Saturday, Aug 31, 2013 at 18:04
In July 1969, my best mate and I took my fairly new HK Holden ute from
Perth to
Darwin to
Port Augusta, and back to
Perth - in just one month!
We travelled on "main" roads that would be called 4WD tracks today! - with a 2WD Holden ute!
Going North, the bitumen ended at the Barradale Roadhouse (long gone) on the Yannarie River.
We were greeted at Barradale by a fully-loaded tri-axle low-loader, bogged to the makers name in the Yannarie
river crossing! (no bridges over ANY creek or river in those days!)
After Barradale, the NW Coastal Hwy was just two wheel ruts across the plains!
Every now and then, you'd have to brake and swerve like mad to miss a huge hole in the "highway" - where a semi-trailer had bogged to the deck, and then been hauled out by a station bulldozer or grader!
They never bothered filling the holes in, they just left them for other road users to find!
Every river and creek had a crossing, there was not a single
bridge all the way to
Darwin. Even the massive
Victoria River had a crossing that we splashed through!
We never saw any bitumen until we got to
Darwin - then we had this amazing WW2 American sealed "highway" all the way to the Alice!
Darwin was just a big frontier town in 1969, with the majority of the buildings being WW2 buildings.
From Alice South, the road was just dirt, a windy track (although quite broad), and with about 3 creek crossings to the mile!
Then disaster struck! We stripped the timing gear in the 186 Holden about 300
miles South of the Alice! Never-never country! The nearest "civilisation" was
Coober Pedy!
I hitched a ride with a truckie from
Adelaide who was driving an early 1950's Foden! This old Foden rumbled along about 40-50kmh, and the truckie never slept, he just drove all night!
We pulled into
Coober Pedy about 7:00AM, got some breakfast at the only cafe/roadhouse in town - and got sent to the only mechanic in town, who had just built a new shed - about the only other above-ground building in the place!
I walked into this near-empty shed and said to the mechanic bloke - "You wouldn't have a timing gear for a Holden would you?"
He said - "Yes, I think I have!" - and he went to a 44 gallon (200L) open-top drum in the corner of the shed - and pulled out a new Holden timing gear! Thank God for GMH and their fabulous parts and service!
I hitched a ride back to the ute, and my mate and I installed the timing gear by the side of the road, and we were off again! We made it to
Port Augusta in record time!
We drove out across the
Eyre Hwy to be greeted by some of the biggest "flocks" of 'roos I have ever seen! (what's a group of 'roos called??).
There must have been 500-700 'roos in these huge flocks, moving South because the feed was drying up in the North. It was amazing to see!
We tried to drive through these flocks and it was like driving into a flock of sheep! They wouldn't get out of your way!
One big 'roo took a sharp left turn as we tried to pass him on the left, and he jumped in the air and came down right on top of the bonnet!! He slid off over the side, and hopped away!
We couldn't believe the size of the potholes in the worst 500kms of the original
Eyre Hwy. They would nearly half swallow your car! God only knows how the truckies coped with them! Those old Inters and Dodges and 34' strap semi-trailers must have been tough!
We were so glad to see bitumen again once we got to
Norseman and the
Coolgardie-
Norseman Road!
North of
Norseman, we came across the MRD of W.A. at work, widening the bitumen on this section of the highway to 2 lanes, from the original 3.0 metre wide single lane.
My mate kept a diary and I have a big box of slides from that trip, and it's a real eye-opener to go through them today and see how much has changed - and how we think nothing of going 1000kms in a single day, with such ease, nowadays!
I lived alongside an old 'Slav prospector, Mick Urlich, at Higginsville, North of
Norseman in the 1970's and 1980's - and old Mick would say - "You see that highway out there? They reckon it cost a million dollars a km! You want to know something? It's worth EVERY CENT of it! When I arrived here in 1923, the road was just two wheel ruts through the bush - and you spent more time driving IN THE BUSH, than ON THE ROAD!!"
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