Relentlessly they tickled and crawled and buzzed.  They were drawn to the moisture in the corners of my eyes.  The mesh around my head held the swarm at bay – they were capable of driving me to madness.  I wondered where they had all come from as we were literally in the middle of nowhere.  Whenever we got out of the car they were upon us within seconds.

          I looked down at my chubby eighteen month old sucking yogurt from a squeeze-pack through the flynet she was wearing.  I was impressed at how quickly she had adapted to the situation. 

          ‘That’s a good way to do it, Amy,’ Kelly said to her, smiling affectionately and followed suit, drinking from her water bottle through her own flynet.

          We were travelling with friends – they were wife Kelly, husband Tim and four year old Max in their car; while myself, my husband Mick and our two little girls – Amy and four year old Lily – were in our car.

          ‘Bung-eye,’ was what I had been told at the general store we had stopped at earlier. 

          ‘Bung-eye,’ I repeated, laughing at the woman when she told me.  She couldn’t be serious? 

          ‘Yes, bung-eye,’ she confirmed.  ‘Is what they’ll get if you don’t keep the flies out of their eyes.  No, it’s not this bad all the time.  There is a fly plague at the moment.’  I noticed the lines of dust marking the creases of her face.

          I looked at the flies crawling all over Mick’s back in disgust as he walked ahead of me to the handful of sandstone ruins.  Lily was already inspecting rocks that she had caught glittering in the sun.  Sweat trickled down my nose.  The flynet, while it protected us from the madness of the flies, made it even more stifling.  The only relief from the heat was within our air-conditioned vehicles, and I would be back in there in minutes as there was not much to see here.

          It was the remains of a settlement from less than 100 years before.  All that was left were stone walls and fireplaces, yawning doorways, roofless rooms, floors of compacted earth and rock.  It had failed.  I looked at the near apocalyptic landscape surrounding it and raised an eyebrow.  Little wonder at that.  Yesterday we had left the mountainous ruins of a volcano, which, like a fortress wall, ended abruptly on a desolate withering place running up to its base; where the temperature climbed to 40 degrees…40 degrees in the middle of autumn!

          Disappointment was smouldering inside me.  We hadn’t taken a trip for a couple of years and we wouldn’t do so again for another couple of years – naturally I had hoped that my holiday would be something enjoyable.  Wasn’t it supposed to be a reward for all of our hard work; I had attached expectations to the idea of holiday. 

          I had once stood among the ancient ruins of Rome.

​

Back into the cars again and we drove on and on, ever further, ever inward, toward the heart, the red heart.  I was thinking dead heart.

          This was land referred to as the never never.  I had thought the name had had a mysterious ring to it, like Peter Pan’s Neverland.  Now I realised it meant it was the land you should never never go to.

          I was feeling deceived by the waxing lyricals of its remoteness and vastness and the wonder of the ‘lake-land’ it became after rains.  I glanced at the clear blue sky.  The website had also said the average temperature was 30 for this time of year – liar.

          It had sounded bearable in theory. 

          I began apologising to my two girls about everything – I’m sorry that it’s so hot, I’m sorry about the flies, I’m sorry you’re bored because we spend so much time in the car.

          ‘They’ll be fine until you tell them they’re not,’ my husband warned me.  So much was going unsaid between us.  I was wrestling my unhappiness.  Surely Tim and Kelly thought this sucked too? 

​

We had come to an oasis.  The verdant hollow must have been the result of an unseen natural spring at its heart.  I drank in the cool green of the long, soft grass.  The handful of trees scattered around were covered with healthy lush leaves.  Everyone was in a cheerful mood all of a sudden, not that anyone else had been as sullen as I.  We searched for kindling and built a fire.  There was a picnic table which the children soon spread their colouring books and pencils across.  The sun retreated below the horizon and so did the flies to our relief.  The vibrant flames of our fire licked at the darkening sky.

          Lily was the first to slap at her bare ankle.  ‘Ow,’ she cried. 

          The mosquitoes did not spare one of us.  We tried standing in the smoke of the fire to stave off their vicious and stinging bites.   Arrrgh!

