Thump! My head crashed against the rear side window. Wiping the saliva from my cheeks and totally disorientated, I remembered I was still in the car. My body was now awake, but my legs were still asleep.

“That’s alright I thought, I don’t need them just yet. They’ll come in handy if we ever stop!”

We’d travelled for most of the day, three students and a scientist in a four-wheel drive packed with food and equipment. Then we joined the Mitchell Highway somewhere between Nyngan and Bourke in the Australian outback.

The landscape makes you want to break into verse, like a Henry Lawson poem, or even start humming a few bars of a John Williamson song. Perhaps it’s the long hours in the car, head bumping and rattling on the rear-side window? Perhaps it’s the open space, and mesmerising scenery? Our destination was somewhere in the distance, far over the horizon on the border with Queensland, near the historic Royal Mail Hotel at Hungerford.

Ironic really, I mean to have this vast expanse of flat earth, and then to view it all, jam-packed into an overloaded vehicle.

We paused briefly in Bourke, a town very suitable for just that. A stretch of the legs and back onto the road. We now left the endless bitumen and joined the jarring red tracks again. They form a disturbingly vast network of crimson dust lines, seemingly placed there to separate, and add contrast to the mulga.

I started to fall asleep, my head still rattling against the window. As I dosed I caught a glimpse of an emu, prancing across the plain. Their feathers hang like a grass skirt, swaying as they run. They’re an archaic looking animal -- something that time forgot. Katie, in the front seat, made a comment, but the enthusiastic yelp of the scientist drowned her out.

“There, look at that, damn fools, they always do that, what a stupid bird.” I looked out the front window, we were hurtling along, and there in front of us was an emu.

As you would expect, it was running, grass skirt swaying and head turning around -- first to the left, then to the right. Then it charged directly into the barbed top wire of a boundary fence running parallel to the road, and proceeded to continue in the same direction as our vehicle, rapidly grating its neck feathers off.

Now this certainly jolted me from my stupefied trance. Feathers flying everywhere, I thought, “for Christ’s sake, get off the fence!” I was trapped between laughter and sorrow for the damn animal.

When we finally passed the bird it was still standing, although that’s all it was doing, no grass skirt swaying now. In fact I don’t think you could call it a grass skirt any more – it all looked rather plucked.

This bird is apparently not alone in this act of self-mutilation. “They all do it,” said the scientist. “Gosh,” I thought, “you are a wealth of information”. Ever ready with a lesson on the local nature, all his teachings had become a little overwhelming, until now.

As I learnt, they either use the grate the neck method, or another technique called the tuck and roll. This involves charging at the fence in the same manner as before, except this time, it’s bend the knees, tuck in those gangly legs, and roll straight through the fence. Only problem is, if you get it wrong, things get really bad. If the bird misjudges the approach, and makes a meal of it, more often than not one of those long legs gets tangled in the fence.

That explains all the stray legs, hanging in the fences like monuments. Or perhaps more like a lost property rack, awaiting the owner’s return.

I’m not sure if the leg comes off during the accident, or whether it’s the only thing the hungry carnivores couldn’t reach. Perhaps the locals put them there to fool and amaze silly tourists such as myself? Ah, the joy of learning -- science certainly is fascinating!

My eyes fell heavily closed and I think I must have been dribbling again. I just couldn’t get the leg on the fence out of my mind. I mean all the beautiful sunsets and sunrises, the amazing lakes at dusk, just couldn’t compete with this image. “Those poor birds, their legs … jeez, it’s so weird.”

Then, bang! We hit another bump. ‘That damn rear-side window! I’ve got to swap seats!’