The CrossingMerredin toward Bodallin
Rabbit-Proof Fence And A Leaking Van
We left Merredin with fresh legs, a leaking campervan and 48.9 kilometres to cover. Somewhere between Burracoppin and the Rabbit-Proof Fence, the simple daily routine became complicated again.
Day 7 was supposed to be a big straight push after the Merredin rest.
The plan was 60 kilometres toward Bodallin. The actual day had other ideas, and so did the campervan.
Around the first stop, the boys found oil leaking from the van. My memory is of a servo that felt like the middle of nowhere: a cuppa, maybe something to eat, no mobile reception and a pay phone outside. I called the hire company and tried to explain that this wasn’t a normal holiday problem. We had timing pressure. I was walking across the country. A replacement turning up whenever it suited them wasn’t going to work.
It was a challenge to be faced, dealt with, and not allowed to slow us down. So I had to do the only useful thing I could do: leave it in the hands of Ben, Ols, and fate, then keep walking.
When the boys later overtook me beeping after cobbling together a temporary fix, it felt less like a surprise than confirmation. That was what kept us going: face the problem, assume a solution would present itself, and keep moving.
Some problems lived in my body: feet, fatigue, blisters, heat, traffic and fear. The vehicle belonged to the team. I cared about it, but I couldn’t stand still all day while Ben and Ols sorted it.
The day still gave us some beautiful anchors. Burracoppin with its iconic little Wheatbelt oddness. A stunning spot near Walgoolan. The pipeline crossing over the railway, which I loved because the pipeline had already become part engineering marvel, part navigation companion, part visual thread through the country. Red dirt under the Hokas. The boys had settled into a shoe rotation: two matching pairs marked 1 and 3 on the tongues, plus the blue pair that became Blue 2. It spread the wear across all three pairs, and there was a small but real psychological lift in putting on “fresh” shoes instead of just grabbing whatever my tired brain reached for.
The Rabbit-Proof Fence stopped me in a different way. Ols and I talked about the fence and the movie, and the history under the ground we were moving through. HAA was full of little practical targets, but places like that made the country feel less like a line on a map and more like something I needed to keep paying attention to.
Even the GPS routine was changing. By this stage the Garmin had already let me down, so Day 7 became one of the first days where I saved data at the end of each session instead of trusting one giant activity to survive. It created its own later weirdness with strange paces and Strava flags, but at the time the answer was simple: if the watch kept failing, I had to use it differently.
By late afternoon I was halfway to Kalgoorlie. That was a strange and meaningful sentence to be able to say out loud. The little milestones mattered.
We had planned to push on, but around 49 kilometres we called it. That left 58 kilometres to Southern Cross and a bit of weekend shuffling, with the hope that some Southern Cross locals might join the catch-up kilometres.
The day gave us leaking oil, split GPS sessions and an improvised finish short of the plan. The replacement would be sorted in Southern Cross. For now, we had 49 more kilometres east and 331 kilometres in the legs.
Images From The Day
