The New (Old)Nomads

There’s an unbending stretch of bitumen, but little else here tells of human intervention. Several hours of red dirt and hardy scrub and 240 km north of Port Hedland, a gray-haired multitude has gathered at the end of a gravel road off the highway. All are wearing shorts, some carry rods and reels. Hundreds of time-rich wanderers are fishing or collecting shells on Eighty Mile Beach in the midday sun, while their well-traveled 4WDs and homes on wheels rest in the caravan park behind the dunes. These gray nomads jest that they are part of the SKI club: Spending the Kids’ Inheritance.

Former BHP mine worker Bill Wilson,62, and his wife Hazel have come here for the 30˚C winter temperatures and to catch up with friends. Their house and assets sold off to fund a lifestyle that now sees them on the road for six months at a time, the only place they now think of as home is their son’s property at Australind, near Bunbury, 2,000 km down the road. “This beach area hasn’t changed at all,” says Wilson, fishing from the comfort of a deck chair. Wilson was a regular visitor to this beach when he worked at Newman’s iron ore mine. Born in Wigan, England, he came to Australia in 1969. “But you definitely now see more people on the road around here.” On the way north to Broome, the beaches offer solitude and bountiful sport fishing; it was in these parts in 1999 that then TIME art critic Robert Hughes had a horrific road accident after a day’s angling.

On an eight-week getaway, Glen and Carol Mowatt, from Lake Macquarie, N.S.W., are “dead-set fishers.” They’ve camped at Eighty Mile Beach before, and are hoping to fill their portable freezer with goodies such as the delicious but hard-to-catch threadfin salmon. Glen, a tanned and trim 62-year-old who still works as a carpenter, keeps an eye on the charts, goes to fish two hours before full tide, and stays for an hour after its peak. When the tide is out on this shallow coast, he’ll walk 3 km over the wet sand to cast his line.

“Up here in the middle of winter you can wear a singlet all day,” he says. Forty years ago, Mowatt traveled around the whole country with a mate in a Mini 850, finding work as a builder along the way; he doesn’t miss the 4,000 km of bone-shaking gravel road from Carnarvon to Katherine that he once rattled over. “The route’s all sealed now,” he says. “The place is not as remote as it used to be.”