Hendry - Wrong Way Round: One Country, One Camper Trailer, One Family, One Amazing Adventure

Explore Australia Publishing Pty Ltd
Ground Floor, Building 1, 658 Church Street,
Richmond, VIC 3121

Explore Australia Publishing Pty Ltd is a division of Hardie Grant Publishing Pty Ltd

Published by Explore Australia Publishing Pty Ltd, 2015

Maps and design Explore Australia Publishing Pty Ltd, 2015
Text and photos Lorna Hendry, 2015

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the catalogue of the National
Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au

eISBN: 9781743583364

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owners and the above publisher of this book.

The maps in this publication incorporate data Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia), 2006. Geoscience Australia has not evaluated the data as altered and incorporated within this publication, and therefore gives no warranty regarding accuracy, completeness, currency or suitability for any particular purpose.

Commissioned by Melissa Kayser
Project managed by Lauren Whybrow
Edited by Martine Lleonart
Proofread by Emma Schwarcz
Cartography by Emily Maffei and Bruce McGurty

For James, Oscar and Dylan

About the author

Lorna Hendry worked in graphic design for many years until she unplugged herself from her computer to travel around Australia with her husband and their two young sons. On their return to Melbourne she changed careers and is now a freelance writer, editor and proofreader, and teaches Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University in Melbourne. She lives in Fitzroy, but is still homesick for the Kimberley.

This is the most important thing we have, said James, waving a small piece of black plastic in my face. It was a 12-volt triple adaptor. One end had a plug designed to fit into the battery of our brand-new camper trailer, the other end had three outlets. Six months before I hadnt known such a thing existed. Now I was nearly as excited about it as he was.

We can put the fridge in the kitchen and run two lights off the battery at the same time, James said. That way we dont have to leave the fridge in the back of the car all the time. Like this.

He plugged in the camping lights. They flickered, then shone a weak yellow light into the afternoon sun. He plugged the fridge in and we listened for the hum as it started up. Nothing happened. James peered at the plug and tugged on it. It refused to budge. He pulled harder and it broke off in his hand, the business end of the plug firmly wedged in the adaptor.

We ended up hauling the fully stocked fridge into the back of the car, and James spent fifteen minutes prying the plug out with a screwdriver.

It was an early lesson that when you are camping things often dont go to plan.

We were on our first day of a trip around Australia with our two sons, Oscar, eight, and Dylan, six. We had quit our jobs, rented out our house, enrolled the kids in Distance Education and left home to have an adventure.

It wasnt the first time we had been camping. It was the second. We had done a practice run at Hanging Rock with a borrowed tent a few months earlier. Just before dusk, after the rangers had locked the gates behind the last of the day visitors, we set up the tent, laid out our mattresses and sleeping bags, and settled in for a night under the stars. We drank wine around a fire with the rest of the campers and went on a guided bushwalk in the dark to look for owls, most of whom had sensibly deserted their usual spots before we tramped down the track with forty overexcited kids. The whole experience would have been better if we had taken pillows, torches, a gas bottle that actually fitted our stove and some bottles of drinking water. As a training run, though, it did the job.

When we left home for real, we had an 80-litre water tank, self-inflating mattresses, a two-burner stove with a gas bottle that fitted and a stove-top coffee maker. We also had a laptop; a fold-up toilet seat; four packs of cards; an axe; four books of maps; a logbook to record our mileage and fuel consumption; an iPod with 6000 songs, a complete set of Spanish lessons and six Harry Potter books read by Stephen Fry loaded onto it; a 20-metre extension cord; a barbecue plate; a bottle of vodka in an unbreakable container; and a kitchen sink.

That first day we had driven 233 kilometres from Melbourne to Port Campbell on the Great Ocean Road. Not a huge distance, but we werent in a hurry; we had a whole year to make our way around the country. That day we spent more time putting up our tent than we had spent in the car, even including an unscheduled stop at the base of the West Gate Bridge. We had to pull up to calm Dylan down, who was sobbing loudly in the back. The reality of our trip only hit him when he saw the bridge and realised we were about to drive out of Melbourne and not come back. James and I had spent three years planning this, but it wasnt until that moment that it dawned on Dylan that he wouldnt see any of his friends for a year.

To cheer him up, James let both boys climb onto the roof rack and ride on top of the car while he drove it slowly around the car park of the petrol station. I was pretty sure that was illegal but I didnt want to have an argument with James in the first half-hour. I fussed around on the ground, terrified that they would fall off and our trip would begin with a day at the hospital having broken legs set in plaster. But they held on tight and Dylan completely forgot to be sad about what he was leaving behind. I bundled them back into the car and when we reached the top of the West Gate all four of us cheered the start of our adventure.

Setting up the camper trailer wasnt as easy as we had expected. Despite being given a demonstration when we bought it, and having a practice go before we left, our first argument was about which way we should park the trailer on the site. We tried to keep our voices down and the swearing to a minimum, but the elderly couple camped opposite us vanished into their van as we bickered. I stopped arguing when I worked out that I had no idea which way the tent would be facing once it was set up.

After unfolding the canvas from the trailer, we realised that we had lost the sheet of paper with the set-up instructions. James disappeared into the tent and, after half an hour of swearing and clanging of poles, he emerged sweaty and flushed and we had a fairly square tent. We laid out the beds, swung out the kitchen unit on the trailers tailgate, connected the gas, put out the tables and chairs and looked around for someone to show off to.

No other campers were around. Neither were Oscar and Dylan.

In celebration of our new freedom, we had told the boys to go and play while we set up. Taking advantage of this unusually relaxed parenting, they had climbed to the top of the cliff at the end of the beach. Now they were standing on the edge, 80 metres above the crashing waves, waving frantically at us.