The CrossingPenong And Beyond
Police Lights And Silly Signage
Police lights appeared through the fog before sunrise, but it was only a friendly check. Later came lunch in Penong, actual street lights and the strange thought that our last Nullarbor night was almost here.
Day 46 started at 4:50am, very cold and very foggy.
There is a particular kind of oddness to stepping out of a campervan in the dark when the rest of the world is sensibly asleep. Compression gear on. High vis on. Torch in hand. The breath of the morning hanging in the beam of light. Then off I went again, because Ceduna was getting close and there was one more proper day left between us and the end of that long stretch from Norseman.
About two hours later, a vehicle pulled up and the flashing lights came on.
Local police.
Someone had phoned in a report of a person walking on the highway in the dark, which I could understand. If you saw a large bloke moving along the Eyre Highway before sunrise, it was probably not the worst idea in the world to let someone know. The useful part that had not made it into the report was that I was in high vis, carrying a bright torch, and doing exactly what I was meant to be doing.
All was good. I apologised for them having to come out, but they were very gracious about it and pointed out that it was much warmer inside the car than it was out there beside the highway. Fair point. Before heading back to the warmth of their police station, the officer wished me luck with the rest of the way to Brisbane and let me know it was minus one.
I did not get a photo or a name. My fingers and brain were both too numb for that level of admin.
The police check was funny, but it also said something about where we were now. For weeks we had been moving through huge quiet stretches where the next roadhouse could feel like the only fixed point in the world. Now someone could see me in the dark, make a call, and local police could come out to check. Ceduna was not here yet, but the long empty chapter was starting to change around us.
The fog lifted slowly, and South Australia kept shifting.
There were more farms, more animals, more signs of people living nearby. Somewhere along the way I saw a sign for Somerset and could not resist the obvious joke: I knew I had walked a long way, but Somerset? Don’t think so. After everything those weeks had thrown at us, seeing that name out there was too good to leave alone.
By lunchtime we reached Penong, and Penong felt surprisingly exciting.
It had street lights. Intersections. Buildings that were not a roadhouse. A school. Windmills. Food that did not involve standing beside the campervan on the edge of the highway. None of those things sound especially thrilling in normal life, but after weeks of roadhouses, rest areas, roadside stops, and wide open distance, they felt like evidence that we were edging back toward civilisation.
There was still room for nonsense, of course.
Western Australia had given us pointless paving. South Australia now offered silly signage.
The sign itself was completely legitimate, and the distances were correct. It was just positioned in a way that made it seem easier to read if you were approaching from the paddock. That was unlikely to be of much use to drivers, so I wondered whether the local sheep wandered up every now and then to check how far it was to Penong or Ceduna.
That was exactly the sort of humour that kept working after this many kilometres.
By the end of the day I had covered 55.5 kilometres. We were only 46 kilometres from the fruit fly checkpoint and Ceduna.
That meant this was our last night on the “Nullarbor”, at least in the way the word had lived in my head since before Perth. We had already crossed the actual treeless plain, but for me the Nullarbor had become the whole Norseman-to-Ceduna chapter: the remote stretch, the roadhouses, the silence, the huge spaces, the shifting country, the strange peace of being out there day after day.
I felt a bit excited and a bit sad.
I had loved the space. I had loved the variety. I had loved the natural beauty, and especially the silence. There would be other quiet stretches later, but this part had been its own thing. It had been the section I had imagined, worried about, planned around, and then somehow lived through.
One more push would get us to Ceduna. Then it would be time to restock, reset, and plan the next phase in detail.
Images From The Day
