Australia's Outback - A Wide, Brown Land

Nobody verily knows where the Australian Outback begins or ends. It is a state of mind, a mystic land of miners and cowboys (known as "ringers") and wandering aborigines and tellers of tall stories.

A journey straight through the Outback quickly reveals why most Australians rarely investment far from the mammal comforts of the coast.

Sears Big And Tall

The great southern land has its share of corporal beauty, including lush tropical rainforest, alpine snowfields, neat pastures, coral atolls, endless sandy beaches, and rolling plains.

But all that is relatively close to civilisation. Beyond broods a primeval, eroded landscape of ochre plains and searing desert, broken here and there by gaunt ribs of granite, basalt and ironstone. Throwing it all into stark relief is the great light, pitiless in its intensity.

Much of Australia's 7.6 million quadrilateral kilometres are empty of humans, one-third is desert. Hindered by the harshness of climate and terrain, man has nibbled at the edges where there is dependable rainfall and intermittent fertility.

A year in Mount Isa, a raw copper-mining town in the red rock desert of northwest Queensland, gave me an insight into some of the hardships faced by Outback dwellers.

Day-time temperatures often hovered nearby 45 degrees C and fine red dust permeated houses, eyes and food. One night at the open-air cinema the performance was abandoned when a dust-storm blotted out the screen.

However, anyone with a taste for adventure will find the Outback fascinating. Just load up your camper-van and take off. These days many of the inland highways are even paved.

The interior, with its suggestions of rugged individualism, courage against all odds, pioneer struggles, plays an prominent part in the Australian consciousness.

Dorothea Mackellar reflected that in her poem My Country: "I love her far horizons, I love her jewel sea, Her beauty and her terror, The wide brown land for me."

If you are tired of crowds and cities and verily want to "get away from it all", this is the place. Maps may propose that the interior is dotted with settlements. But those exotic place-names, Mooloogool or Christmas Creek, often indicate no more than a cattle hub (as Australians call ranches) or a tin-roofed pub.

Bumping along dusty Outback roads, you can travel for a day without meeting other vehicle. On one trip, floodwater forced me to make a detour of 1,300 kilometres, all over dirt tracks.

No traffic jams here, just a wilderness of spikey scrub, eucalyptus trees and dry creek-beds, brolgas (ostrich-like birds) ambling into the heat-haze, galahs (parrots) flying up in bursts of grey and pink, a kangaroo lolloping over the track.

So vast are some of the Outback cattle stations that ringers working the boundary zones may never see the homestead. Until it was split up, Victoria River Downs in the Northern Territory spread over 31,000 quadrilateral kilometres, the size of Belgium.

These days visitors fly in just to see the sun set over the big sight of the Outback, Ayers Rock, a 348-metre-high monolith jutting from the surrounding desert. You can drive there too - it's a mere 450 kilometres away from the nearest town, Alice Springs.

As an Aussie friend never tired of telling me: "She's a big country, sport."

Australia's Outback - A Wide, Brown Land