This trip of ours is a part-reprisal of our long-planned trip in March 2020. We had packed and were days away from leaving before the convergence of our departure date and the date that covid became a reality in Australia. And we stayed home.
Last year we’d intended to be away 6 months, on the east coast and in Central Australia. This year it is just 2 months in Central Australia.
It has been long awaited and much anticipated but not everything is quite going to plan so far.
On our very first morning in the carpark of the Hyden Hotel Tim was jacking up the camper trailer in the icy cold morning to find out why the wheel hub was heating up so much. Luckily he was able to adjust the brakes and solve that one easily.
Later that morning on our way to Kalgoorlie, Tim was jacking up the car again for us to change a tyre, the first flat tyre we’ve had in this car.
We laughed it off, and decided this was just the easing in, the shakedown trip we never got to have.
But then only days later, after just a few nights camping, we had packed everything up to leave at Goongarrie Homestead, jumped into the car to find some engine warning lights on the dashboard.
And so we called the RAC. Hours later, Boris came but couldn’t resolve it, and the verdict was that we’d have to put the car on the truck to Kalgoorlie.
This was 5pm on Friday night so we organised that we’d stay camped out until Sunday afternoon.
Only six weeks ago my folks Ron and Gaye and aunty Sesha had their own breakdown and interaction with the RAC (and some might recall a certain speech by Ron where the RAC featured heavily?). They were just getting into Menzies at the very end of their trip in their Amarok. We were less than 50km from Menzies at the very start of our trip, in our Amarok.
Is there a curse on Amaroks in a 50km radius of Menzies? Tim wondered whether someone in an Amarok had run over a gold miner in Menzies at some point in the past?
But I have been reading Trent Dalton’s All Our Shimmering Skies, where a curse on a gold prospector drives the whole narrative and essentially destroys a family. So I have been looking back further. Is there a long-lasting family curse in the Goldfields?
There’s a few brief interactions with this part of the world in my family history. My grandmother Ethel Daymond, later Hodgson, lived here as a young woman with her family – her father worked for the Post Office and was posted there in 1941.
My great-great-grandfather Hugh De Largie was here for a while at the end of the 19th century. He was a unionist on the Goldfields, helping to create the Amalgamated Workers Association and became its president.
He also campaigned heavily for Federation. There’s a photo of him on an interpretive panel in Boulder (he’s on the far right) and his colleagues in the committee the Goldfields Reform League that led the pro-Federation campaign.
He later became a Senator in the first Australian parliament, after which I don’t think he spent much time back in the Goldfields.
I think he was involved in some contentious political issues in his time – but I’m not sure if we can pin the Menzies curse on Hugh?
Meanwhile I’m trying not to be superstitious and think that the universe is just trying to keep us at home.
A positive out of all of this is that Monday’s cold front reached the Goldfields and it has been wet, windy and cold, and it would not have been much fun out bush. We’re cosy and warm in an Air BnB that RAC is paying for. The part for the Amarok has been ordered, and we should be on our way again in a day or two.
In the meantime we will just keep taking photos of the amazing collection of old buildings in Kalgoorlie.
