The Trip That Started It All
A Reflection from the Road
Everyone has a trip that changes them.
Mine was in 2010. With my dad, his 4WD and two tents, we headed into the outback so he could show me the country he loved, and so I could finally see it through his eyes. I did not know it at the time, but that trip would set the course for everything that came after. It is one of the reasons I do what I do now.
We had a loose plan and a firm goal. The plan was to camp our way north and west into the proper outback, the real thing, not the edges of it. The goal was Cooper Creek, in flood, crossing the Birdsville Track. Dad loved that part of the world, and I had heard that the Cooper Creek was running, which rarely happens. So we packed the tents and went.
We headed up to Mungo National Park first, out in the far west of New South Wales. The Walls of China at last light, the pale eroded dunes going gold and then pink, the silence so complete you could hear your own blood. I got it immediately.
I had a camera with me, nothing flash, and I stood out there trying to catch what the light was doing and knowing, even then, that I would never quite manage it. That was the moment the country got hold of me and did not let go.
From Mungo we pushed on to Broken Hill, a strange, proud mining city out on its own, and then across and up to Marree, where the bitumen gives up, and the great tracks begin. Marree is where the Oodnadatta and the Birdsville Tracks meet, and standing there with a fuel tank full and a long dirt road ahead is one of those feelings you do not forget.
And then the Cooper. It had done the rare thing and flooded the Birdsville Track, which it manages maybe once in twenty years, and the crossing was cut. In its place, a government punt was running, ferrying vehicles across the floodwater on a detour via Etadunna Station. We took it, our loaded vehicle floating across a flooded creek in the middle of the desert, and I remember Dad grinning like a kid. There has been a punt on the Cooper in the big floods since 1949, when a barge called the Tom Brennan first carried the outback mail across for the legendary Tom Kruse. We were, without quite realising it, part of a long line of people who had been floated over that same reluctant creek.
We had planned to push up to Birdsville, but the track had other ideas. The roads north were closed. So we did what I have done many times since: looked at the map and changed our plans.
We turned instead toward Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, the great salt lake that only fills in the rare wet years and was, that season, holding water. To stand at the edge of an inland sea that spends most of its life as a dry white pan, and to see it shining, was not something either of us had expected to get. The outback gives and takes on its own terms. Close a road, open a lake.
I took hundreds of photos on that trip, most of them not very good, many of them lost to time and dodgy hard drives. But somewhere in the making of them, out on the Walls of China, in the Mungo Woolshed, on the edge of Lake Eyre and the banks of the flooded Cooper, I found the thing I have been chasing ever since: the light, the distance, the enormous quiet, the big skies. Landscape photography and remote travel both took hold of me on that trip, and neither has let go. Off the Main Road, in a real sense, started in those two tents in 2010.
Here is the part that gets me now. That punt we crossed on is gone. The old ferry was pulled from the Cooper years back, left to rust, and finally vandalised beyond use. When the record floods came through in 2025, the biggest in a generation, there was no punt to run, and the government had to build a whole new barge to reconnect the track.
The Cooper we crossed, in the way we crossed it, cannot be crossed that way anymore.
Which is how the outback works, I suppose. Nothing stays the same, not the water, not the roads, not the crossings, not us. You get the trip you get, in the year you get it, and if you are very lucky you are standing next to the right person when it happens.
Thanks, Dad.
Some of our other thoughts
A 2010 camping trip with my dad into the outback: Mungo’s Walls of China, the Birdsville Track cut by a flooded Cooper Creek, the government punt, and Lake Eyre holding water. The trip that started everything.