On 13 December 1998, Caroline Großmüller died on the road from the Oodnadatta Track to Lake
Eyre North. At the time, the incident made front page news in the national newspapers, and
I had kept the newspaper clippings from The
Australian of 17 December 1998 as a warning for our friends from Central Europe. The
people had made a number of mistakes:
-
They had gone in the middle of the summer, where the temperatures reach 50° C in the
daytime. Apart from the fact that it's pretty gruelling, it also meant that they were
just about alone on the road.
-
When they got bogged down in the sand, they decided not to stay with the car, but to
walk back instead. This is against all we've ever been taught, but I wonder if it
wasn't the best thing to do anyway, since obviously nobody had come looking for them.
-
The most ironic thing of all is that Ms. Großmüller went straight past a drinking trough
just a few hundred yards before she died. The ranger thinks that she might have already
been too far gone to notice; but if she had, she probably would have survived.
Incidentally, the newspaper article is very inaccurate:
-
Halligan Bay, where they got bogged down in sand, is directly on Lake Eyre, not 50 km
away, as they suggest.
-
The photo on the left shows South Lake Eyre, directly on the Oodnadatta track (we went
past it yesterday).
-
The map is just plain wrong. As you can see, Ms Großmüller was shown to have died in
the middle of nowhere. In fact, it was on the road. The road shown going North off the
Oodnadatta track (and somehow getting to Oodnadatta instead of the track) is a figment
of somebody's imagination.
