Dear Desert
Barbara Schwarzmann · Memoir · 57,000 words
At fifty-nine, Barbara Schwarzmann flew from a village of five houses in the Bavarian Forest to the middle of Western Australia to walk the Canning Stock Route — 1,850 kilometres, fifty-one wells, and the most remote vehicle track on earth.
Two years of planning ended on the first morning. The floor of a wheel rut is forty centimetres wide. Her axle was sixty.
Publication details to follow.
She went back. She had a trolley built to the measurement, hired a man to bury ninety days of food along the route at twenty-kilometre intervals, and set out again — into sand ridges, a fever that nearly became sepsis, two days of rain on a dune catching water in a cup, and a country where every single person who passed her slowed down to ask you right for water?
And somewhere in the middle of it, a married man on a tag-along tour, and a satellite dish that came on for three hours every evening.
Dear Desert is the story of a woman who designed her life so that nobody would ever have to come for her — and what happened when the one thing she asked for was a telephone call.
Funny, unsentimental and entirely without self-pity, it is a book about self-reliance, about the exact price of wanting something, and about a bag of food still buried outside Wiluna with a smiley face drawn on the label.
Preface
In April of 2026 I drove eighteen hundred and fifty kilometres up the middle of Western Australia with a young tour operator from Perth, a fence-post drill, four hundred and fifty litres of water, and ninety paper bags of food that I had packed by hand on a floor in a suburb.
Every twenty kilometres we stopped and bored a hole in the ground and buried one of them.
Then we tied a yellow ribbon to the nearest bush, pushed a wooden skewer into the sand, and moved on. On the skewer was a label I had written out ninety times, in a language that is not my own, and it said:
THIS IS BARBARA’S FOOD. SHE’S A WALKER 2026. PLEASE LEAVE THERE
And underneath that, a smiley face.
I want you to understand what that actually is, because it took me two years to understand it myself. It is not a supply chain. It is ninety notes from a woman in a warm suburb in April to a woman who would arrive at those exact spots on foot, alone, at the end of a long day, in a condition neither of them could yet imagine. And every single one of them says the same thing underneath the words: it’s me. I got here first. I left you this.
I designed the whole expedition on one principle, and I did not invent it in Australia. I learned it a very long time ago in a house where asking for help did not produce help. The principle is that nobody should ever have to come for me. Anything anybody gives me is a present, and a present is lovely, and a present is not a thing you can build a supply chain on.
And then I walked into the one country on earth where every single person who passes you slows down, winds the window down, and asks whether you are right for water.
This is a book about a track I have not finished, a machine I had built to a measurement nobody publishes, a fever I did not notice, and eighty-nine bags of food that were exactly where I left them.
It is also, and I did not plan this part, about a man who could not make a telephone call.
The desert was never the hard part.
Contents
Part One — The Wide Axles
Five Houses, Fifty-One Wells · Bush Brumby · Twenty Centimetres · The Nearest Bus · The Window · North · Has Anybody Seen Barbara Today · Mum and Dad · Hinterher
Part Two — Ninety Holes
The Price · What Goes in a Hole · Graves · Billiluna
Part Three — Three Attempts
The Rollercoaster · You Right for Water? · The Cup · Cream · The Mail Plane · A One and Only Exception · Tinned Fish · The Same Seat · Power · Please Leave There
Words I have collected
From the back pages of the log book, in the order they were got wrong.
arvo — afternoon. Heard nine times before lunch on the first day.
bull dust — fine red powder lying in holes in the road, pretending to be road.
breakaway — a low cliff standing out of a plain, as though somebody had taken a slice out of a cake and gone away. Not a jail.
road train — three or four trailers behind a prime mover. Not a train.
spinifex — not grass. A defensive installation.
icy pole — an ice lolly. Worth ten extra kilometres. Well — maybe five.
minties — sweets, kept between the two front seats, eaten at eleven o’clock. A whole national institution and nobody mentions it to foreigners.
shouted — bought for you, without being asked, by somebody who then leaves.
bugger — everything from a broken axle to a dead husband. Tone does all the work. Excellent.
yeah, nah — no. nah, yeah — yes.
you right for water? — the only question anybody ever needed to ask, and every single person asked it.