Michael Gray Griffith

There is so much space out here – it’s as if the gods left before they could bother with mountains, valleys, or grand forests. You could misplace an entire civilisation inside it.

We did, and they are still lost. On the beaches near Eucla – cliffs you have to climb down to reach – lie mounds of broken shellfish and the hand-chipped stones the indigenous used to prise them open thousands of years ago. Mounds that took generations to build, now replaced by nothing. No resorts overlook the serene ocean, which wave by wave keeps carving the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight.

You could scream until your lungs burst; no one would hear except the odd crow flapping over to see if you might end up on its menu. Even the earth-shaking roar of a road train is swallowed whole by the space, then forgotten in the silence.

How did she not simply veer off this straight, endless road, her grief and rage combing the plain for anywhere to escape the loss? This woman we encountered.

A few weeks earlier, half-protected by shock, she and her husband had driven this same highway toward Kalgoorlie. They were from Adelaide; they had just been told their eldest son was dead. He’d driven off the road in Kalgoorlie itself, but witnesses said he was already slumped over the wheel. He’d been vaccinated – no choice. He loved the mines, and the mines had given him the ultimatum. Now his body would join those minerals, or at least it would once they finally got it back.

Allegation: the coroner was holding the body in Perth because Premier Mark McGowan was also in Kalgoorlie, coaxing a reluctant town to get jabbed, and the last thing the government needed was local evidence the jabs could kill. Allegations, like we said.

In town she still had another son. Police had asked him to identify his brother’s body. He believed the jab had killed him – had seen his brother black out at the wheel before the car left the road. Yet, mad for karate, he took the shot so he could return to class. It paralysed him. Now the grieving parents had two boys to care for: one in a coffin, one in a wheelchair.

At last she arranged for the eldest to be freighted to Adelaide.

All she had to do was get herself home. But times had changed.

State borders were welded shut. Days on the phone to the South Australian government made no promise that when she reached Ceduna – the South Australian edge of the vast Nullarbor Plains – anyone would let her in. She might have to swing round and drive 1800 kilometres back, alone – if Western Australia even let her back. The nearest checkpoint lay 480 kilometres behind her.

In Ceduna a caravan park bulged with West Australians waiting for their own border to reopen – refugees in their country, punished for refusing the needle. Crazy, yet this was the arithmetic she faced: alone, leaving her husband to nurse their now-paralysed son, she started the long drive home to bury the other.

These were the stories Australia’s mainstream media never told the public – and by their negligence and deceit, they failed in their duty of care.

The Nullarbor is never busy. In ordinary times there might be a car or truck every ten minutes; in that season, almost none. The Nullarbor became not just one of the longest straight roads on Earth but the loneliest.

Even at a thousand kilometres a day she would still have miles to go, slabs of it without internet except near the roadhouses, sometimes 300 kilometres apart. A tourist in simpler times might call the flat view boring; might call it spiritual. How often do you travel through country where, standing on your car’s roof, you become the tallest feature? Where the clouds have room to tell entire stories – dark storms to the right promising to chase you, caravans of cumulus migrating to a horizon you will never kiss.

But with your heart torn open, the only thread holding her together was the stubborn need to cross a border so she could bury her boy, and for her, so totally grief-stricken, the road must have stretched forever.

Unvaccinated, she would sleep in the car – roadhouses refused her a bed and made her mask up to buy a sandwich. Did she find God out there? If she was the only soul from horizon to horizon, He wouldn’t have trouble spotting her; no queue would block her from His throne where she could ask what was the point of knitting this miracle inside me, letting him grow into my young man bristling with dreams, only to leave him broken in a wreck.

His name will never be etched on a shrine celebrating the sacrifice he – and so many others – made for the community. No day will mark their loss, no apology will come. Only silence, the same silence buffering the car while she tried to sleep under the immensity.

Then, finally, the border. By now every defence was armed; no one would stop her entering. She had decided, and the closer she came to Ceduna, the fiercer the resolve. She was a grizzly bear mother separated from her cub – good luck to any official who stepped between them.

But no one tried. The border station was shuttered, lights off. She lost it then, she told me – after all that tension she wanted to ram the barrier. Instead she drove on to Adelaide, still nine hours away.

She isn’t rich, isn’t famous; no government note will ever acknowledge her loss. She is simply a middle-aged woman you could pass in a mall without noticing – an Australian suburbanite who reached the funeral her husband could not attend.

There, masked mourners – limited in number by government mandate – gathered in silence, none allowed to mention why they were there, that being the rule of the greater hush smothering the country. She completed her duties and said goodbye to the boy whose face and story, every weekend, now drift back and forth in the breezes that move through the people’s unofficial shrine: the Forest of the Fallen.

1 June 2023.