We had decided to move to Victoria!
We left at relatively short notice. We had decided that I was to start studying at the Reformed Theological College in Geelong. Starting mid-year in 1990. My employer, the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) had agreed to transfer me to the Geelong office, from the Bunbury office. But I had to start in a week! I pleaded with the manager at Bunbury to extend that to a fortnight. They did. Just.
We had already organised all our furniture and other stuff to go to Geelong in a removalist truck. We had our gear together in our VW Kombi – an older 1970s model with an air-cooled 4 cylinder ‘boxer’ engine in the back. It had a pop top camper roof, which we didn’t use. The car had been reverted to an eight-seater van. Plus, we had bolted a safety seat between the two front seats for our then youngest daughter, A. There was comfortable space for all or our seven kids.
But the car was full of luggage, so there was not a lot of space to spare. It was going to be a long drive, from Bunbury in southwest Western Australia, to Geelong, near Melbourne, in Victoria. A distance of some 3 300 kilometres. In just three days!
The day we left friends of ours gave us some nice surprises. Judi de R prepared a huge batch of sandwiches. Really nice sandwiches, with enough to last us for several days. Hugo, Judi’s husband, gave our eldest son, Ch, a skateboard. It was well used at every opportunity on the trip!
We had been given a really great send-off by our church family on the previous Sunday. Lots of love and encouragement and gifts and prayers from really dear people.
So there we were. Seven kids, and Dad and Mum in an old Volkswagen Kombi. Across the Nullarbor. That was a memorable trip! After we left Bunbury, we had intended to keep driving right through the night. We had a distance of about two and a half thousand kilometres to cover before we got to our first booked in place of rest in Clare, South Australia. Two and a half thousand kilometres in two days!
Lots of stops. Stops to fuel up. Stops to eat. Stops to give the kids a chance to get out of the car and run. And use the skateboard! In between we just kept on driving. About one-thirty in the morning I just had to stop for a rest and a sleep. An empty truck bay alongside the Eyre Highway was a good spot. The kids were already asleep. The driver’s seat of an older Kombi is not the most comfortable bed, but I managed to rest and even sleep for a short while. After that I got out and went for a walk around to wake up properly.
Our first major stop was a cabin in a caravan park in Clare, South Australia, in the middle of a great wine region. We were at the end of a long, tiring drive. It was about eight o’clock in the evening. Our youngest, A, just one year old, in the safety seat between us, was crying. Persistently. It was raining. It was the middle of winter! Almost in desperation I prayed out loud that God would let A go to sleep. She did. We were so thankful!
The road wound ever on. Nearly nine o’clock. Here is Clare, at last. Still raining. Where’s that caravan park? Trudi was giving directions from the map. She’s good at it. Into the caravan park. Met by a man who pointed us to the cabin. He went ahead and opened it up. And lit the wood fire that he had prepared! That was service!
We all got out of the car and grabbed our gear that we needed for the night. E, our then six-year-old daughter, dropped her pillow and blankets right into a puddle! We sorted that out pretty quick and thankfully sat down around a pleasantly blazing log fire. It was still raining outside!
It didn’t take long to tuck the kids into bed, and then, after a short while, to tuck ourselves into bed. We slept in the next morning. We didn’t get on the road until eight o’clock!
The next, and last lap of the trip was from Clare to Geelong. Only about 800 kilometres. We got there at about eleven o’clock that night. Pretty tired, but we were there! We had friends in Geelong who had made an empty caravan in their backyard available for Trudi and myself to sleep in. The kids slept in the house.
After a week or so we obtained a rental home in the Geelong suburb of Belmont. We started to move all the stuff we had with us in the Kombi into the house, and as we were doing so we heard the sound of a truck approaching. It sounded funny. It certainly wasn’t running properly! We saw pretty quickly that it was the removal truck with our furniture in it. Sure enough, it backed into our driveway and the guys unloaded our furniture.
What was with the truck and the noise? Well a couple of days before, on the Nullarbor, the truck had blown the engine. The piston in number six cylinder had blown a hole in the top. What to do, stuck in the middle of nowhere? They decided to disconnect the fuel supply to number six cylinder, and keep on driving, hoping they could get to Geelong, and then to Melbourne, to offload their cargoes. They succeeded!
They had organised another motor, and a place to get it installed, at a business in Melbourne. They then loaded the cargoes they had to take back to Perth and drove back to Perth. I like the persistence, and the solving of problems, that these guys had. Well done!