Never mind the dust and mind-numbing distances: there’s something about driving the outback that feels like conquering the universe. Beyond my windscreen, outback Australia unfolds like a Mobius strip: the more I drive, the more I seem to see the same scenery repeated: a battered orange landscape stuck with great clumps of grey spinifex like the last remaining tufts of hair on a bald man’s head. The only signs of progress are my falling petrol gauge, increasingly squinty eyes, and the red dust that billows behind my car, signalling I must be travelling onwards.
The road goes ever on. Credit: Istock Outback drives are mostly flat, straight and featureless, unless you count rocks and road kill as passing attractions – and on an outback drive, for want of anything else, I do. And yet I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Where there’s red dust, there’s wanderlust, as far as I’m concerned. I love road-tripping in the outback. The sheer immensity and monotony are curiously mesmerising.
The Methuselah surface of our ancient land is dried up and wizened, its bony rocks brittle and splintered. What were once massive alpine chains are now humps under a vast blue sky, across which my four-wheel drive moves with the insignificance of a beetle. Credit: Jamie Brown Outback driving humbles me.
Besides, I simply love the sweaty heat of it all. I love the dust that seeps into every crevice of the car, the groaning air-conditioner, the steering wheel hot under my fingertips. I love .
