Arriving yesterday, we’ve turned off the Eyre Highway towards the Great Australian Bight – careering down a steep escarpment across dunes and a rocky 4WD track – to 50km southeast of Cocklebiddy; the old Eyre telegraph station.
In the morning we meet Shirley while sitting on the veranda drinking coffee. Shirley has a weathered face despite the permanent fixture of a wide-brimmed calico hat; a look that’s incongruous with her old-school English. She’s a volunteer here at the research station, an amateur naturalist and historian. She brushes a fly from her mouth; the standard Outback salute. Her eyes are small but bright. “I’ve been known to cook a bit too”, she adds, just to set the record straight.
We’ve decided to stay awhile to give `the bus’ a rest, due to a string of stinking hot days and more ahead; whereas – according to Shirley – most rush on through. “They don’t know what they’re missing here.” I exchange glances with my girlfriend and gaze at the kilometres of rolling desert scrub as far as the eye can see.
Shirley is sharp to catch my drift, and smiles. “Yes, it’s a hard country I suppose, but we’ve got everything we need. And you have time to think here.” There’s a pause as Shirley’s thoughts drift off someplace else; shaking her head as if to kick start the next sentence. “I don’t know how those first explorers got through though. Now, they really were a tough lot!”
She tells us Edward John Eyre arrived in 1841; part of an exhausted and starving party of five crossing the Nullarbor. They’d seen no new water for a week, until digging 2m down in the fine sand here. Eyre rested up for 29-days before continuing west, a journey ending in the death of all but two of his party.
Shirley puts one hand against a veranda post as if listening to the building, and suddenly turns to me. “By 1897 there was the telegraph, and this limestone homestead. And we’ve been here since 1977, the most isolated research facility in the country.”
Mid-afternoon Shirley’s still at it, having dropped by for water. There’s bird monitoring, surveys and rainfall checks. “I’m pretty handy with a hammer,” she says. We’re not surprised. “There’s the reptiles too; the pit-fall and funnel traps, all checked twice daily, the animals weighed, measured, and marked.’ Shirley senses our astonishment at the workload and smiles. “I need to keep busy,” she says.
Finally finished for the day, her face is streaked with sweat, flushed but beaming. “See that light?” she exclaims pointing westwards. “The washed afternoon haze; the changing palette, the reds and yellows turning blue.”
This is the first time we’ve ventured out from the wide expanse of veranda. There’s a slack rope pitched between two pairs of posts and I ask why. “Ah,” says Shirley, “there are often families here, and kids, God bless them. They run around the verandas like banshees. We tell them, but, well you know, they are kids.” I wonder if Shirley’s being petty, but she seems to read my thoughts and points a finger. “See that?”
I see a low small bowl of a bird bath, surrounded by sand and the ubiquitous desert litter. Shirley smiles again. “Look closer.” I still don’t get her point. “There, at the foot of the base.” Yes, I see the scattering of leaves and sticks. And then I do see it; the brown head flat, broad and triangular, the rest of the body hidden.
“We call them death adders,” she says, “a patient breed content to sit and wait for the slow and unwary; for days if necessary. Pretty common about these parts, preferring a mouse or small bird; but you’d be dead meat in no time.”
I suggest the snake be moved. Shirley smiles the indulging smile of a knowing parent. “Not much point.” She shades her eyes from the last of a flaming sun. “There are lots of them around here. If one moves out, another moves in.” I think Shirley could handle anything.
In the morning Shirley’s already up and about as usual. It’s the end of her roster today, and she’s leaving for home `before it gets warm’. We catch her down by the beach, standing and taking in the length of the coast across the mist from waves that pound a rusted wreck. She’s turned back and coming our way as we push through a sandy track surrounded by rolling dunes in dappled sunlight. The rumble of the Southern Ocean seems stifled at Shirley’s back.
She stops when up close, speaking quietly. “This may be my last trip.” Her words are slower today. There’s vagueness in that sunburned face – the previous confidence gone – and there’s a sniff as she wipes sand from her face with the corner of an old lady’s handkerchief. “I’m getting on a bit these days. And with Jemima on her own now, there’s grandkids to help out with.”