shirt into his trousers without asking
(we all fell about laughing when Dan
told us this). Or the assumption, by
many people that we were unable to
take care of ourselves. Rumours even
got back to friends and family in Tas-
mania that we weren’t being ‘looked
after’. However, mass hysteria was
averted by some timely phone calls.
From the Flinders Ranges the team
would head out East on the most re-
mote leg of the journey, being ac-
commodated in shearing sheds. We
encountered excessive kindness from
the musterers and shearers, and se-
vere headwinds on the dirt road to
Curnamona Station. Unfortunately,
the gears on Dan’s drive wheel stuffed
up so he would now ride in the troopie
unto Broken Hill. Dan was not hav-
ing the best of luck. We hit the Bar-
rier Highway at Yunta and had to do
battle with road trains and kangaroo
carcasses for three days east. Duncan
renamed it ‘The Highway of Death’ be-
cause he would gag every fifty metres
when we approached a corpse of a ‘Big
Red’.
Duncan lost his vision when he was
in his late teens to an unpronounce-
able genetic condition. After a decade
and a half he now has a successful
lighting design business in Hobart
were one can often find him using dan-
gerous power tools, the blades coming
perilously close to his finger-tips. But,
it is a testament to his dexterity that he
still has all ten digits.
Three weeks after we started, Team
Adaptive (or The Shit X-Men, as one
person called us) had only had one rest
day, and our cycles were in desperate
need of repair. Ed felt like Mosses guid-
ing the blind, the crippled and insane
out of the desert and into Broken Hill
‘Big W’. It was a strange experience for
us, and possibly the other customers,
seeing five dust laden, dirty, mangled
bodies limping and wheeling through
the air-conditioned store.
From Broken Hill we rode the de-
lightful Silver City Highway from bar-
ren desert to the lush Murray Riverina.
TRAVERSE
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