The CrossingNullarbor Roadhouse And Beyond
The Actual Treeless Plain
After weeks of false alarms, this was the actual treeless plain. It was cold, exposed and 54.4 kilometres long, with a late start and a later finish.
After weeks of almosts, Day 42 was the one where I finally crossed the actual treeless plain.
Not the wider thing everyone calls the Nullarbor. I had been inside that version for weeks by then, from Norseman east through roadhouses, cliffs, scrub, wind, cold mornings, and huge skies. This was the literal bit: the plain with no trees.
I had been waiting for it longer than I realised.
We’d slept at Nullarbor Roadhouse, so the morning began at my pin about 15 kilometres back down the highway.
It was a cold start and a late start, which is not an ideal combination when the day is going to ask for more than 50 kilometres. The yellow beanie was back on duty, the morning light was thin, and the first job was simply to cover those 15 kilometres properly on foot.
The first checkpoint was Nullarbor Roadhouse.
Nullarbor Roadhouse had a lot of history sitting around it. The old bicycle displayed outside made me smile, mostly because any complaint I had about my own setup looked ridiculous next to that contraption. If I ever cycle across the Nullarbor, I hope I have something more comfortable underneath me than that.
I liked seeing it, though. One of the strange comforts of the crossing was realising that lots of people had found their own odd, difficult, stubborn ways across the same country. Mine was just one version.
But before that, the sign had appeared: Nullarbor Plain, western end of the treeless plain.
After so many false alarms, that felt properly official.
For days I had been looking at the country and thinking, maybe this is it. The trees would thin out, the horizon would open, and I would decide I must be getting close. Then the scrub would thicken again, and the moment would slip away. The Nullarbor had been teasing me with its own name.
Day 42 ended that.
As far as I could tell, there really were no trees in that section. Low scrub, saltbush, sky, highway, horizon. The treeless plain itself is not especially long west to east, although it stretches much further north to south. On foot, I crossed that west-east dimension in a single day.
That is a strange thing to be able to say.
The place was stark, but it wasn’t empty. It had texture, colour and little changes in the light and the way the sky sat over everything. Its peace was hard to describe without making it sound softer than it felt.
It was peaceful, but not gentle.
I had to keep moving. The late start had not changed the distance, and the finish was still somewhere 30 kilometres east of Nullarbor Roadhouse. The day became a long piece of concentration: break it into sessions, keep eating, keep drinking, watch the light change, get back to the campervan, start again.
There were plenty of photos because the views kept being stunning in that particular Nullarbor way. Big space can look repetitive in a car, but on foot it changed slowly enough that I could feel the day turning. Morning blue became hard midday light. The afternoon sky started to pull itself into shapes. Then the sun dropped and the whole place changed again.
I still wasn’t done.
The late start became a late finish. The day that had begun cold ended under the moon after 54.4 kilometres, with the accumulated total sitting at 1798.4 kilometres.
The overnight stop was not a town or a landmark in the usual sense. It was 30 kilometres east of Nullarbor Roadhouse, which sounds vague until you are out there and understand that a workable place to stop is a perfectly real destination.
What stayed with me was the feeling that the false alarms were over. I had finally crossed the real Nullarbor, the literal treeless plain, on my own feet.
For something so open, it felt like a threshold.
Videos From The Day
Dawn on the actual treeless plain
A dawn Day 42 clip from the actual treeless plain, with the light starting to reveal the scale of the place.
Open on YouTubeJust before Nullarbor Roadhouse
Daytime footage just before Nullarbor Roadhouse, passing an unnamed worksite-looking area beside the Eyre Highway.
Open on YouTubeImages From The Day
