The CrossingFirst day of the Nullarbor stretch
First Steps On The Eyre Highway
I left Norseman at 5.15am and took my first steps along the Eyre Highway. The bitumen was kinder to my feet, the country felt wilder and dinner was finished before the evening disappeared.
Day 22 began in the dark with a sign that made the next month feel suddenly unavoidable.
Balladonia. Eucla. Adelaide.
Those names had been on the map for ages, but maps are polite little things. They sit there on a screen or a sheet of paper and make impossible distances look tidy. Standing under the Eyre Highway sign before dawn, wearing a yellow beanie and looking at Adelaide still almost two thousand kilometres away, was a very different experience.
I had rested in Norseman. We had swapped into campervan number three. We had bought supplies, talked through the plan, and made peace with the fact that the next four weeks were not going to behave like the first three.
Then I slid out of the campervan in the early hours, grabbed breakfast at the BP Roadhouse, and started walking east.
This was one of the milestones I had worried about for months. The Nullarbor had been the big unknown in my head, even though technically the first part out of Norseman was still trees, scrub, signs, and bitumen rather than the treeless plain people imagine. It did not matter. From this point, we were on the long stretch everyone understands as the Nullarbor crossing: roughly 1,200 kilometres from Norseman to Ceduna, on foot, with roadhouses and rest areas becoming the shape of our lives.
The first gift was the weather. Cool, dry, a little cloudy, and only a gentle breeze. Perfect walking weather, basically. I started around 5:15am, and by 8:30 I had about 15 kilometres tucked away.
Even better, my feet weren’t being smashed as they had been on the earlier tracks and verges. Those parallel options were often rough, loose and punishing. The Eyre Highway was smoother and flatter. It still demanded attention around traffic, but for my feet it felt like mercy.
That changed the whole mood.
The schedule changed too. To get to Kalgoorlie and then Norseman, we had followed a pretty demanding plan. It had been deliberate, and it had got us where we needed to be, but the days had often been longer than expected and my feet had taken the worst of it.
For the next four weeks we tried something different: roughly 43 kilometres a day, seven days a week. No proper rest days, but earlier finishes. The weekly distance stayed about the same, and the daily pressure came down just enough to make better sleep possible. Better sleep meant better mornings. Better mornings meant I could start in the dark and walk toward the sunrise instead of staggering toward sunset with the day already feeling late.
Earlier finishes changed more than the clock suggested.
Walking into sunrise felt like being pulled into the day. Walking after sunset often felt like trying to squeeze a few more kilometres out of a body that had already given what it had.
On the first day of the new rhythm, it worked. I finished just after 6pm, dinner was done by 6:30, and suddenly there was a whole evening to relax. Not a rest day. Still nearly 48 kilometres. But it felt civilised, which by HAA standards was practically decadence.
Part of the reason the distance crept above the nominal target was simple: I walked to where the campervan was parked. That added a few kilometres, but it also meant the next morning could begin straight away. No drive back to a finish point. No faffing around before sunrise. Just wake up, get sorted, step out, and keep going.
A few bonus kilometres could buy flexibility later. The van supported the route, but my feet still had to connect it.
The second gift was the place itself.
At first I still had non-Telstra phone coverage, which felt almost suspiciously generous. After that we relied on the portable Telstra hotspot, WikiCamps and whatever reception appeared around rest areas and roadhouses. WikiCamps told us where I could meet Ben and Ols, whether there were toilets and what facilities or phone signal we might find.
Underneath it, something else started happening.
The space started to get into me.
There were endless horizons, wide skies, trees and scrub stretching away from the highway, and a quietness that felt different from the earlier sections. I had spent three weeks getting there, and those three weeks had been full of people, towns, foot pain, logistics, campervan chaos, generosity, and noise. This felt like the start of something more private.
Not lonely exactly. Ben and Ols were still there. The campervan was still leapfrogging ahead. People would still stop, ask if I was okay, and sometimes donate or offer help. But the Nullarbor had a different pull. It gave me room to think in a way I do not think the earlier kilometres had.
There were also religious signs nailed to trees, which amused me at the time because I could not quite imagine someone heading out along the Eyre Highway with a hammer and a stack of signs as their mission for the day. Later, when I thought of the crossing in terms of my own version of 40 days and 40 nights, those signs sat differently in the memory. I am not trying to turn it into something neat or holy. It was still me in hi-vis, managing feet, food, traffic, and campervan logistics. But there was a deeper feeling out there that I still find hard to describe.
Somewhere in all that, the boys also managed a classic comedy moment involving abandoned blue bath towels. HAA had once again put the ridiculous right beside the profound without needing any help from us.
By the end of the day I understood what Matt Napier had been trying to tell me.
Matt had crossed the Nullarbor before, and the night before we left Norseman he had said he was jealous because I was about to do his favourite bit. After one day and about 48 kilometres on the Eyre Highway, I messaged him:
“I can see what you mean now.”
That was the day in one sentence, really.
I had been worried about this section for months. I had imagined the exposure, the distance, the lack of towns, the logistics, the long empty spaces. All of that was still real. Nothing had become easy.
But after the first day east of Norseman, the fear had changed shape.
The Nullarbor was no longer a problem waiting for us somewhere ahead.
I was in it. I was moving through it. And somehow, after everything it had taken to reach that sign in the dark, it already felt like exactly where I was meant to be.
Videos From The Day
My office for the next few weeks
A short Day 22 clip showing the Eyre Highway office for the next few weeks as the Nullarbor stretch began.
Open on YouTubeThe tale of the abandoned blue bath towels
BlueTowelGate on Day 22: the campervan heading back to retrieve the abandoned blue bath towels.
Open on YouTubeImages From The Day
