Jill Malcolm makes her way across Australia's Nullarbor Plain, one hole at a time.
My tee shot ricocheted off the trunk of a stunted eucalypt tree, raised the hair on a group of basking kangaroos and then landed next to a fallen branch that looked like a desiccated snake.
It was not an auspicious start to a five-day golfing expedition across Australia's Nullarbor Plain.
Since 2009, the Nullarbor has become the habitat of the world's longest (and roughest) golf course, creating a reason other than ''because it's there'', for tackling a road trip across this extraordinary bit of Australia.
For many Australians ''Crossing the Nullarbor'' by road is an archetypical outback experience.
It was not until 1941 that a stony track known as the Eyre Highway first connected Norseman in Western Australia to Port Augusta in South Australia.
It lurched across the plain at its southernmost edge, stretching across the emptiness like an enormous yawn, and crossing two states and three different time zones.
Bit by bit over the next 35 years the track was sealed and by 1976 was worthy to be named ''road''.
Even today, habitation is sparse, just isolated hamlets or roadhouses that have sprung up along the way to service travellers.
In 2004, two desert denizens, while imbibing a glass or two in the Balladonia Roadhouse, hatched the idea of a unique golf course that they felt might attract more people across these wastelands and boost the fortunes of the tiny settlements.
Five years later it was a reality. The 18-hole, par 71 course spans 1365km with one or two holes in each participating town or roadhouse between Kalgoorlie and Ceduna.
It's euphemistically described as ''an outback-style, natural terrain fairway''. No kidding!
Most holes just head straight into the Aussie outback with few refinements.
It costs $70 to play and although it is said you can hire clubs at each hole, more often than not there is no-one there to organise them.
Bill and I were travelling with a caravan and because we had come from Perth we started backwards on the 18th.
We drove out to the Kalgoorlie landfill where we found a bag and seven clubs for $10.
They cleaned up rather well and in the pocket Bill found 42 golf balls and $1.70 in cash.
That was our first win. He bagged the balls in groups of five, intending to flog them off as we went.
Losing balls on the Nullarbor is all part of the game, and so is finding them.
All golf courses have hazards - bunkers, water and trees - that need to be avoided but on the Nullarbor course the whole fairway is often a hazard; and as a consequence, there is very little in the way of rules.
To play the Nullarbor course is also to contend with grit, heat, wind and be bothered by the ubiquitous Australian fly.
Serious golf aficionados have to adjust their thinking. It's a course where skill means little and luck means a lot.
The 18th and 17th golf holes were at the Hannan Golf Course in Kalgoorlie.
On the fairways, leaves, dry branches and crunchy weeds overlaid pink sand. Kangaroos took up the only shade, indifferent to the hazard of flying golf balls.
Not that flying was the term I would use for any of my shots.
The ''green'', a round patch of oiled sand was also misnamed. I ended up with 20 strokes off the stick and Bill with 16.
Strewth! And it was about to get worse over the next five days.
It was 40degC on the morning we left Kalgoorlie and drove east through the goldmining town of West Kambalda to play a hole at Silver Lake, and then Norseman, where we ticked two more holes off the list. Our golf was not improving.
The road then took us past forests of salmon gums and polished gimlet trees to Frazer Range Station.
There we hunkered down for our first night on the plain. The wind blew steadily off the ranges and rocked us to sleep.
Fraser Range was the first station set up on the Nullarbor back in the time when it took three days to reach it from Perth in a wagon drawn by 16 camels.
Here, we played the 13th hole where the ''green'' was artificial grass.
Next day, we drove through thinning forests to the tiny settlement of Balladonia (the 12th hole), that in 1979 hit the international spotlight when searing hot chunks of the American Sky Lab rained into the desert nearby.
US President Jimmy Carter apparently rang the Balladonia Hotel to apologise.
Between Balladonia and Caiguna there was one bend in the road before we hit the longest bit of straight road in the country: 146km without the slightest curve.
We drove between mulga and myalla trees before the trees ran out altogether and were replaced by tawny grasses and saltbush.
It's a long lonely road, the sort of place where spotting another vehicle is cause for excitement.
Caiguna Roadhouse is at the end of the straight and the golf hole here is touted as a par four: five over for me, a slight improvement.
We drove on to Cocklebiddy (population eight) that was originally an Aboriginal mission, and parked for the night on a patch of sand next to the roadhouse.
At night, a full moon painted the flat landscape in hard bright light and the air was so still it was as if the whole world was holding its breath.
The tee of hole 10 here is dedicated to Bindy, ''a great bloke and true blue Aussie trucker'', who could spin a good yarn and for years belted across the Nullarbor carting goods from one side to the other.
Next day, at Madura Pass, we could see over a vast plain speckled with salt bushes like mouldy cabbages and studded with myalla trees, which were low and humped and looked like a herd of buffalo lumbering eastward.
Then a low escarpment appeared, winding alongside the road like a colossal petrified worm.
Just before Mundrabilla, a Frenchman in a battered red station wagon hit an emu chick, and maimed but did not kill it.
I reported the incident to the nearest roadhouse and a ''true blue'', as dry as the desert with cold eyes and deep furrows in a face long exposed to sun, headed off with a gun to put the chick out of its misery.
The incident ruined my golf. On the Mundrabilla fairway, the precision I displayed in hitting the ball on to every prickly bush or gritty knoll was impressive. My score was not.
Up the escarpment, the road leads to the village of Eucla, famous for a fraudulent nymph, a beautiful blonde rumoured to run with a family of kangaroos nearby.
We camped in a bare paddock near the golf course to play the 7th in the early morning.
No sprite or kangaroo came into view, but in the distance we had our first glimpse of white sand hills and the sea.
Border Village Roadhouse was marked by an outsized kangaroo called Rooey 11, the size of a house and clutching a can of Thirst Crusher.
Around here were true plains of ''nullus arbor'' and the road follows the coast through coloured heathland and then a dull bleak terrain, devoid of colour or cover.
The roadhouse at Nullarbor was on the blink.
The generator had packed up and it was going to take six weeks to get anyone out that far to fix it.
Behind the building was the 5th fairway, a stretch of rutted grit where crows swooped down and nicked our balls, one of them snatched in full flight.
It was the closest I came to scoring a birdie.
The record for crow-nicked balls is apparently eight belonging to one man. Where the balls end up is still a mystery.
Between Nullarbor and Nundroo is Head of Bight, a place of dramatic honeycomb cliffs and caves where the belly of Australia drops vertically into the Southern Ocean and whales come into the bay to calve.
At Nundroo, the 4th is called the Wombat Hole, as Australia's largest population of southern hairy nosed wombats apparently lives close by.
The only ones we saw had taken a suicidal path across the road and were now a mangled pile of blood and fur.
Under a blazing sun, we played the 3rd at a place called Penong, which is surrounded by hundreds of old-fashioned windmills.
The last two holes are in Ceduna, set beside the sweeping shore of Murat Bay.
After the Nullarbor it seemed highly civilised with shops, banks, schools, smart camping grounds and seafood restaurants.
The name comes from the Aboriginal word ''Chedoona'', meaning ''resting place'', which after five days on that great southern plain and a golf score too high to be recorded, sounded good to me.
