The Road to Birdsville: Part 2

It took 5 months since I first saw the Annandale Homestead from the air for the desert to dry out enough for me to return and spend a couple of days camped beside Eyre Creek and shooting dawn and dusk pictures of the old homestead,

the yards

and thinking how in the hell did anyone think that running sheep in the Simpson Desert was a good idea.
The yards and the gallows were made of local timber,

all that remained of the homestead was the ornate stone chimney ,corrugated Iron and spinifex used for walls.

If few days on your own in the desert can’t cure what ails you I don’t know what will, so I left Annandale with a lighter heart and drove back to Birdsville and a cold beer in the pub , where I got talking to this old bloke who upon hearing that I had been camped at the Annandale ruins asked me,

” Did You find the graves of the Angels?”

“Uhh No…No graves…What Graves?”

He then told me the story of the “Angels of Annandale” , Early 1900’s and the Simpson desert was in the grip of an extreme dry spell and out in the sand dunes was a family of 4 running sheep and not having a good time of it, eventually the father had to take the flock away in search of feed and left his wife and 2 sons at the homestead.
Days turned to weeks and weeks to months as the year slipped into it’s scorching zenith , January in the desert is beyond redemption.
The water hole had dried up , food was running out , she was beside herself with worry and desperation and still with not a word from her husband she slipped into madness.
In her state she decided that there was no way out , the only way to ease her suffering was to kill the children and then herself., she dosed the boys with poison, killing them, and then took it herself, but she failed to administer a fatal dose to herself and was found the next day wandering the sand dunes irretrievably insane, by her husband’s head stock man , part of an advance party paving the way for his return.

I put my beer down and went straight back out there , muttering ” How could I miss 2 bloody graves?” after all I spent so much time there?
I had 2 days to be back in Sydney and prepare for an extensive overseas assignment early the next month , I crisscrossed the ruins as the afternoon light faded , was it true? or was that just one more piece of outback bullshit?
Then as the light faded , I found a small cross , a child’s grave covered in wire mesh to keep the dingo’s out.

I drove back to Birdsville and then on to Mt Isa in the dead of night to catch my plane to Sydney the next day, thinking about the angels , where was the other grave?
Are there any records? A double infanticide and attempted suicide must be documented somewhere …you’d think!

As it turned out I didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on the Angels because a week later 9/11 happened and a week after that I found myself in the Hindu Kush, in Peshawar on the border of Afghanistan, thinking I was a long way from home.
To be continued…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 11:44 am and is filed under Old Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.