Lorna Hendry drove on the Mereenie Loop and found herself in Albert Namatjira territory.
My husband refuses to drive on the same road twice if he can avoid it. From Kings Canyon, there were two ways to get to Alice Springs. We could head back to the Stuart Highway, but that would mean retracing our drive from the highway to Uluru.
We took the Mereenie Loop instead.
The Mereenie Loop is a 200-kilometre unsealed road that runs north from Watarrka National Park, past Hermannsburg, and meets up with the sealed road to Alice on the edge of the West MacDonnell Ranges.
It passes through Aboriginal land so you need to buy a permit. We bought ours from the Kings Canyon Lodge where the receptionist gave us a Mereenie Tour Pass booklet, a form to fill out and asked for $2.20. I must have looked surprised, because she smiled and confirmed the tiny fee.
‘I’ve had to train myself to say “Two dollars and twenty cents”,’ she said. “I used to say “Two twenty”, but people were having heart attacks because they thought I meant two hundred and twenty dollars.’
The Mereenie Loop travels through the country of Albert Namatjira. When I was a kid in the 1970s, framed prints of his watercolours hung on the floral-papered walls of living rooms across the country. Their pastel shades of mauve and blue always seemed too delicate to be a true representation of the Red Centre.
The drive isn’t long and the road is usually well graded, although it’s not recommended for 2WD vehicles, caravans or trailers. Along the way, signs placed by people from the nearby Aboriginal communities warned us of particularly tricky sections of the road. It took us just a few hours to reach the turn-off to Hermannsburg and Palm Valley, where we camped overnight before continuing on to Alice Springs the next day.
In the middle of the Mereenie Loop, as we came over a rise in the road, the country below us sang in hues of purple, yellow and green. The sky faded to white on the horizon and the light was hazy and diffused, making the scene look blurred. The white trunks of huge ghost gums glowed as if they were lit from the inside.
It looked exactly like an Albert Namatjira painting.
Image credit: all images courtesy of Lorna Hendry
