While living in Europe, Padma and I missed one aspect of Australia: the emptiness. There is no emptiness in Western Europe, certainly not on the highways.

So with the arrival of the cooler Autumn weather, Padma and I decided to experience some good old Aussie emptiness. And there’s no better place for that than the Nullarbor Plain of Western Australia and South Australia.

So we packed our bags and loaded our Toyota Hybrid and started driving East … destination Melbourne (3500 kms) to visit our sons, Joseph and Xander.

The Nullarbor is a flat, almost treeless (null=no arbor=tree), semi-arid plain which stretches about 1100 kilometres across the south west of Australia. There aren’t any sizeable population centres on the plain. Just some roadhouses ever 150 kilometres of so where you can fill up with petrol and water.

If you mention crossing the Nullarbor to an Aussie you’ll get one of two reactions. Some will wrinkle their noses and say ‘Why?? There’s nothing there to see. It’s boring. It’s endless. You can fly nowadays.’ In fact the first European to cross the Nullarbor, John Eyre, didn’t think too highly of the Plain. It’s ‘a hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams,’ he said.

Others will smile and gaze away into the past and bring back old memories of when they did the crossing perhaps years ago when the road was corrugated gravel and the cars weren’t air conditioned and the temps were 40°C in the shade. ‘It’s a magical experience. Want to do it again. Loved it’, they’ll say.

Padma and I are now of the second sort. We’ll always think fondly of the time we crossed the Nullarbor. We’ll remember the quietude, the emptiness, the serenity. And the beauty. Not the dramatic beauty of majestic forests or stunning coastlines. But the beauty of simplicity in nature and subtle changes in colour. The loneliness of the plain proved to be addictive, the endless vistas mesmerising, the lack of human intervention inspiring.

We loved it so much that we’ll make the drive again … in a few days in fact. We have visited the boys in Melbourne and are now recuperating in Adelaide before we once again make our much-anticipated second crossing of the Nullarbor later this week.