Looking out the windows of the SUV, we saw it: the gaunt outlines of the northern Flinders Ranges, a metallic red brown vein of cliffs and ridges and valleys running deep into Central Australia, one the most arid, barren places in the world.
Then we knew we were nearing our destination, the point at which one journey ended and another began.
From hitch hiking 400 kilometres to walking 200.
They were tired looking those ranges, almost as if their venture into the heart of one of the world´s greatest wastelands had proved to be too much and they had renounced any ambition of being a normal range.
But early in the morning and late in the evening, they burst into a spectrum of colours, all the colours of the rainbow. It was a transformation as miraculous as the animal which had once thrived there and learnt to dress itself up in a coat of many colours, like the biblical Jacob – and to merge into its environment during the critical times of the day when it went to forage for food…..
The aborigines (belonging to Adnyamathanha tribe) had called the wondrous animal ‘andu’.
The white man called it ‘the yellow footed rock wallaby’.
With the countless mornings and evenings engraved in its DNA, Andu was eerily beautiful. In the hope sighting this creature lay the promise of imagining this land as it once was, before white settlement, when the aborigines had thrived.
Which was why we were hitch hiking to the far north of South Australia with heavy rucksacks: we wanted to breathe new life into a dead land and without Andu we knew that was impossible.
We got the lift with Ella and Sven that morning. They pulled over and stopped and it was strange what happened next: the woman got out and in heavily accented English, told us to put our rucksacks in the back. When we’d finished doing that, she motioned for me to sit in the front with the man and Anya to get in the back with her.
´More leg room in the front´.
Later, I wondered about that.
Inside, introductions got underway.
Ella and Sven; they were Danish.
Ella had shoulder length ash blond hair, blue eyes, a round, friendly looking face; she was in good shape and attractive for her age – easy to see that when she was younger, she was a ‘looker’.
Sven had a high forehead, an aquiline nose, dark eyes, a lined but handsome face topped by a thick crop of wiry, black hair – probably dyed, I suspected given that the stubble on his face was grey. He was a big man and the wheel looked small in his hands.
The four of us chatted for a while.
Initially, Ella did most of the talking.
When she found out that we were headed to the north of the Flinders Ranges, with the plan of following an established walking trail and camping out in a tent, she exclaimed:
´That sounds adventurous!´
We began to explain that there was more than adventure involved.
‘ We’re hoping to see the ‘yellow footed rock wallaby’.
‘Yellow – foot – rock – wallaby’? exclaimed Ella, ‘What is that?’ (emphasis on the word ‘is’).
During our hitch hiking journey, Anya and I had worked out a division of tasks, something akin to the way we set up camp late in the afternoons and dismantled it on the following morning. It was my job to explain to strangers what a yellow footed rock wallaby was. I´d already had a bit of experience with this from our previous lifts.
‘A rock wallaby is like a small kangaroo only its smaller and has stronger, thicker, forepaws. Unlike kangaroos which never reside in one place but instead move around grazing where they can and resting under trees, especially during the heat of the day, rock wallabies have a fixed abode – in the crevices and holes in cliff faces which they can traverse with incredible agility. They feed on grass and small plants growing above and below the cliffs. To survive the hot days, especially during summer, they crawl inside their cliff face crevices.´
I didn’t have an image of Andu with me. When we left Adelaide, we had so many other things to attend to that it hardly seemed like a pressing concern. Later, on the road, I regretted that oversight.
Words were all I had and they were hardly sufficient.
‘The body of the yellow foot is blue-grey; its hind legs and fore paws are orange yellow. Its chest is white and there is a white stripe along its body and also its cheeks. Its long tail – it’s at least as long as the animal itself – is orange yellow and banded in sections of black.’
Ella and Sven were impressed.
‘So many beautiful animals in this country!’
I gave a short explanation.
Australia was the oldest continent in the world and also, being an island, its most isolated. Over aeons of time, the flora and fauna developed in unique ways. Originally there were 50 species of kangaroo-like marsupials, ranging from kangaroos two metres tall to a plethora of eerily beautiful, rabbit, rat and mouse sized hopping creatures: a menagerie of amazing and yes, beautiful animals.
But there was another side to this story which was altogether darker.
