Free Into Thick Air by Jim Malusa

were little more than a tatter of clothes hung over skin like parchment. The sole survivor, John King, had wits enough to realize that only the Aborigines could save him, for they knew what to eat.
    Yes, things could be far worse. My fig bars are still edible, and I have an emergency box of Coco-Pops. I mount my bike and creep ahead in low gear. The wind ebbs and I’m able to shift up a gear or two. Landforms that seemed impossibly far ahead—long low dunes and the dead glare of salt pans—eventually fall behind. Fifty miles out of Oodnadatta I reach my water cache, arranged by Lynnie and kindly put out by the Williams family, of the nearby Nilpinna Cattle Station. At the same time a truck rumbles up and a federal range ecologist gets out for a chat. Awful nice of the Williamses, he says—let’s return the water jug. I hop in for a little detour off the track.

    Before I see it, I imagine the Williamses’ place—a dust bowl shack with whip snakes in the outhouse and a pedal radio for communications. The pedal radio was another clever Australian invention born of the fantastic isolation of the outback, a shortwave that generated its own electricity so long as you were willing to crank away.
    But that was in the 1930s, and it seems things have changed. Within minutes of my arrival at the Williamses’, their eleven-year old, Nick, is checking out my laptop computer. He stops singing “Waltzing Matilda” long enough to express his amazement: “What sort of computer doesn’t have games?” He drags me over to their home computer and shows me how to play Star Trek.
    Paul and Krystal Williams immediately adopt me. Here’s the shower, here’s the phone, and here’s dinner: pan-fried steak (“schnitzel”), heaps of veggies, mashed potatoes, and strawberries. After dinner the young girls, Katrina and Renee, show me their outstanding at-home school, then play a kind of tug-of-war with a large and apparently boneless tabby cat. Nick confesses to me: “We drove our last governess mad !”
    Mum and Dad offer me a bed. Tempting, but I had one last night and now prefer the comfortable sand of a dry creek. I haven’t used a tent since the tropics. Under stars like sequins, I sleep the sleep of a man whose fortunes seem to have changed for the better.
    But the road hasn’t improved. The next day it’s still a mess of pointed rocks and sand traps. At least the wind is sleeping, and by midafternoon I arrive in William Creek, population 9. No creek, naturally. The William Creek Hotel is the sole business, a sun-warped, wind-stripped hovel with flies zipping through the holes in the lopsided screen door. It looks like paradise to me; I wobble in, find a chair, and order an orange juice. It costs the same as water in a place where it hasn’t rained in thirteen months.
    Meanwhile, the local ranchers with blood-spattered hands (“Been branding, mate”) drop in for a bottle of “VB.” After my juice is gone I figure I might as well have a Victoria Bitter myself so long as the men are dropping coins into the jukebox. The 45-rpm record sticks until somebody whomps the machine on its side. Then the music gets scratching and the joint is grooving to Rolf Harris’s hiccupping, accordion-based, acid-outback
version of “Stairway to Heaven.” Nothing else like it, I’m thinking as my gaze is drawn upwards to a frighteningly large bra hanging from the rafters. It’s big enough to carry twin bowling balls, but is loaded with coins. I don’t ask why. Might be something tragically personal.
    The men drink and ramble in a cheerful crude lingo. It’s plenty entertaining, but can complicate otherwise simple tasks like finding the bathroom.
    â€œThat way, up a chain.”
    Thanks . . . but how far is “up a chain”?
    â€œLength of a cricket pitch.”
    I’m the only tourist in town until a gang of Japanese