This bloke (Jerome Murif) was the first person to cycle across Australia from Adelaide to Darwin. I'm not sure what extra gear he carried (or how) but I doubt it was too much more. .... I believe in those days there were a lot more taverns and shanties for horse riders and wagons to stop overnight at, but not many at all in central Australia.
For a long time I held the record from Adelaide to Darwin -- there and back, a 3760 mile trip that few people in Britain can envisage. The average was over 100mph, and the Falcon GTHO in which I did it expired from heat exhaustion as I returned it to the driveway of the owner.
Between the four of us in the car, we started out from Adelaide with about a hundred times as much food and water as could be fitted into Mr Murif's visible luggage, and added more whenever the opportunity offered. Horse riders and wagons did not venture through the heart of Australia often enough for there to be taverns -- the towns even today are few and far between, certainly too far for several days' riding on a horse or a bike. Any journeys made through there before automobiles were made by camel train, and Norm Shearlaw, the prospector who struck the big bauxite deposits, told me the camel-trains were self-sufficient -- more precisely, he didn't tell me because it wasn't necessary; self-sufficiency was the explicit subject of the conversation. Until the First World War, and for some time afterwards, Australia had more camels than Arabia did. (Lawrence of Australia doesn't quite have the same ring...)
We can see on the photograph that Mr Murif's clothes are not clean...
I also travelled by car all the way around the coastline of Australia, camping, and in my opinion (I have substantial African and South American experience, including walking out of the Namib Desert after my convoy was destroyed) it would be virtually impossible for someone to live off the land without indigenous assistance. It is not generally understood that, if you live off the land, even if you know what you're doing, just finding water and food can consume your entire day, slowing you down tremendously.
What there was though, in Mr Murif's time, and still are, were huge farmsteads every few hundred miles, and a cult of hospitality. I don't know the details, but I think it likely that Mr Murif rode from homestead to homestead, and would have been sent on his way after a few days rest with enough food and water to get him to the next homestead.
All the same, it must have been a fraught adventure to cycle out there. Forget roads, or even trails from camel trains; I seriously doubt if they passed often enough to cut a track. I suspect that what Mr Murif rode on were cattle or sheep trails, and these would naturally lead him toward the homestead because that's where the services were centralised. All the same, the opportunities for becoming terminally lost were clearly very substantial.
I understand why Dan would rather abort his trip than go into a desert without enough water and food to see him through.
Andre Jute
