Shot Notes
This is a bodger legend and an inspiration. There was no information board but given the location in the centre of the Australian outpost of Marree this looks like the remains of the Leyland truck from the 1954 film/documentary “The Back of Beyond”.
Marree is a frontier town and the last petrol stop before embarking on the Birdsville, Oonadatta or Strzelecki Track. From here dirt roads stretch out hundreds of miles into South Australia’s remote corners. The place has a Mad Max feel. Beefed up 4WD’s adorned with equipment and stacked high with water and petrol cans prepare to take on the expanse. From here I went North until the road ended at the foot of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre.
When I first visited Australia in my gap year over 20 years ago a fellow traveller told me this quote by Samuel Johnson “The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are” So it is with Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre. Internet articles predicting the rains earlier this year in Queensland and The Northern Territory would cause a once in a lifetime event were greatly exaggerated. I suspect they were written by someone with an interest in the tourism industry. It is true that the rivers here are untamed but industry and agriculture still take bore water from the Great Artesian Basin. This reduces the chance of the lake ever filling again like it did in 1974. It is a sobering thought that since it last filled the global human population has doubled and the wildlife population has halved. Another part of travel these days seems to be seeing things before they are gone forever.
From here I will go west across the Nullarbor Plain to revisit the location of my best selling photo in Kalgoorlie.
The tyres still look in reasonable nick.
They are in better nick than the seat.
In need of more than a little TLC
Lovely vehicle
Shame you didnt get to drive it. Pictures of the owners and truckers would be good X