Getting to Israelite Bay is not easy. It is a major setting for my novel and I have only managed to step foot on the sandy salty ground twice.
The first time was in 2006, when Tim and I were at the very beginning of our trip around Australia. Marcus, a friend of Tim who flies light planes, flew us out to Israelite Bay from Esperance. This country was all entirely new to me, and I was on a literal and metaphorical high, flying in a light plane (which I love), over this gloriously wild edge of the continent on a spectacular day.
We at our lunch in the shadows of the incongruous Victorian era ruins of the Telegraph Station, and I was intrigued by this place, the isolation of it, the grandeur of the building, the idea of a settlement out here to link up Western Australia through the East-West Telegraph. Then together with the stories Marcus told us of the early settlers of this area and I was completely and utterly hooked. The tiny seed of the novel was planted that day.
We later came through the Cape Arid National Park and followed the Balladonia Track to Mt Ragged and then Balladonia. At times we would pick up the old Telegraph track and see the remains of the original telegraph line or the ruins of a very modest station outpost along the Nullarbor.
For the next decade I would occasionally get excited about the idea, and visit the Battye Library to search the archives for more oral histories, more documentary evidence of the lives of people in that remote place, and especially the woman whose story I most wanted to tell – Sarah Brooks. But I couldn’t figure out how to get into the story, how to write it, and it wasn’t until I decided on historical fiction that it began to take off. Then, of course I desperately wanted to visit Israelite Bay again.
In spring of 2016 after a few weeks through the Great Western Woodlands, we took the track in towards Israelite Bay, deciding to first camp at Point Malcolm (about 30km to the west). It had been a very wet winter and we were worried about the condition of the track, especially towing a camper trailer. At one particularly gnarly set of bogholes we were about to turn around but then along came a couple in a similar sized ute, also towing a camper trailer, and said ‘You’ll be fine!’ So off we went, and took many many hours to negotiate the 80km of bog holes, side tracks and muddy quagmires down to Point Malcolm (another setting in the novel).
We weathered a two day storm down there (look out for the scene inspired by that experience) and after leaving it a few days in the hope of some drying out, we decided to drive to Israelite Bay. Our maps showed two tracks around the enormous salt lake that lies between the two places, and we unwisely chose the track less travelled. We’d only got halfway there when we got bogged in the edge of the salt lake, and if it weren’t for our plastic tread thingos and Tim’s amazing digging skills, we would have been in big trouble, especially because in our whole week camping out at Point Malcolm we saw so few cars and so few people. This was the last day we had available for the trip to Israelite Bay so that last bit of the trip had to wait.
Then on the way back out on this muddy quagmire of a track, we managed to fatally bend the chassis of the ute with all the bottoming out and towing of a heavy trailer. It became a very expensive camping trip, and I still hadn’t gotten to Israelite Bay.
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So in May 2017, we had enough time to dash across to Esperance and further east. On the way across we were monitoring the weather and it looked a big storm was expected with a lot of rain, directly intersecting with our plans. We weren’t keen to deal with another really wet muddy track.
I started wailing ‘I’m NEVER going to get back to Israelite Bay! Maybe this is a sign, maybe I’m not meant to write this story after all!’
Tim talked me down and pointed out very reasonably that we could of course just re-arrange our trip slightly. Which we did. We left our camper trailer and drove in for a quick overnight camp and thankfully the track had dried out substantially since the last time we’d driven on it.
We finally made it back to Israelite Bay on an unsettled moody afternoon. Tim thought I might burst into tears, but I was just relieved and excited to actually experience the place I was trying to evoke in my novel, even just overnight. Maybe it is my inexperience as a writer, but I really need to immerse myself physically into a place and a landscape to even have a hope of being able to describe it.
With a handrawn map of the Israelite Bay settlement we traipsed around the sand dune looking for the ruins of the Brooks cottage. We found a pile of limestone rocks that seemed to be in the right place, and finally I was in the spot where Sarah Brooks had lived for decades.
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The postscript to this trip is that there was an enormous dump of rain starting the afternoon we came out again. Over 100mm in 24 hours at the closest weather station. We later heard of some people who took THREE days to get out again towing an empty boat trailer, while the boat was sent by sea back to Esperance.
Israelite Bay is remote and difficult to get into in 2017 in a 4WD let alone in the 1880s with a horse and cart.