Word: nullarbor
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...quiet watchfulness of his profession. But a dogger he is and his frontier is the dingo fence-not the 5,400-km great wall of wire that runs from the Great Australian Bight to Queensland's Bunya Mountains, but a mere 500-km stretch bordering one of the Nullarbor's largest sheep stations, near Cocklebiddy. His painstaking task is to patrol and repair its parameter of chicken wire, laying dog baits as he goes. Little escapes his eagle eye: the other week, marauding camels charged through the fence in two places, while the sudden greening of vegetation from recent rains...
Through the late-afternoon sun shower, it hovers on the horizon: a fluoro-red-eyed monster, or a UFO. Then, as the rain clears, the strange beam of light becomes the reflector shield of a high-tech wheelbarrow being pushed along the Nullarbor by a tanned young man wearing a blue bandanna and a welcoming smile. "Every day I get at least two offers for a lift," says Matt Shaw, 32. "People are always stopping; I guess it breaks up the journey a bit for them." In the past 57 days, Shaw's journey has rarely stopped for long...
...traveling faster than the Gladesville postal worker Nobby Young, who at 44 km a day over 365 days, set a record pace for circumnavigating Australia in 1994. But the very Zen-like Shaw would seem to be in no real hurry to return to Ringwood. "Back on the Nullarbor," he says, of the limestone plateau he's just crossed, "you can hear the bark peeling off the trees. It's amazing-it's just that quiet. You become part of the land, I guess...
...come to graze, or roadhouse workers Craig Cooke and Kris Hutchison come for R and R. (New Zealander Hutchison, 23, prefers the nearby mini-golf course-"It's cool.") For Port Lincoln-born Cooke, 34, it's sometimes necessary to get away from the relative rat race of the Nullarbor. "A lot happens out of Eucla," he insists. "We've had suicides, cyclists go under trucks, cars flip over-you name it." But they've yet to see a hole...
...seemingly sleepy hamlet-nestled in mulga scrub on an uncharacteristic hill above the Nullarbor, close to the South Australian border-Eucla has a work ethic that could put many city folk to shame. As well as an industrious roadhouse, police station, meteorological office and quarantine center, the 50-resident village is a hub for shark fishing and starling shooting (the bird is considered a pest in Western Australia). "We're either sleeping or working," says local mechanic Rodney Fowler, 60, proudly wearing his eucla spirit of the desert windcheater...