The Connie Sue Highway - getting there

The Connie Sue Who?!!

The Connie Sue Highway is an ill-named 4WD/goat track that stretches some 630 kilometres from a ghost town called Rawlinna on the Nullarbor Plain in Southern Australia, due north to Warburton, a small aboriginal community. It was built in 1962 by an extraordinary man named Len Beadell in an effort to provide access through the big nothing of Central Australia to areas involved in the nuclear/rocket testing program of that time. By all accounts Len was a pretty funny guy and naming this track a highway was probably hilarious; not to say that it was not a fantastic engineering achievement – he was a superb surveyor – and it probably wasn’t his fault that no one had bothered to run a grader over it in the ensuing 56 years. He named the road after his daughter Connie Sue who actually accompanied her parents on the journey as an 18 month old baby. Apparently he placed a wooden tea chest in the centre of his Land Rover and packed it with wadding as a cot-come-car seat for baby Connie Sue to travel in – and this over basically unexplored country in which he was trying to forge a thoroughfare for people to travel in relative comfort. I’m guessing this occurred to the astonishment and concern of modern day road safety experts sporting close shaved beards and sockless comfortable shoes, but sometimes one can overcome the odds without “approved” and compulsory equipment.

A rough map of our trip area
 

A fundamental problem in tackling this stretch is that it’s hard to know just what the road is like at any given time as it can change so quickly and information is at best sketchy. The local Shire describes conditions succinctly on its website as either “Open” or “Closed”, but even being “open” doesn’t mean one can sail happily along it without incident, and by the time the authorities get to know that the road is “closed” it’s probably really open again. We were going to attempt this trip two years ago but aborted in the face of a very wet winter (we had seen vision taken by other travellers of what an inland sea the road could be in wet years). Nevertheless we persisted in our planning and last June the Returds and intrepid bushies Kevin and Shirley meeting in the city of Kalgoorlie with our campers in tow to travel this piece of inland history. For some intrepid four-wheel-drivers this road is a bit of a “rite of passage” to attain some 4WD bragging rights, and I should say here that some travellers on the Connie Sue attempt the trip in jacked-up, souped-up Four Wheel Drives blasting along at speeds of 80 to 100 km/hr, jinking over the terrain in order to tick it off their bucket list in two days, prepared to incur any amount of subsequent damage to their vehicles and their lower backs.

We on the other hand allowed about 12 days for the trip – we wanted to see the countryside and we wanted to make sure that we had most of our vehicles with us when we got there. We had a few logistical problems to overcome – fuel, water and food being the uppermost ones as we had to carry all of that with us – there is no road house, no store on the 1000 kilometre journey from Kalgoorlie to Warburton. So with a sumptuous 65 litres of diesel in the tank, 90 litres of diesel packed on the roof in 10 and 20 litre jerry cans, 100 litres of water, a big mess of dehydrated vegetables that Maurs had systematically prepared from fresh, and the teensiest amount of alcohol we set off for the Connie Sue. Kevin and Shirley had similar commodities and quantities packed into their Pajero plus a satellite phone in case of trouble (but what could possibly go wrong?)

Looking east along the Trans Access Road

The road to Rawlinna on the Trans Australian Rail Line started out as a well behaved road up to the Mount Monger turn-off (that’s a mine site) but then it turned to gravel which got progressively worse as we went along but we made the 375 kilometres leg in two days. We made camp on the first night at a rail siding named Zanthus – a word that had caught my attention in the 1980s when I was an aviation weather forecaster and was scratching to find places to use to describe weather boundaries for light aircraft operators in an area where there is not much. There’s not that much at Zanthus now – just the siding and a dump which funnily enough offered the best prospect for a camp site for the night. Actually we identified it as a camp site before we noticed it was a dump and as a dump it was a pretty good place for a one night stay.

 

Zanthus to Rawlinna was 175 kilometres of quite rough road with stretches of potholes and corrugations and at times we were reduced to about 30 km/h. The harder going took a toll with fuel consumption in Kev’s Pajero and we stopped about 20 kilometres out of Rawlinna to top up with a jerry can of diesel. We took a small diversion on the outskirts of town to visit the area where the annual Rawlinna Muster is held. It’s quite an expanse with good facilities and apparently the event attracts thousands of people from far and wide with a rodeo and country bands, and some drinkin’! It was deserted so we drove into town. It was equally deserted, however after a while we were able to say hello to the entire population (his name was Calvin and he was a roo shooter) – a really nice guy who pointed us to a suitable place to camp. He said he was leaving the next morning so we would have the town to ourselves, but he stopped short of presenting us with the keys to the city.

 

 

We set up camp and were relaxing with a drink around our small campfire when we saw lights on the horizon. These lights eventually turned into the Indian Pacific (I-P) train which glided into Rawlinna remarkably silently, coming to an abrupt stop. This icon of rail transport plies between Sydney and Perth and we discovered that it stops at Rawlinna for a candle-lit dinner experience for the passengers in the summer (drinks and canapes in the winter) once a week, and we were lucky enough to be there to see it. We abandoned our camp and wandered up to the train siding. It had been magically decked out with lanterns and a sprinkling of warming fire places. We asked how we might procure a drink and the event manager said we were welcome to a glass of wine or two if we could hang around after the train pulled out and help Faith (from a local sheep station) put away all the equipment. So glass in hand we proceeded to meet the passengers like we were local tour guides, pointing out the benefits of the carefree camping life and asking if they would recommend a trip across the Nullarbor on the I-P (thoroughly recommended it seems – we must do it one day). There was live music, wine and great conversation with some interesting people but that all ended at 7.45 pm when the train swept out of Rawlinna as silently as it arrived. We honoured our pledge to help Faith (it was hard not to as she was visibly pregnant and there was a lot of stuff to stow away). She lived 50 kilometres away and thought nothing of travelling this distance to set up for the I-P event. Now most of us had the polite two glasses of wine however one of us, in a disgraceful exhibition of indulgence had four (that he would admit to) with the result that he lost his glasses and the group spent time looking around the station the next day in a vain attempt to find Kev’s glasses (sorry Kev, that just slipped out).

The Indian Pacific waiting to disgorge passengers for a night under the stars.

 

So Rawlinna was a bizarre little town. Its other claim to fame was that it sported a flushing public toilet, once you fought your way through the maze of spiders’ webs to the bowl and hovered over the seat (I never said that it was a scrupulously clean and maintained toilet) – but nevertheless much appreciated over the alternative. The level of amazement continued when we awoke after our Indian Pacific experience to the sound of a horse nuzzling around outside our campers. She was unbridled, unaccompanied, had brush hanging off her tail and was very inquisitive about our camp. She seemed quite tame, liked a pat on the nose and hung around us for quite a while. In her sampling of the camp facilities, she decided to have a drink from our washing up bowl that we left out. Unfortunately we couldn’t tell her that it was soapy water but she found out anyway and bared her teeth in disgust. Just when we thought we might have to file adoption papers she took off and the last we saw of her she was galloping over the railway tracks and into the bush, presumably back to her owner. We took the opportunity to fill our water containers, and conducted a self-guided tour of the old Trott house (a national trust building decomposing onto itself with no prospect of doing anything else). One more night around the Rawlinna campfire and we were as ready as we would ever be to tackle the Connie Sue Highway.

Our mystery horse (friendly though)

The Trott House - see it before it falls