James McAlloon has always dreamed of a great adventure.
He has done mountain expeditions and running challenges, but has always asked himself, “How far can you go if there wasn’t really a limit?”
The answer?
“One day, if I’m good enough, and have enough time off work, I can walk across Australia.”
When COVID-19 hit and the world shut down, James — who works for a travel company — found himself with a lot of time off work.
So on July 1, 2020, he walked out of his front door on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, down to the beach where the Pacific Ocean meets the east coast, grabbed a coffee, and started walking across Australia.
The long and winding road
The plan was to head south west through southern Queensland, Broken Hill, across the Nullarbor, and to finish on the west coast at Bunbury, south of Perth.
He would challenge his own limits, walking 5,100 kilometres in total, and raising thousands of dollars for South American tourism operators thrown into poverty by the pandemic, and an Indigenous remote health service.
Each day he plodded 30 to 40 kilometres along country roads.
A customised hand cart was filled with the supplies James would need across hundreds of kilometres between remote towns.
He was chased by wild horses, nearly stepped on deadly snakes and swallowed more flies than he cares to remember, and met countless generous drivers who stopped for a chat and gave him food, water and encouragement to keep going.
But there was no escaping the pandemic.
Road to nowhere
Just before crossing the border from New South Wales into South Australia, the wheels began to fall off, literally and metaphorically.
“My tyre busted, not the tube, the tyre. I tried to fix it, but it wasn’t working,” James said.
“I took a day off in Broken Hill to fix my cart and then the day before I arrived over the border into South Australia they imposed quarantine rules, so I ended up having to quarantine for two weeks.
“And then whilst I was in quarantine, WA closed its borders as well. So it threw my entire plan into a spiral. I couldn’t get to the west coast.”
He made the difficult decision to cut the journey short, and veer north to finish – temporarily – in the heart of Australia, at Uluru.
On the road again
For some, that might have been the end.
But James has a stubborn streak.
“At first I think I was satisfied with what I’d achieved,” he said.
“But within two weeks I wanted to get to the west coast and say I’ve actually crossed Australia.”
So he mapped it out, planned the logistics, and waited.
Nearly two years later, on June 4, 2022, he set out to finish what he started.
He left Alice Springs – this time with his partner Emma Williams for company – and set off across some of Australia’s most harsh and remote country.
They were bound for Broome and the Indian Ocean, with the greatest challenge of the journey so far yet to come.
The Tanami Track
The Tanami Desert is one of the most isolated and arid places on earth.
Through it runs the Tanami Track, a 1,035km dirt road roughly from Alice Springs to Halls Creek in the Kimberley, with just two remote Indigenous towns along the way.
Only the most seasoned and prepared four-wheel drivers take on the route.
This was the route James and Emma would spend 24 days traversing with new, more rugged hand carts, in their quest to finish James’s walk across Australia.
“The sand goes forever,” Emma said.
“We even had to pull our trolleys as opposed to pushing them, because it’s too hard.”
But it was here that the kindness of strangers shone through the most.
“So many people came out of nowhere to help out, and lend a kind word or a hand, or offer fruit or food,” James said.
“We couldn’t have done it without them.”
End of the road
After more than three weeks on the track, James and Emma reached the bitumen, and the final stretch: a comparatively easy 700km stroll to Broome and the oasis of the Indian Ocean.
“It was quite an extraordinary achievement, but it felt very personal,” James said.
“Sometimes I think, ‘Wow, I walked from here, all the way across the country’. Not in a straight line; I walked down, up, around. You almost can’t comprehend it; it’s too big a thing.”
Along the way, James and Emma raised $36,000 to help support tourism workers in South America, and $2,500 for Indigenous health service Purple House.