Westward Ho!

Do you ever dream, my sweetheart,

Of a twilight long ago,

Of a park in old Kalgoorlie

Where the bougainvillaeas grow?

--Herbert Hoover

The miners of Kalgoorlie's Golden Mile knew Herbert Hoover before the turn of the century as a young gold-mining engineer and balladeer in love with a local barmaid. Today Kalgoorlie is a nickel-mining center of 26,000, with 37 saloons, tolerated brothels and streets still wide enough to turn a horse team around. It is a part of a vast interior that few Australians ever see, since four-fifths of the country's 13 million people live in coastal cities. Together with such other way stations as Cookamidgera, Ivanhoe, Broken Hill, Bookaloo, Tarcoola, Koolyanobbing and Doodlakine, Kalgoorlie forms a new standard-gauge rail link across the continent. This single 2,461-mile track now connects swinging Sydney on the Pacific with tranquil Perth on the Indian Ocean. While the U.S. is cutting back on trains, Australia just added a third weekly transcontinental express in each direction. TIME Correspondent Roy Rowan made the trip and reports:

Pulling out of Sydney's ancient Central Station at 3:15 p.m., the Indian-Pacific glides through a suburban sea of red tile roofs and manicured backyards planted with lemon and orange trees, past platforms packed with schoolgirls in turquoise tunics and schoolboys in maroon blazers. Aboard are 144 passengers, the train's capacity. They are young backpackers headed west, retired couples on an endless vacation, students, and an assortment of tourists.

For 65 hours the Indian-Pacific rushes over a kaleidoscope of landscape. From the steep Blue Mountains of the Great Dividing Range it speeds toward the stark-naked Nullarbor Plain. It flashes by farms with earth so red that the livestock watering holes seem to be filled with blood. It races past nickel, lead and gold mines, flocks of fleecy merinos, smelters, slag heaps, ports and forests. It passes signs exhorting WELFARE NOT WARFARE and OUR HOSPITAL NEEDS YOUR HELP: PLEASE GET SICK. A big painted rock aimed at shooing away pilots seeking to land says PISS OFF. To the north, lights from the Woomera range and tracking station, used for guiding American astronauts, glow in the night. To the east, the moonlit rails turn molten in the Popsicle-or-ange sunrise. This is the time of day a kangaroo likes to lick the dew off the steel track. Or when a yellow-eyed dingo, Australia's coyote, will stand its ground and stare sourly at the train while a spindly-legged emu, the local version of an ostrich, will try to outrun the 3,300-h.p. diesel express.

Now the diesel engines pull

Like a mighty station bull.

--Anonymous ballad

By morning the train is in Menindee, where paddle-wheelers used to p!y the cafe-au-lait-colored Darling River. From Menindee, a water pipe runs beside the track for 75 miles to the parched mining city of Broken Hill. A man must live in Broken Hill for eight years just to qualify for work in the lead, zinc and silver mines of this hard, uncompromising, union-ruled town. The train flits by a clump of "humpies" (aborigine huts built of empty gasoline drums). The kids wave.

In Peterborough, a few passengers change for Adelaide. There the yard-masters have the maddening job of sorting out rolling stock for three different gauge tracks. In Gladstone, east-and westbound trains stop side by side to swap crews. "Be careful you get back on the right one," warns the chief conductor, Joe Ford, as he spots a passenger alighting dangerously between the two identical silver liners. By nightfall the train is heading into the "back o' beyond," where tiny settlements along the track still depend on a fortnightly supply train called the "tea and sugar."

The Indian-Pacific goes like a bullet,

A section car could easily pull it!

This ditty is recited by the children of Cook. They are up at dawn to watch the train refuel before it heads across the 500-mile plain of Nullarbor (Latin for "not any tree"). The desolate limestone plateau is covered with sea fossils, saltbush, and red-flowering wild hops. Weird subterranean winds whistle through caves honeycombing the limestone, and whoosh with an eerie trumpeting from gaping blowholes. Over one stretch known as "the long straight," the track runs dead ahead for 297 miles, the longest straightway railroad in the world. There was a "loco" driver at Cook named Kevin Smith who, they say, did not go round a bend for five years.

The loco driver boarding at Cook is Gary Carn He and his fireman, Peter Read, carry four days' provisions in a metal tucker box, which they keep in the locomotive cab. Carn stares down the twin ribbons of steel at a sea of green saltbush that reaches out in every direction to the circular horizon. No houses, no trees; only telephone poles rushing by at 60 m.p.h. interrupt his view. "We used to stop and let the passengers pick wildflowers," Carn says. "There are 7,000 different kinds."

The Indian-Pacific rushes into its third night, past the gold and nickel of Kalgoorlie, the great iron deposits at Koolyanobbing, and on over the wheat fields of Kellerberrin, glistening under the moon. This is Australia's West.

Land of politicians silly,

Home of wind and willy-willy,

Land of blanket tent and billy

Westralia.

--Anonymous ballad

The Indian-Pacific rolls out of the night and finally into the first suburban fringes of Perth. It is 6:45 a.m. Kitchen lights glow in the freshly painted frame houses backed against the track. The sleeping-car porters rap hard on the compartment doors to make sure all passengers are awake. A disc jockey, piped into the train from a Perth radio station, is playing his morning selection. "Now here's a good one," he says, and the song begins, "Pardon me, boy, is that the Indian-Pacific ..."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.