Red Dust Tapes rocks and rattles back into the early days of Australian rail.

You’ll hear:

A 1914 account of the flies, the dust and the mind-numbing isolation, by a man who was right there with pick and shovel for the building of the 1,710 kilometre Nullabor Railway, the Transcontinental.

We visit the tiny railway settlement of Cook, in the middle of that desolate track, in the later days of diesel. It’s deserted now, but back in 1970 when I recorded there, it had a school, post office, a lock-up, and a handful of houses.

We’ll hear of the Tea and Sugar train that would pass through these isolated settlements, with its butchers’ van and other reminders of civilization. And of the railway fettlers’ camps along the line, which featured the occasional murder.

And I record my brief encounters with steam, standing on the clatter-bang of footplates on the last smoky shunter in Perth, and then Port Pirie in South Australia, sitting in a coffee place in Port Pirie’s main shopping strip, being startled by the hiss-choof-whoof of a passing steam train.

It was in Port Pirie where I encountered the quirky level crossing that featured three separate rail gauges, a testament to the pig-headedness of our colonial transport planners.

Also, social and musical historian Warren Fahey, shares why the railways were a godsend to the shearers, prying them away from the money-hungry publicans, so they had a chance to visit their far-away families.