Word: saltbush
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...have chosen a more dramatic place to stop. But having turned off the 90 Mile Straight, "Australia's Longest Straight Road," in the early hours of the 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...
...marsupials and water birds - for communities camped on their shores. As the lakes receded and were refilled, prevailing winds layered sand and clay on their eastern shores into giant crescent-shaped dunes, or lunettes. And by the time the lakes dried permanently about 16,000 years ago, leaving saltbush to claim their abandoned saline beds, the lunettes were like vaults, stacked with the artefacts and bones of people who had lived near them for millennia...
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...
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...
...loco driver boarding at Cook is Gary Carn He and his fireman, Peter Read, carry four days' provisions in a metal tucker box, which they keep in the locomotive cab. Carn stares down the twin ribbons of steel at a sea of green saltbush that reaches out in every direction to the circular horizon. No houses, no trees; only telephone poles rushing by at 60 m.p.h. interrupt his view. "We used to stop and let the passengers pick wildflowers," Carn says. "There are 7,000 different kinds...