Today, I pointed out, most of these amazing and beautiful creatures were either extinct or endangered. White settlement had been an ecological disaster. A British settler invasion had wiped out the aborigines and at the same time, destroyed the environment and the wildlife.
Over the last decades there had been a campaign, initiated by the state Labour government, to reintroduce Andu into its original native habitat. There was politics behind the re-introduction of this unique wallaby in the Northern Flinders Ranges. The attempt to breathe new life into a decimated native species was symbolic of an attempt to redefine who we were as a nation and to expunge the demons from our past: the racism, violence and smallness of spirit.
I kept the politics of Andu short and focused more on the biology.
I mentioned the problem with feral animals, which was ironic, given what happened later.
I talked about how the settlers had introduced all sorts of European animals which had compounded the destruction of Andu: e.g., rabbits and goats, which competed with Andu for plants and grasses in the vicinity of the cliffs; foxes which attacked and ate Andu (especially because thanks to the rabbits and goats, it had to go further to find grasses and small plants).
An essential part of the re-introduction of Andu was a campaign to eradicate the feral animals.
Where were they headed? What kind of journey were they on?
They told us they were on their way to the Simpson Desert.
The Simpson Desert?
I didn’t know much about the Simpson Desert.
I knew it lay in somewhere in central Australia and much further north than we were going.
Sven informed me that the Simpson Desert covered an area of around 170,000 square kilometres.
Why were they going to the Simpson desert? I asked.
Driving around through hundreds of kilometres of sand wasn’t something which could inspire me much.
It was then that Sven began talking about camels.
Before I knew it, I found myself in the company of a different person entirely. From a quiet, almost taciturn man, he metamorphosed into a chatter-box.
And I was stuck with him on the front seat.
I suspected that Ella had set me up. I mean it didn´t escape my attention that whilst I was being drilled by Sven, Anya and Ella were having their own conversation in the back.
Sven talked about camels and little else. It was an obsession.
Camels!
Sven had worked in the Middle East for a big Danish engineering firm. It was there that he’d become interested in camels: gone to camel races, gone on camel safaris, talked to the locals about camels and eaten camel stew with rice.
He knew a lot about camels. And he knew a lot about camels in Australia.
He was really looking forward to seeing the camels in the Simpson Desert.
I can’t say I knew much about camels in Australia, only that they were feral.
They had been introduced by the white man and didn’t belong here.
My voice thick with disapproval, I asked him:
‘Why do you want to see feral camels?’
‘They are pure.’
‘Pure?
Pure feral?’
I had a feeling I was missing something here – lost in translation maybe?
We eventually surmounted the misunderstandings between Denmark and Australia.
He told me about how camels were brought to Australia during the late 1800’s and used to transport supplies up north because unlike horses and bullocks, they could survive for long periods of time without water.
His voice became almost passionate as he described how long lines of them, loaded up with boxes and bags and were led into the interior by their Afghan camel drivers.
Afghanis to handle the camels.
(In the mid north, at the copper mines, they had imported hundreds of Chileans to lead the donkey trains. In other words, they imported humans along with the animals).
In the 1920’s, Sven continued, the camels were superseded by the trains and later, roads. The camel drivers, rendered obsolescent, released their camels into the desert – where against steep odds, the camels proceeded to proliferate at an incredible rate.
Current estimates put the number of wild camels at well over half a million.
He stated this with a distinct sense of awe, even admiration.
I knew what I thought about those feral camels and it involved eradication.
I kept that opinion to myself. Instead, I interjected his spiel with what for me was an intriguing question:
‘Sven…where does the purity come into this?
‘These camels, they are isolated. They cannot interbreed with other strains of camels….these camels are like the camels in the Middle East in the time of Mohammed!’
Irony: The supreme isolation of Australia from the rest of the planet had led to development of unique flora and fauna –and now, in modern times, to pure camels.
What a loopy world this was!
The species we didn’t want multiplied. The ones we did want struggled.
Sven and his stupid camels!
The dramatic change in his demeanour when we got onto the subject of camels underlined not only the intensity of his obsession but also the sheer vitality of the species itself.
The image of Sven leading a long line of camels into an expanse of sand appeared before me accompanied by doubts as thick and pestering as a swarm of flies.
Why were we working so hard, spending so much money, to reintroduce native species?
The long term chances of survival of these reintroduced species were generally speaking low.
