Why I love camping - 3

Hell west and crooked. It was a term used by the buffalo hunters of the 1930s when the herd they had been tracking suddenly went into a frightened stampeding frenzy with the knowledge that most of their lives where in danger. I have just finished reading a book of the same title, written by a bloke named Tom Cole and it reminded me of one of the reasons I love camping so much. Hell West and Crooked, the book, follows the life of Cole after he left his home in Kent, England at the age of 17 and travelled to Australia to make a life for himself as a drover or stockman. The book takes up his Aussie life after he had been here a few years but just landed a job working on a station in the Northern Territory, up until the beginning of WWII

What amazed me about this book and Cole’s life was how tough these guys did it. One story Cole tells is of the Postie based out of Darwin. Every couple of months or so, the mail would turn up by boat. In the dry the postie would load up his truck and make the rounds, covering almost the whole top of half of the NT. It would take him a couple of weeks, but in those days everyone it seemed, were mates so it sounded like a pretty good gig. In the Wet however, the mail still had to be delivered but there was no chance in hell of getting a truck built in the 20’s anywhere, so he delivered it on horses. The postie would load up about 20 horses with mail and gear then head out. Now this was the days before anything but single lane trails that only lasted as long as the Dry, so by the time this postie got around to it, they were gone. When they came to a flooded river they would wrap all of the mail in a huge tarp and float it across. Usually this meant walking a mile upstream so that by the time they got across they could get out at the right spot. Then they would have to swim back over and get the horses and hope the crocs weren’t hungry. In all of this, they never got any of the mail wet.

Cole tells more stories of pioneering stockmen, aboriginal trackers, even of the first crossing of the Canning Stock Route with a herd of cattle. In all of this these guys lived out of their swags, on the back of horses in the middle of nowhere. The Outback is a harsh place now, I can only imagine what it would have been like then.

When I read about guys like Tom Cole, I wonder sometimes if they knew something most of us don’t. They lived a dam hard life in dam hard country in dam hard times, but all of them were happy. Maybe happier than a lot of people today.

When I go camping and am living out of a tent or swag, cooking simple meals over the fire, I sometimes think I could be a little bit like them. When I have set up a tarp to survive a storm or managed to get a fire going in the rain, I often think I could even be as tough as these pioneers, do what they did, survive when others couldn’t. When I go camping there is a small sense of pride in the small accomplishments that I don’t get when I do the same thing at home or in the city. I think that is one of the reasons I love camping so much, and one of the reasons why I take my wife and my daughter.

Brendan Batty
Editor
Camping with your 4WD
batty@4wdaction.com.au

PS. If anyone can reccomend any decent books on early Australia, I'd love to know about them!