Time begins to dilate and contract out here at its own pace, woven into the ancient stone, into the steady patience of the trickling water that has sliced clean through two billion years of buried secrets. We play like children in the rainwater-filled wounds that the rainbow serpent has left cauterised in the earth…
I spend another night in a stand of tall dead gidgee trees in the lee of the wind between 10m dunes. Their wan bare limbs reach up to the stars. The ground is getting redder as I travel further west. The wildflowers brighter and thicker. The northwestern Simpson Desert becomes gradually lusher, as deserts go, with every dune I cross now…
This part of the Simpson is the desert of the mind. Red dunes after red dunes. The roar of the V8 working under load climbing the dune, the inhalation sound of the intercooler sucking air through the snorkel, then the engine-braking groan going down the back of the dune and the upshift through the flat, corrugated valley…
Crossing the northern Simpson via the Madigan Line.
Every picture tells a story: every moment is a window into the soul of the world. Some moments, captured, are like lightning in a bottle. These are the stories of those rare strikes.
On the Search, we inevitably find more than we were looking for. This is our ode to awakenings on the road.
