Peter Burton, who turns grass into T-bones in the Kimberley; Elizabeth Keenan visited the kitchen of Warrant Officer John Benstead, 22 years an Army cook and now based in Townsville; Michael Fitzgerald tracked down Doug Pekin, a dogger who maintains 500 km of dingo-proof fence on the Nullarbor; Daniel Williams joined hands at a Sunday service with the dwindling faithful of Darnum, Victoria; and Rory Callinan met the crocodile-shooting, yarn-spinning "Wolf" Arneth of Normanton, Queensland. Our stories are brought to life by some of Australia's finest photographers: Ross Bird, Paul Blackmore, Stephen Dupont, Randy Larcombe...
...morning en route from Melbourne to Perth, their three-carriage Kenworth inexplicably shuts down. A misty dawn reveals an endless vista of saltbush: They're bang in the middle of an ancient seabed stretching 700 km from South Australia's Head of the Bight west to Balladonia. Nullarbor translates as "no trees" in Latin, and for the moment the truckers are without a clue. "Usually when there's a fault, a series of codes will flash up on the dash, but that's not coming up," Schneider says. "You just have to try and eliminate all the possibilities...
...usual culprit along this stretch of road is the kangaroo. "The roos breed up something phenomenal," says Eucla mechanic Rodney Fowler, who regularly tows broken-down vehicles across the Nullarbor. "Trucks bowl them over all the time, and a few cars as well. And they just keep on coming and they don't thin out." But a roo isn't to blame this morning, nor is low oil or water. Written across the Kenworth's chassis is the motto without trucking australia stops, but into the last quarter of their 40-hour trip, Schneider and Bryson must simply...
...Having moved to Perth from New Zealand little over a year ago, Bryson, 48, is new to the Nullarbor. "The thing that struck me," he says, "is it's the same but different. There's always something a bit different down the road." Today he's especially struck by the tyranny of distance. From Ceduna to Esperance alone, he says, "this distance would get me the whole length of New Zealand...
Traveling through the Nullarbor at dusk, you'll often find a wedgetail eagle hunkering down on road kill for its final feed of the day before taking off, slow and steady, like a jumbo jet into the wind. Doug Pekin, 66, has something of the eagle's noble bearing as he goes about his business, looking for signs of strength and weakness in the landscape, keeping the wilder forces of nature at bay. "On the pay slips I'm a boundary rider," he says, when quizzed, "but the locals call me a dogger...