I approached my first trip to Australia's north-west corner with trepidation.
It was some time ago, an age before social media and smartphones with three camera lenses. Instead, I had only a single boxy camera to capture my memories.
The "Nor'west" was the land that time forgot, with temperatures known to top 50 degrees Celsius, and where just about everything could kill you.
Snakes curled up like land mines, filled with poison, neurotoxins and blood coagulants. The outback dusk carried spores, the white wedge in the lungs, fungal pneumonia. And then there was the risk of heat stroke.
But my local guide Jack had reassured me over the phone, and also promised an experience like no other.
Checkerboard fields and salt pans
The flight from Perth offered a bird's-eye view of Western Australia's changing landscape.
The checkerboard fields of crops and multi-coloured wildflowers soon gave way to a yellow sea of blooming canola. A half-hour later, the mid-west region appeared in all its barren glory. Further north, the Pilbara came into view — salt pans and rocky outcrops stretching to every horizon.
Eventually, the earth was nothing more than a noise of dirt: grey dirt, orange dirt, red dirt, and a spattering of hardy trees, lonely white ghost gums that challenged the sun and wind.
Dead trees, trees of iron, with bare branches extending defiant middle fingers to jeer the cloudless sky.
Under a vast emptiness once disregarded by Dutch sailors as useless, an enormous mineral wealth now fuelled an almighty financial boom.
Viewed from above, the giant yellow trucks and earthmovers looked like cheap children's toys.
The silence of spinifex country
We landed with a jolt at Tom Price.
The light was crisp, razor-sharp shadows falling across the sand, the sun feeling closer than I had ever known it.
Shielding my eyes, I looked around – although I could see for miles, not a single living thing was moving, the animals having retreated, searching for relief under whatever cast a shadow.
A detonation in the distance sent shock waves through my calves, the rumbling of machines shattering the silence of spinifex country.
Jack collected me in a monstrous four-wheel drive covered in halogen spotlights and with a roo bar the size of Sydney Harbour Bridge. The tyres came up to my chest.
"We're heading inland," he said. "Sit back, relax, enjoy the scenery."
Stockmen, drovers and pubs with no beer
Over the next few hours, I watched the brown draughty tufts of Australia blur by.
Abandoned mining pits dotted the land. The companies didn't backfill them with dirt, leaving a gaping divot in the face of the earth.
The voids were below the natural groundwater table so water seeped in over time, topped off during the wet season. The result was what Jack called "a pit lake — we swim in it".
At the town's heaving pub, we ordered lunch and ate out back in the beer garden, surrounded by hefty men in alternating shades of fluorescent yellow and safety orange.
We drove on. In every direction, all I could see was more dirt and low, dry bushes.
Jack flicked on the radio, ballads about stockmen and drovers, drought and dust and pubs with no beer. The mellow country twang soon made my eyelids heavy …
"Hey. Mate, you awake? We're here."
Jack's big country hand was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes listlessly and peered through the grubby windscreen.
There it was, carved into the land — the edge of the world. The almighty gorge disappeared beneath me, a curved red wall forming a natural amphitheatre with an ice blue waterfall plunging into an emerald rock pool.
The walls rose up in strips of varied colour that made them look like ancient temples to worship the sun.
Signatures driven into rock commemorated the Dreamtime, drawings of kangaroos, turtles, thylacines, emus and crocodiles.
Beneath a zillion stars
The explosions ended at dusk. Within a half-hour, the land turned a vibrant umber, the chocolate ranges became deep purple, and a zillion stars appeared overhead.
Jack offered me the coldest beer I'd ever tasted. A sound echoing up from the gorge soon tickled my ears.
"A pied butcherbird," Jack said. "They sing every night from behind a black executioner's hood."
Peaceful and haunting, tumbling over granite and sandstone, the bird's delicate whistle nestled inside my brain.
Its silvery tones spoke of the palpable sense of space, of quiet and calm. It told of an unhurried existence, of the intangible.
On a rocky slope below, a mob of black-tailed wallabies fed, their movements dislodging small stones.
A barn owl flew unseen overhead, its call echoing against the rocks. Seconds later, a bat made a chipping sound. Tree frogs croaked asynchronously, crickets chirruped incessantly.
And then, everything fell silent. Even the waterfall seemed to stop trickling.
I felt momentarily giddy, with no sound to stimulate me, to support me, the world spinning.
Was it the beer? It couldn't be, I hadn't had that much to drink. What was it? It was the Pilbara.
For a collective instant, it had stopped, stepped back, and was now watching me, sitting, listening and witnessing its staggering beauty.
Jack rolled out swags, and we camped. The lingering warmth in the earth against my back dissolved my aches like an electric blanket on low setting.
Despite my initial reservations about the north-west, I never slept so soundly.
Peter Papathanasiou is the author of The Pit.
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