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Words by Mark Lowry Photography by Lachlan Payne

It’s well past midnight and the stars have just emerged from behind dark rain clouds. Laying here in my swag I’m feelin’ warm and cosy… but most of all safe. You see I’m two-feet off the ground.

Looking out through the safety of the midge proof netting, I can see Mark Allen crawling into his swag … two feet off the ground and Grimbo’s not far away…also two feet off the ground. In the distance I can hear the low rumble of thunder… or is that Roothy’s snoring? I’m sure he’s also a few feet of the ground, in fact we all are.

So, you may wonder why we’re all a few feet of the ground. To see eight blokes with their swags rolled out on top of picnic tables and in the back of utes must be quite a strange sight, but the answer is six inches long, red and yellow with a hundred legs and a nasty set of nippers… the Minniyarra or Desert centipede.

We’re at Chambers Pillar on the last night of a very eventful Ute of the Year test. The glow of our camp lights has brought out an array of small creatures, all looking for a feed on the bugs spawned of the rains that passed through just on sunset.

I had a nasty experience once in the Flinders when our camp was hit by rain. We all ended up in bed early, and I’d previously reminded the missus to make sure the fly net on the tent was kept zipped shut as the moths were out and would get inside after the fluoro lamp. Halfway through the night I was stirred awake by something fluttering down the other end of the tent. One of those dammed moths had got in so I kicked at it and it stopped moving. Some time later I awoke again as it crawled up the inside of my thigh. Thoroughly annoyed and half asleep, I reached in with one hand and grabbed the moth and threw it across the tent.

It hit the wall of the tent with a thud…a rather loud thud! I thought about it for a moment then jumped out of bed flicking on the torch, just in time to see the most disgustingly enormous centipede I’d ever seen crawling into my cloths bag. After belting it with the heel of my Blundstone a dozen times I was happy it was close to dead and threw it out of the tent.

If you get bitten by one of these, you’ll certainly know it... and you’ll know it for some time. We all get blasé about not zipping up our tents or swags, but anywhere you have a light makes for a pretty plentiful supply of tasty bugs for a Minniyarra hunt. And it’s not just centipedes you need to watch out for. Last thing you need is a ‘Joe Blake’ taking a nap in your sleeping bag... In short, zip it!

So, as we sat around Desleigh’s chuck wagon at the Chamber’s camp ground devouring another top meal, a spider the size of my hand runs between my legs. Now I don’t like spiders either so the first instinct is to squish it, but one of the boys catches it in a jar and relocates it to the other side of the camp. But the centipedes are too quick to catch. By the end of the night the tally is over ten dead centipedes at the hand (or foot) of Mark Allen’s and my Blundstone’s... and after I recount my nasty experience, none of us are feeling too comfortable about rolling our swags out on the ground.

So, what do you do when the nasties come out to play? Well for the flies, mozzies and midges you can’t go past a can of Bushman’s Deet repellent. But when the creepy crawlies are out my best advice is to get up high and as high as you can, and keep everything zipped up and sealed. Oh, and don’t forget to put your boots inside too!