Between the small coastal town of Ceduna and our destination, Maralinga, the roads don't have signs and some don't appear to have official names. There are only a few places to stop, including a roadhouse or two and an Aboriginal community called Scotdesco that draws in tourists with a 'Big Thing' (a wombat). Our directions instruct us to call from Nundroo, the last chance to use a mobile phone until the Trans-Australian Railway. Nundroo is a couple of semi-connected buildings with a roadhouse, a shuttered bar and a few rooms for hire. We call Robin, Maralinga's current caretaker, and he sounds exactly like I imagined: a deep Australian drawl, gruff and friendly. He says we're close and he'll see us in a few hours. We're driving on the Eyre Highway that originated in the 1870s as a by-product of the East-West Telegraph and informally connected the populous east with the mineral-rich west. We're on the eastern edge of 180,000km~2 of exposed limestone, an ancient Cretaceous Period seabed that the Indigenous Anangu called Gondiri, meaning 'bare like a bone'. In 1840, the Englishman Edward John Eyre falsely claimed that he was the first man to cross Gondiri and another white man gave Gondiri a colonial name: Nullarbor Plain, Latin for 'no trees'. Eyre's name is now conspicuous across Australia. The Eyre Highway was considered a marvel in its day, largely because it attempted to tame the Nullarbor, but the road wasn't completed until 1942 and even then it was little more than a dirt track. Today, the sunburnt and pockmarked bitumen looks tired and overused.
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