         The next morning Lily woke with red welts.  I felt sorry for her.  I was covered in itchy bites as well but they were not as inflamed looking as my little ones were.

​

The track stretched away before me and shimmered in the heat haze before falling over the edge of the horizon; there was no hill or feature to bring relief ...until we arrived at the legendary Oodnadatta Roadhouse.  Gawd, what a heap!  And it was painted the colour of raw flesh.  This was a landmark…this is all it took to be considered a landmark!

          Oh how I yearned for the comforts of my suburban home, yearned with an aching need.  I longed for the pretty facades, velvet lawns, European trees, the rain and the cool breeze that blew off the water in the evenings – bountiful, dreamy, suburban middleclass.  I had wanted to break with routine, but now it didn’t seem so bad and I wanted to be back within the nest of it.  My chest felt tight.  I was frightened by being surrounded by seemingly endless, near-uninhabitable country. 

          Inside the raw flesh roadhouse I eyed the chicken niblets sitting in the bain-marie with distaste.  They looked fake and thawed and why would you use the word niblet; it rhymed with the word giblet, and that wasn’t appetising.

          The children sat at a table, content with their pink milk.

          ‘What’s wrong?’ Mick asked me.

          ‘Nothing,’ I breathed.

          ‘There is.’

          ‘No there’s not.’

          ‘I can tell there is,’ he sighed.

          After a pause, ‘This is not what I imagined a holiday to be.’

          'Well, what did you think?  It’s a desert.  You wanted to come too.’

          ‘But I didn’t think it was going to be 40 degrees and there would be a fly plague.  And all we do is drive and drive because there is nothing to see.’

          This was the beginning of the end; it was going to lead to divorce, I was certain of it.

          ‘There is nothing we can do about it; you’ve just got to make the best of it.  It’s not just a holiday…it’s an adventure.’

          He looked away and out the smeary windows with a look of disappointment.  I tried to swallow the lump in my throat.

          ‘We could head south from here; down to the coast.  Kelly and Tim could go on without us,’ I suggested with hope.

          ‘ They won’t make it by themselves; it’s too risky for a single vehicle with a trailer on the back.  We’ve put too much preparation into this to just quit.’

          ‘What’s up,’ said Tim, coming over to the table. 

          ‘Alice is struggling with the flies and the heat.  She’s a bit surprised.  I’m ok with it,’ he said distancing himself from me.  ‘She suggested going south but I think we should keep going.  What do you think?’

          ‘Yeah, so do I,’ Tim replied.  ‘You’ll be disappointed if you don’t see it through,’ he said addressing me.

          Kelly walked over to us now.

          ‘Is everything OK,’ she asked.

          ‘Alice is struggling with the flies and stuff; not quite what she thought it would be,’ Tim informed her.

          ‘Bloody flies, I hate them too,’ she said with a smile.  ‘We’re made of tuff stuff though, aren’t we?’

          My throat was dry.  I was letting everyone down with my attitude.

​

The sky above had turned temperamental.  Inky dark clouds hovered above us.  What an insult to the land below to be looking as if they might break apart and drench everything in life giving rain.

          The landscape had subtly changed too.  Thin grass covered the plain that spread around us.  And without the bright sun bleaching everything with its glare, it actually appeared to be green.  I love green.  I always want to live somewhere green.  The track had also changed by dwindling to a single lane width.

          A four legged beast appeared on the horizon ahead and as we approached I could see it was a donkey grazing.  My head followed it round as we passed it.

          ‘Where did a donkey come from,’ I commented out loud, giggling.  I found it amusing, in an on-the-edge-of-madness kind of way.  ‘I didn’t know there were wild donkeys out here.’

          ‘The temperature’s dropping,’ Mick informed me.  Indeed it was, so the gage said.  It was a rational 30 degrees when we pulled up to have a break.

          Within moments of being out of the car, everyone exclaimed, ‘Where are the flies?  There are no flies!’

          ‘Not cattle country anymore,’ Tim suggested.

          We came to Mt Dare on the edge of the Simpson Desert.

          And the landscape changed again; dunes began to build like the swell on an ocean.  But it wasn’t barren like the surface of an ocean.  It was covered in a myriad of low growing vegetation.

