In some places there are water-courses that cross the road, so that your vehicle can get buried up to the axles in mud, and you get completely stuck there until another vehicle arrives to pull you out. People usually take a couple of days’ worth of food and water with them, just in case. The road runs alongside the railway line that takes the iron ore from Mt Tom Price to Dampier, and often you see trains so long that you cannot possibly count the number of wagons, heaped up with red earth, that need three vast locomotives to pull them slowly through that immense wilderness. Before leaving Paraburdoo for that long trek, Jack Collins took the precaution of opening all the car windows so that the breeze would blow through and stop it turning into an oven, and began to pack it with the more precious and breakable things. Bigger and heavier items he packed into the trailer that they had hitched to the towbar on the back. In the kitchen of the caravan, Maureen Collins packed an esky with cold drinks and sandwiches, because there weren’t too many decent places to stop for refreshment, and for the same reason she remembered to put some dunny paper into the front glove box of the car.
