The Plenty

“It’s quite likely that I shall stay in this colony for good – I may even leave my bones to lie whitening on the plains far inland.” Ludwig Leichhardt, Explorer

Bull dust swirled in through the cracks of the windows and bush flies landed on the corners of my mouth. I swatted at them automatically and began to nod off on a bench in the back of the Land Rover as Chris, Adam and I bumped along the Plenty Highway. Highway, actually, was a misnomer. Highway conjured up a paved interstate back in the good ol’ US of A. The Plenty, running 300 miles between Alice Springs and the outback town of Boulia, was more of a glorified track, a two-day stretch of red earth, sharp rocks, and talcum powder fine dirt as treacherous as a patch of ice.

The explosion of the tire was amplified by the quiet of the middle of nowhere. The vehicle careened to the left, jerking me along with it. “Jesus Christ, mate,” Adam said to Chris. I looked out of the back window to see the trailer of film equipment we were hauling, airborne. I looked at the metal box across from me. It contained every tool Chris might need to fix the Land Rover if we broke down in a place where another vehicle might not pass by for days, which was precisely where we were. It was the size of a human body. I jammed one hand against the roof and wedged my boot on the edge, thinking, “This is really going to hurt when it comes crashing down on me.”

How had I ended up on the verge of death in the middle of nowhere with two people I barely knew?

_______

Four year earlier, my brother Ben and I and our two guides had rolled into Darwin after finishing Leichhardt Expedition 2000. We had spent the last six weeks in a 4-wheel drive vehicle, retracing the expedition that my great, great, great grand uncle, Ludwig Leichhardt, led in 1845 by foot and horseback. After 3,000 miles of struggling to find food and water, enduring intense heat and surviving a fatal Aboriginal attack that killed one of the men in his party, Uncle Ludwig and his ragtag group straggled into Port Essington, a remote British settlement in northern Australia. He was a Prussian exploring in an English colony and snubbed for having the audacity to do so. Long given up for dead, when he sailed into Sydney he was welcomed as a hero. “Leichhardt lives!” the people shouted.

But not for long. Just three years later, he and his six men, seven horses, 50 bullocks, 20 mules and a motley mob of kangaroo dogs vanished into the outback on his third expedition while attempting to be the first “white fellow” to cross the heart of the continent from east to west.  It is one of the great mysteries in exploration.

I was 12 years old when I found out that I was related to this famous person. Ben and I were standing in the kitchen in our house in Louisville when my Mom, Letty Lee Leichhardt Williamson Ransdell, set a book on the table. “Uncle Field brought this back from his trip to Australia. It’s about the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. You’re related to him.” Mom got an acting scholarship to a private Baptist college in Kentucky, and although she left early to marry my Catholic dad, the “crossback” as Granddaddy Leichhardt referred to him, she always had a sense of the theatrical about her. “He disappeared in the desert never to be heard from again,” she said, enunciating each word as it slowly peeled off her tongue. Our house never lacked for drama. There were five kids, our dog, Pepper, our cat, Cinderella, and as many snakes, hamsters, turtles, mice and God’s creatures as my mother would let me brother Jamie have. Not to mention, one stepfather, always impeccably groomed, who drank every day. Something dramatic was always happening. But this was good drama. Ben and I made a verbal pinkie shake right by the sink full of dirty dishes that one day we would go to Australia and find out what happened to Uncle Ludwig.

Unlike Uncle Ludwig on his Port Essington expedition, on my expedition I had not suffered from prickly heat and boils. I had not had to walk over rocky terrain after my horse drowned in a freak accident. Aborigines had not attacked my party and killed Ben or one of my guides (although there was one guide I could have killed). Still, I could relate to the words that he wrote in his journal when he finally reached Port Essington on December 17, 1845, “I was deeply affected in finding myself again in civilized society, and could scarcely speak, the words growing big with tears and emotion.”

I felt just like Uncle Ludwig when we pulled up to the hotel in Darwin, the Land Rover, covered in dust, our swags and gear strapped to the roof rack. In the process of my journey, I had ended up somewhere else, and it wasn’t just Darwin. Intellectually, spiritually and emotionally, I felt like I was somewhere else.

Letty Lee had flown to Australia to meet us at the end of the expedition and was standing in the portico as we got out. She ran to Ben and wrapped her arms around him. “My beamish boy!” He looked like the actor Patrick Swayze (people often thought he was), and had the physique of an Aussie footballer, but my mother stilled gushed over him like she did when he was an always-smiling, towhead toddler. She then came over to me and put one hand on each of my arms and stood back. “Carrie, what happened to your hair?” I’ll admit it looked like straw. A gravity shower, a bag filled with bucket of water from a nearby stream and strung from the branch of a Mulga, was no match for dust and sun in the desert.

