Andrew Cameron - A Nurse on the Edge of the Desert

Theres a truck parked at a rakish angle outside the pub, a capable-looking four-wheel drive with a tall flag and a snorkel and liberally stained with red dust. A dog lies panting in its shade. The dog stands, walks irresolutely into the sun, stops, pants hard, then returns to flop down in the shade again. Beyond it, a small roly-poly the Australian equivalent of a tumbleweed is stopped in the carriage-way, awaiting a breeze and a sense of purpose.

Rush hour in Birdsville.

I am walking west along the main drag towards the pub. Its hot, but not desperately so. The flies are about, but not in the numbers they will be later in summer. The wind has spared us today.

It feels like a calm before a storm. A couple of trucks have arrived and are parked in the lot across the road from the pub. The driver of one, the saddlery guy, is setting up his tent. The refrigerated container outside the general store is full of bags of ice, and one or two people are in the visitor centre, the advance guard of the invasion of grey nomads were expecting in the next few days. Everywhere you look, preparations are underway for their arrival.

Im on my way to pay a visit to Jenna Brooks, the organiser of the annual Birdsville Races. Word has it the weather will intervene this year. The forecast is for a very active weather system to cross central Australia precisely when the races are on. This, needless to say, would be a bit of a blow for the town, which relies heavily upon the race crowd to set everyone up for the rest of the year. There has already been rain about. It has affected the Birdsville Track, the rough track iconic among Aussie adventure motorists because of its roughness between Birdsville and Adelaide, over 1100 kilometres distant. Too much more rain, and the track will close.

And despite the fact that the sky is blue and cloudless as far as the eye can see, the Diamantina River is perceptibly rising. Its one of the things about Australia that takes some getting used to: weather systems affecting countryside so far away that it might as well be overseas on the New Zealand scale of things. The Diamantina Shire, in which Birdsville is located, is part of the so-called channel country, which basically drains northwest Australia into the Great Australian Bight. You can be in the middle of a mini-drought in the Diamantina no rain for weeks and yet roads will be closing all around you due to flooding.

Adelaide Street, Birdsville, outside the heritage-listed Birdsville Hotel. Built in 1884, it is Australias most iconic outback pub, the last watering hole for hundreds of kilometres. In the tourist season, April to October, I am often called by the publican to see overnight guests who have taken a bit of a turn, which could mean anything from a stroke to a bad case of sunburn.

There are four of these signs in Birdsville, one on each of the four roads into town, from the north, south, east and west. In the height of summer, the population is more like a mere 45, as many of the permanent residents leave for cooler climates for two or three months. The 7000 (can be up to 10,000) refers to the influx of tourists for the Birdsville Races (the Melbourne Cup of the outback).

Jenna knows the score well enough not to be fretting too much about the weather. It looks as though well dodge the worst of the rain, and if we dont well, what can you do? I admire the colour of this years shirts for the volunteers, a rich forest green, and Jenna gives me a handful of race badges to give to my visitors. The badges serve as an entry pass to the racecourse 4 kilometres outside town to the east, and theyre always a sought-after souvenir.

I walk back towards the clinic, curling my lip slightly at the traffic islands and the tidy footpaths. Both are an innovation. The concrete glares white in the hard sun and the islands are covered in lawn grass, a ridiculously bright green that has no place in the local palette. I was opposed to their construction, but the powers felt that they would make the street look tidier. It does look tidier for the time being, and with lots of input from sprinklers but whether thats an improvement is a matter of opinion.

A road train rumbles in with a few hundred Portaloos aboard. A cloud of fine red dust pursues it into town.

Once I reach the clinic Ive been walking for all of three and a half minutes the whole of Birdsville lies behind me. The tallest structures are the radio masts. Next, the water towers. The rest of the town is all one storey. To the east, the road extends through typical channel-country landscape: grey-brown earth studded with low-growing, parched eucalyptus. It all shimmers in the heat. There are already a few campers established along the roadside, and clouds of dust in the distance herald the arrival of more. Some of the regulars turn up a month or more before the main event to settle in at their favourite camping places (their pozzies) beside the river, or wherever they think theyll find the most shade and not be slap-bang up against other campers. I have come to know some of them by name over the years.