And why were Anya and I going out there in the unlikely hope of seeing a few struggling examples of a doomed marsupial?
We reached our destination.
We got down at the side of the road and heaved our rucksacks on and began walking. The change was as sudden as two divers jumping off a boat and being immersed in another world. We were surrounded on all sides by bush and endless space.
My doubts began to fade.
The sense of purpose which had inspired us to embark on this trip returned.
The journey in search of Andu was about to begin.
We had to find it, that elusive animal.
To breathe new life into a devastated land.
Ella and Sven – I thought about them. Oh, they would find their stupid camels. The camels like in times of old in the Middle East. Nothing more certain.
I didn’t think much of their journey. Going all that way to see a feral pest. I made jokes about Sven and his damned camelmania.
Sweetly oblivious of the conversation between Anya and Ella on the back seat due to Sven’s monologue, I made assumptions, drew conclusions.
Anya was going to bring me back to earth and to realise that there was one hell of lot more involved in Ella and Sven’s journey into the heart of Australia than camela.
And that their journey had its own kind of nobility, one no less valid than ours.
What was going on with Sven and his single minded obsession with camels?
A typical man, unable to express his feelings?
He must have known that Ella did not have this problem: that she was talking to Anya from the heart.
He must have known that after we left them, I would hear the full story.
I guess all of us beat a path through life in our own way.
He had a goal and he needed it.
The feral camels were an escape.
On our first night camping in the bush, with a small fire burning, I turned over the day´s events. That afternoon, walking with our heavy rucksacks, we lost the trail and had to retrace our steps.
Not a promising start.
It’s hard to follow a poorly marked trail and even harder to follow the meanderings of a mind.
Mesmerised by the flames in the depths of silence and darkness, my mind was wandering.
I had this picture in my head of Sven returning from a trip to the Middle East and greeting Ella in their luxurious apartment in Copenhagen with his camel chatter.
Maybe their apartment or house or wherever they lived was filled with pictures of camels – and carvings and statues of camels. I once met a couple in Rotterdam who were obsessed with hippopotami; their large apartment was filled with photos and models and carvings of hippos.
Maybe Sven and Ella’s place was like that, only it was camels, not hippos.
They’re not a couple’ Anya said, ‘they’re brother and sister.’
Brother and sister?
And then, close on the heels of this small revelation, another:
‘They’re twins.’
‘Twins?’
Twins were supposed to resemble one another and I couldn’t think of two people physically less alike than those two.
Anya recited the story that Ella told her whilst Sven was bashing my ears with his camels.
When you travel the hard way, you meet some interesting people.
But even taking this into account, the story of Ella and Sven was incredible, underlining the old adage of fact being stranger than fiction.
‘Sven is my younger brother. He’s three years younger than me.
He and I were both born as twins: I had a twin brother and he had a twin sister.
Our mother and father had immigrated to Australia and we were living in Newcastle. It was an industrial city. Dad worked in the smelters. We lived in a simple asbestos house, one of many, all of them arranged in neat rows. Life wasn’t easy. Then my mother gave birth to two lots of twins and the real misery began.
I was born normal, but my twin brother was born with a severe intellectual and physical disability. He was a very difficult child. He had to go to a special school. It was a nightmare for my parents.
Then my mother got pregnant again and would you believe it?
The same thing happened again: twins, a boy and a girl, one born normal and the other, with the same disability, only this time it was the girl who inherited the genetic defects.
My parents gave up.
The new country had brought only hardship and suffering. They had two badly handicapped children. They went back to Denmark. The social services there were better than in Australia and by that time, the wages were higher too. Not that life was a bed of roses back home. The problems with our brother and sister hung like a cloud over our family. It was as if we had been cursed by an evil spirit.
Sven and I grew up wondering why we had been born normal and not our brother and sister. We bore a heavy burden just to be alive and to be normal. Neither of us ever really found a way of dealing with it. Our brother and sister ended up dying young – in their 30’s – after bouts of drink and drugs and constantly being in and out of institutions. My parents suffered enormously, no matter how hard Sven and I tried to cheer them up.
