Tuesday Spot Check: Red Bluff, Western Oz

Desert Utopia aka Sand-Plain and Sky. Photos @scottbauer_

Mick Klausner, Red Bluff 2000. “It’s the best roll of film I’ve shot. One late surf session before dark, 36 photos, and four of the images are the favourite of my career.”  Photographer Scott Bauer

The journey ahead was already long, but suddenly it just became longer. Only 100 miles into our 850-mile pilgrimage from Margaret River to Red Bluff, the cassette deck (google it kids!) in my Ford XF Panel Van had decided to spool the magnetic tape into tiny ribbons rather than play it.

With the am/fm radio having died many moons before, this was truly fucking disastrous. The thought of the next 12 hours being sustained only by conversation with my two mates wedged into the bench seat next to me with a live bong was unbearable. Pablo, however, had a solution. He bought out his battered copy of The Old Man and the Sea and started reading, aloud. Every three hours we would stop and shuffle the driver, reader and navigator roles. 

The navigator role was the easiest. After Perth, there is a 700-mile stretch on Highway 1 that is ruler-straight and endless. My mate the  writer Kirk “Slouch” Owers recalled one such mission. “You plant your foot on the gas, crank the stereo, and steer one-handed. Nothing happens along the way. You might see a dead kangaroo, a pack of dusty sheep, or a peripheral hallucination. Other than that, it’s sand-plain and sky, sand-plain and sky.” 

Except we couldn’t even crank the stereo. It was only the last two hours, just as the sharks were killing Santiago’s dreams in the book, that reading became impossible. From the town of Carnarvon to the working Quobba sheep station the tarmac was replaced by a deeply corrugated dirt road. These canyons threatened to not only dislodge the 10 surfboards, jerry cans of petrol, tubs of water and spare tyres on the roof, but also the brain from your skull.