The Road To Moura

After Carnarvon, I felt a kind of gnawing anxiety, a kind of terror at being so far from people, so far from help should I need it. Instead of heading back south the way I had come, I headed north, through the nighttime, towards the closest town of Rolleston.

At Rolleston, however, the whole town had gone to sleep. Troubled by my emptying gas tank, and still anxious, I drove east on the supposedly major highway, the Dawson Highway, which was really a very bumpy two-lane road, which sometimes was a lane-and-a-half wide, with no central dotted line. Nobody, but nobody, was on the road tonight - I was in the middle of oblivion! Every so often, however, a vehicle passed - an enormous road train or two, but that's it.

Arriving at Bauhinia, I was downcast: everyone had gone to sleep there too. I hated the idea of just stopping without an assurance of nearby petrol, and even though it was late, I decided to continue pressing east, towards Moura.

Within thirty minutes, three events:

• A large raptor was startled by my vehicle's approach and tried to outfly it. It lost. I smacked into the bird with the windshield and it tumbled over the top of the vehicle;
• I ran over a rabbit; and,
• My tires left the pavement as I reached to change the radio station. I had to wrestle for control, and nearly joined the other animals as a victim of Australia's roads.

I can justify the rabbit by saying that, even though I love rabbits, they are not native to Australia, are pests here, and probably should be eliminated. Thus, I was doing a public service. But not a beautiful raptor! Compounding my guilt was that I didn't stop to see if I could help. Maybe the bird died outright, but maybe it was merely injured. I didn't know where to take it, but I could have at least tried. In the brief two seconds I saw it, I thought it was an owl, but my wildlife books don't show an owl that white - it may have been a Black-Shouldered Kite instead.

Paraphrasing that old, cynical saying from Vietnam days:

Become an international tourist! Travel to distant Australia, met the rare and unique wild animals there, and kill them.

Finally, about 11:30 p.m., I arrived at Moura. That town was shut down too, but at least I could see they had a gas station. Poking around residential side streets, I discovered the refuse tip, so (appropriately enough), around midnight, I fell asleep in the driver's seat of the car, without dinner, in the Moura town dump, not far from the pile of glass recyclables. I was awakened only once, by a curious cat.