Sven and I grew up during the ‘60’s but we missed out on it. There was the politics and the idealistic causes and really, it was young people celebrating their youth. There were new drugs like marihuana and LSD, there was the pill and free love; everyone wanted to experience life, to do something else other than live the conventional life. But it was not for us. We had this cloud hanging over us. We were different. I studied hard to become a teacher and outside of studies, I became very religious. I needed God. I became a member of a Christian club, an unfashionable thing to do in those days. It was through this group than I met my husband Jan. He came from a village in a part of Denmark where the people are very religious. We got married and went to live near his village. We had two children, a boy and a girl. Both times when I got pregnant, I prayed to God that I would not have twins, that what had happened to my mother would not happen to me. I felt guilty because if that was what God had in store for me then it was my duty to accept it. So for the whole time I was pregnant, which for most women is a time of fulfilment, of joy, I was in purgatory. ‘God, dear God, please spare me what happened to my mother’.
Sven studied engineering but he didn’t turn to religion. Instead he became very conventional. He made being normal a kind of religion. He got married to a very unambitious kind of woman who didn’t want to do anything other than raise children and cook meals and read women’s magazines. Sven got a good job with a large company, he went to work every day, bought a nice house and drove a nice car and every year, went with the family to Spain during the summer and Sweden during the winter. He never did anything out of the ordinary. He was always very reserved.
The years passed and my kids grew up and left home and Jan and I got older. Then Jan and I lost our belief. It was a slow process. The doubts grew over the years. Early one Sunday morning during the winter, he and I went ice skating on a frozen lake. It was a beautiful sunny day with a clear sky. The temperature was well under zero and everything was covered in a layer of white. We felt like children as we raced along over the ice. We laughed and did stupid things. It was possible to feel God’s presence on a morning like that. Later that day, we went to church. At the end of the service, as everyone filed out the door, the reverend took Jan aside and said:
‘Now Jan, tell me what you think about people who go ice skating on the day of the Lord.’
That was the breaking point for us.
We stopped going to church. We had been going there every Sunday for over 20 years. This had consequences for us; people in the village treated us differently, as if we were strangers in their midst. What was far worse was that our own children rejected us, especially our son. He was married to a very devout woman who came from another village where they followed an even stricter version of Christianity than we did in our village. He was certain that we would burn in hell. Our daughter thought the same thing though in time, she learnt to accept our decision. We couldn’t get angry with our children because we had brought them up to believe in God; we had taken them to church every Sunday and read the bible with them in the evenings. They had grown up following our example and they felt betrayed when we stopped believing in God. We could understand this of course but you can’t continue to believe in God just because it will help you get on with your children and your neighbours.
When we retired, Jan and I bought a camper van and began travelling around Europe. Two years ago he died of a heart attack whilst we were in Portugal. He was only 63. In the meantime, Sven’s marriage ended. After years of being the conventional mother and home maker, his wife suddenly decided that she wanted more out of life. The children had left home and were working. She went off with one of the directors of the company where Sven was working. Sven had tried so hard to create a little oasis of peace and happiness in his life, and it all came to pieces.
After Jan’s funeral, I spent more time with Sven. For many years we hardly saw one another; at the funerals of our brother and sister and then our parents; sometimes at Christmas and on the birthdays of our children. We phoned each other a few times a year. Circumstances brought us back together; my husband had died and his wife had left him, and each of us were abandoned, alone; we had no one else to turn to, he and I, the normal ones, the left-overs from the twins.
One day Sven got an idea. Travel to Australia to see the camels. He started reading about the camels in Central Australia. It was something to help him dig himself out of a deep hole. I was in a deep hole too. We were both suicidal and needed something, some plan.
Yes, let’s go to Australia and see the camels!
Both of us had lived sheltered lives. We were in our 60’s and we had never really done anything except finding ways to be safe. Why were we born healthy and sane and our brother and sister destined to suffer such terrible lives? We had never been able to answer that and so were never able to have much of a life ourselves.
We have no plans and don’t know where we are going. Sven loves to drive, he just wants to drive and drive and get lost. Since we have been here in this country we realise that we still have so much to live for.
We will see the camels and go on a camel safari. After that, no plans, only one; we will not go back to Denmark.
I’m thinking that maybe when we get to Darwin, we’ll go to Indonesia and travel around. Sven doesn’t care. As long as he’s somewhere, he’s happy.
Who knows where we will go? ‘
Ella and Sven were not foreigners travelling in Australia, as I assumed.
They were Australian Danes returned to the land where all their troubles had begun and they were looking for a new life before it was too late.
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