The Road To Hell

The travellers risking their lives to stay in Oz

- Lorna Gray

Natalia Ferrazzano was exhausted. She’d been travelling for 10 hours straight, and it was now pitch black outside. Out of the corner of her eye, she looked at the man driving her to his property on the remote Kangaroo Island in South Australia – scruffy beard, a stench of stale alcohol, eyes that kept shifting to look at her, instead of the road. He’d collected her from the ferry, and straight away, she’d started to feel uneasy. She’d applied to work on the sheep farm to get the authentic outback experience. But as they drove into the blackness of the countryside, it was beginning to feel more like the start of a horror movie.

As they pulled up at a crumbling farmhouse, she looked on at the place she would be calling home for the next three months. There were no street lights, and the last time they’d passed another house was about 10km back. She looked down at her phone: no reception.

‘Is there Wi-Fi?’ she asked the man sitting next to her, a sheep farmer, who was to be her boss. ‘None,’ he replied abruptly.

He showed her to her room and she shut the door behind her, locking it tightly. For the next six days, she worked on the farm, herding sheep and marking lambs. There were supposed to be other backpackers sharing the house – he’d told her there would be – but she was all alone.