kilometres to Bonney Creek. He arrived in spectacular fashion, coming a cropper while trying to ride through a pebbly crossing. A group of Aborigines scattered into the bush. Although frightened, Jerome refused to leave the water. He gathered firewood and inspected their now abandoned camp site. He decided against tucking into the goanna and ‘frizzled snake’ left on the fire, and had to be content with his last remaining soup tablet. Hungry and miserable, he went to sleep with his head shoved into his spare pair of pyjama bottoms to protect himself from the ‘athletic mosquitoes’.
Now on his third day without food, Jerome resolved to cover the better part of 100 kilometres to Tennant Creek by nightfall. Even under the best of conditions, it was an ambitious goal. But this time Fate was against him. At Gilbert Creek he lost the trail and wasted valuable hours finding his way out of a billabong he mistook for the main watercourse. Following the telegraph line also proved to be much slower than expected. By this time, many of the original wooden poles used to support the wire had been replaced by steel poles. Workers often left the old poles right across the track. Unwittingly, they created a tedious obstacle for bike riders, who now had to cycle into the scrub to avoid them, or lift their bike over each one.
Jerome’s luck turned, however, when he chanced upon two white men with three Aboriginal boys. He quickly accepted their offer of hospitality and a place to camp. ‘You’ll not think I’m a beast, will you?’ he asked by way of an apology for his voracious appetite. ‘I’ve eaten nothing for three days.’ They did not. In the outback, as Jerome discovered, no-one stood on ceremony or looked askance at a man devouring enough food for three people in a single sitting.
In the morning his luck continued. Smooth roads eased the burden of the final 50 kilometres to Tennant Creek, which he reached on 21 April. The brevity of his telegram to The Advertiser in Adelaide spoke volumes about the state of his mind and body. ‘Am well,’ he fibbed: ‘Three-and-a-half days from Barrow. Intend spelling here for a while.’ Possessed by an ‘unnatural-seeming craving for food’, he ate almost continuously. ‘My happiest thoughts were centred around the dinner table,’ he wrote later, ‘and there was a savage delight in the partaking of every meal.’
Jerome had learnt his lesson. When he felt strong enough to continue, he loaded his bike with as many provisions as he could carry. He picked his way slowly northwards, staying at cattle stations or camping with drovers. But following the telegraph line continued to be deceptively challenging. The faint track did not always follow the line directly. It often led away to find easier terrain, or diverged to waterholes and other features, leaving the traveller unsure of his bearings or how to rejoin the main route. Sometimes the tracks just petered out to nothing and left one hopelessly — and dangerously — lost. Near waterholes and creeks there was usually such a profusion of ‘pads’ and tracks that a ‘traveller might just as likely follow up the wrong one as the right’, Jerome later recalled.
Encounters with local Aborigines were more frequent now, but still fraught with fear and misunderstanding. Jerome preferred to keep his distance. Here he found his bicycle did much of that work for him. As he memorably explained to a newspaper reporter, his bicycle ‘was the best revolver I had’.
Once, while he repaired a flat tyre, two curious Aboriginal boys came a little too close for comfort. Jerome squirted his bike pump at them, the hiss of air causing them to flee. ‘They were careful not to venture within range of so deadly a weapon anymore,’ Jerome recalled.
As well as a belief in his technological superiority, Jerome carried with him all the racial prejudice of his era. Let one stark passage suffice:
The first beholding of adult blackfellows and blackfellowesses naked may be slightly shocking to sensitive nerves. An uncomfortable, uneasy feeling will probably be induced. But this creepiness soon passes, and one comes to either look upon or pass unnoticed the ungarbed blackfellow (and later on the average lubra) as he might the apes and monkeys in a zoological gardens.
Of course, all his braggadocio masked a deep vulnerability. Most nights he went to bed terrified, with one eye open and a loaded revolver within reach. One of the few things that gave him the confidence to carry on was knowing that other white men were nearby.
Fear, too, was literally etched into the buildings Jerome stayed in. On 3 May, after a few days of rough riding, Jerome reached the sanctuary of Powell Creek Telegraph Station. One of the workers there was a cycling enthusiast and an amateur photographer. He delighted in taking shots of Jerome and Diamond with the station buildings as a backdrop. Look closely at the image on page 27 and you can see the defensive gun loops built into the cottage walls. A rifle is pointing through one of them directly at the camera, helpfully demonstrating how it was used. Such defences, Jerome explained, were a ‘reminder of the days when the natives were troublesome’.
Jerome spent a few days at the station before riding past the Ashburton Range and onto the Sturt Plain. The flood-prone terrain had a reputation for being difficult to cross. In the Wet, the blue-black clay became inundated, or at least so muddy as to be impassable. In the Dry, the retreating water left waves of cracked mud. Early settlers called it the ‘Bay of Biscay’ after the wild, pitching seas encountered in the North Atlantic off the coast of France. It was said that the jolting and choppy terrain forced horse riders to stop every 100 metres to reset the kinks in their spines and rest their aching jaws. Riding at the peak of the dry season, Jerome likened the experience to ‘cycling up and down a stairway, with the stairs of unequal height and width, blindfolded or in the dark’.
Nevertheless, he possessed the fortitude and resilience common to every overland cyclist. Once at the beautiful Newcastle Waters, a lagoon-like waterway bursting with life, he soon forgot about past hardships. He lay down beside the river, watching the birdlife, eating, sleeping, writing and reading. ‘I was right, the bike was right, so all was right as right could be,’ he recalled.
Jerome had to drag himself away. Worse still, the road ahead meant riding another 20 kilometres of these Biscay soils — yet another morning of ‘bumpy, desolate, barren wretchedness’. Once clear of the plains, Jerome entered a dense, shaded forest. Something odd began to happen, something strange and supernatural. The forest seemed to come to life. As he recalled, he cycled into ‘a fairy land’, where ‘fairy fingers pulled hard upon the wheels and stopped them’. He stood transfixed at all the life and beauty that surrounded him.
Then, as in some delightful dream, I led Diamond to a hedgewood tree, and stood stock still to drink in the melody — silent melody; for there was no sound to woo the eyes from the feast of tropic beauty … O marvellous Nature, supreme master-artist, what human brain could conceive so glorious a transformation scene — so swift, so entrancing, so unexpected!
He moved on reluctantly, riding slowly to make the most of every second, ‘to stretch the sweetness out’:
The charge of scene and country was so marked and impressive that … in the lasting gloom and shadow of countless solemn giant trees, encompassed by a penetrating solitude, I experience again those indescribable sensations … mystic sensations of a hushed expectant awe as in the presence of a something living, breathing, but unseen, intangible.
The land was ‘throbbing’ with power and purpose. It was neither dead nor inert, unlike what he had once thought. There, in Nature’s embrace, he felt trivial and frail, an ‘insignificant atom’. Yet he was not afraid; quite the opposite. He felt calm and relaxed, as if he had awoken from a deep sleep: ‘In the vast immensity of towering forest the thought of quiet death was no unwelcome one.’ Two months in the desert had left Jerome a changed man. In a very real sense he had entered another world, almost another state of being. Lost in reverie, he draped Diamond in wattle blossom and other flowers.
With a light heart, Jerome wheeled his way through the forest land towards Daly Waters and on into savannah country. A few days later, he arrived in reflective mood at Elsey Station