          The track deteriorated into shifting sand.  And I shifted inside too.  Every dune became a challenge and a risk.  Progress slowed and who would have guessed what that meant – anticipation.  Passage slowed and time sped up.

          ‘Righto kids, out,’ Mick instructed them. 

          I climbed out with them.

          We waited anxiously as he plotted the cars path up the dune.  Mick got as many revs and as much speed up as he could accomplish while still maintaining control, of course.

          ‘Go, Daddy, go,’ the children cried.  Even little Amy was picking up on the vibe, sucking ferociously on her dummy.

          We clasped our hands before us and as the vehicle settled triumphantly atop the dune we broke into cheers and clapping and laughing – yes, quite unexpectedly I was laughing, and not in an on-the-edge-of-madness kind of way.

          Then it was other vehicles turn and we cheered and ran up the dunes, and within minutes we were at the next.

          This is how we made our way, dune by dune, slowed down to no more than a dingo’s trot, or perhaps a donkey’s.

          The camper-trailers had to be unhooked, dragged by snap strap and hooked back up, over and over.

          It could have been tedious, but for some inexplicable reason it wasn’t.  Perhaps it was because there was an edge to it.  For each dune we traversed, it was possible we might not make it over.  And if we rolled a vehicle, or simply couldn’t make it over a dune, we would be stuck.  We would have to wait for help, and that could take days.  Even the children sensed the realness of this.  We even turned off the air conditioning because we were afraid of sucking to much fuel and underestimating how much we would burn through.

          The children were laughing and singing out the windows, and listened to us speaking to Tim and Kelly on the two way radio.

​

In the latter half of the afternoons, we would look for simple attributes that would make a good place to camp: a flat clear space, a twisted gnarled tree as a focal point.

          Tents unfolded, chairs laid out.  The children took small cars and made tracks in the sand with sticks and amused themselves looking at prints laid on the ground by birds, reptiles, insects, marsupials and the dingos.

          It had been on our first night within the dunes, upon dusk, we heard our first mournful howl.

          ‘Dingos,’ I had whispered to whoever was nearest.  We looked at each other.  The children clutched at us in genuine concern.

          ‘Dingos,’ we had whispered to them.

          ‘Dingos,’ they had whispered to each other.

​

This night, the desert had a gift for me.  The moon had been gradually making its way to fullness, rising minutes later every day, on a path that brought it closer and closer to our terra firma.  This was unbeknownst to us, a mere gravitational co-incidence of our journey. 

          The sky was saturated with colour, translucent like a ruby gem, and then faded till all that was left was a tinge of aquamarine.  The first star rose.  It was incredibly bright and we wondered if it wasn’t a satellite, but no, we settled on that it was Jupiter.

          A howl echoed clear and chilling across the landscape.

          The moon had delayed for its perfect entrance onto the stage of the night sky.

          Cool white light began to brighten the rim of the sky of the east and made the indigo even deeper.

          The moon began to slide above the horizons edge, all silver luminosity.   It glowed so brightly it was as though it was lit from an inner mysterious light. 

          It appeared so impossibly big.

          ‘Look at that,’ Kelly said in a hushed voice and the children stopped and were silent.

          I felt so clearly at that moment that I was truly sitting on the edge of one celestial body and looking at another.  The breeze that brushed my face felt like the winds of the earth turning.  For a moment I stepped away from my own self and saw it, saw myself as part of something even greater again; a part of the cosmos; rider of the earth as it danced with the sun and moon.

          The valleys and mountains, gigantic pock marks of crashing asteroids, three dimensions of the lunar landscape could be perceived so vividly.

          I sensed the awe from my humans around me, all gazing in silence at the majesty of the rising moon, the horizon bowing low, the setting minimalist, highlighting the grandeur of the goddess taking to the sky.

          Dingos raised their faces and called into the night.  Others answered from all around, north, south, east and west, raising their muzzles upwards to the divine, the divine is always up.

          With modesty the moon had its fleeting moment, all the more precious, and retreated to the heights of the sky and allowed us to break our gazes and look away, and the dingoes to resume their foraging.

​