ON OUR most recent desert jaunt leading a trip for my son’s tour company, Moon Tours (www.moontours.com. au), we came across a total of five burnt-out vehicles dotted along a couple of remote desert tracks. These had all succumbed to a spinifex fire and were not vehicles that had broken down and then got torched, as you often seen on our more-often travelled outback roads.
Then, as I was writing this, I heard a news report of a couple having been rescued from the Gibson Desert after their vehicle had caught fire on the Talawana Track. While there were very few other details, I could hazard a guess of what went wrong!
Two of the vehicles we’d seen had been burnt-out many years previously (I had photographed one of them, a Landie, in the late 1980s on my first trip across the Talawana Track), but three of them were pretty recent – a Prado sometime between May 2021 and June 2022, a Prado and trailer in April 2022 (more of which later), and an FJ Cruiser sometime since 2018. While the FJ was petrol-powered, the two Prados were diesel-powered, which proves spinifex fires don’t discriminate between petrol or diesel.
Endemic to Australia, what we generally call ‘spinifex’ throughout our desert country is, in fact, Triodia, while the ‘real’ spinifex