I wasn’t going to have any time for reflection anytime soon. Leichhardt Expedition 2000 was big news in Australia, and I was being interviewed yet again, this time by a reporter for the indigenous station, Imparje Television. The cameraman was a cool-looking Aboriginal dude with wild black hair. After we wrapped up the shoot, he came over to chat. He handed me his card with an email address and name written on the back. “You’ve got to meet my mate, Chris Tangey. He knows all about the explorers. I’ll bet he can help you find out what happened to Leichhardt.”

Since then, I had struck up a cyber-friendship with Chris. He was a documentary filmmaker in Alice Springs who had spent years searching for the camps of the also ill-fated Australian explorers, Burke and Wills, who ironically starved to death by a stream teeming with fish. Just six months ago he had emailed me to say he was headed out to the Simpson Desert to investigate some remains found in a massive clay pan. Did I want to tag along on a recky? Why, yes, I did.

I met Adam, at Chris and his wife, Annie’s house. They had kindly offered me a place to stay before going bush. I had just gotten back from a run. I was hot and sweaty and red dirt caked my shoes. Chris was sitting at the kitchen table with a guy. “Hey, Carrie, I want you to meet my mate, Adam. He’s an anthropologist and photographer. I thought he might want to join us for the recky.” Adam had a shaved head and wore a green camp shirt cut off at the sleeves. On his bicep, which bulged like a football, was a tattoo of the infamous Ned Kelly, bushranger, outlaw, gang leader, cop killer and beloved by all Australians.

“I know all about you,” Adam said. “I’m good mates with Brendan and Nerida.” Brendan and Nerida were my guides on the Coburg Peninsula, a sacred piece of land where wetlands stretch from one rock outcrop to another and Magpie geese float with the crocodiles. It wasn’t an odd comment to make, but there was something about the way he said it that seemed overly intimate. My Spidey senses were on full alert, but they would have to battle it out with the butterflies in my stomach. He was 180 degrees, literally and figuratively, from the men I had been involved with—mainly prep school boys and professional sailors—but I was attracted to him.

So, here I was finally back in Australia, tagging along on one of Chris’ bush forays. He was in search of Burke and Wills’ camps. I was in search of clues that would help solve the Leichhardt mystery, including trees carved with “L,” signs his final expedition had come this way. We were both anxious to find out what was buried in the clay plan. But ultimately, our little party was en route to Wantata Waterhole on the far east side of the Simpson Desert. In 1980, Gordon O’Connell had written a book, The Mystery of Ludwig Leichhardt, in which he analyzed the reports of the various search parties that had gone looking for Leichhardt over the decades.  He made a convincing case that dear old Uncle Ludwig and his party had met their demise at Wantata Waterhole. It was my holy grail.  

We shot into the desert like an arrow leaving a bow, Chris fighting the wheel as we tilted sharply to the right. Bam! We were on, then off, all four wheels, skittering across the sand and spiny clumps of spinifex before finally coming to a jerky stop seconds later. No one said a word. With dust still billowing around us, I climbed down and joined Chris and Adam to stare at what remained of the tire.

Then the two strangers started to argue. “How in the bloody hell are we going to change the tire, Chris? There’s no way to stabilize the jack in this sand.”

With nothing to add, I followed the shredded rubber littering our departure from The Plenty. A wheel rut just inches from what looked like the only crevice in the desert for as far as my eye could see marked the spot where we had nearly rolled to our death.

I stood there, thinking back to the moment when I was braced in the Land Rover unsure which way gravity would favor. In that split second, I was calm, wondering if it would be a slow death, writhing in pain for days before anyone would find my crushed remains, or if miraculously, I might walk out of the desert like in a made-for-TV movie. I hoped it was the adrenaline, but I as stood looking down at the crevice I was thrilled.

Minus the drama, it was much like an out of body experience I had had six months earlier, when I was still stuck in Virginia, trying to claw my way out of the emotional quicksand of a failed marriage. Just like now, I was standing in the middle of the desert looking out to the horizon that seemed to stretch to infinity. It felt as comfortable as my well-worn boots. I had taken it as a sign to move on.

Now as I stood on the edge of a crater it dawned on me that modern Australia presented its own perils. They may have been men with Ned Kelly tattoos and blown tires in the middle of nowhere, but they were as dangerous as Uncle Ludwig’s were over 160 years ago. It beat the hell out of the alternative.

This is an excerpt from Tracking Uncle Ludwig, a book I am writing about my adventures retracing the adventures of my great-great-great-granduncle, the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who vanished in the Australian outback in 1848.