This place of raw, ragged beauty will percolate into your soul

A drive through the outback provides hours of featureless monotony and daunting immensity. Orange dust coats your car and makes your air-conditioner grumble. You squint against silvery saltbush. Mulga stands twisted as bonsai, and occasional bewildered birds flap across the sky.

The landscape splinters into the hazy distance. The hip bones of old mountains lie exposed. Heat and sky press down as if about to squash your car like a soft-drink can. But only after enduring dust and boredom is the beauty of the outback revealed and made more wondrous.

Out of nothing wild beauty appears. Rucked orange folds add a third dimension to the ironed-flat landscape. Giant rock formations emerge, twisted with mineral bands of red and purple. Orange gorges hide surprising pockets of green where waterfalls tumble into fern-lined pools.

Credit: Illustration: Jamie Brown

You’ll need a four-wheel drive, survival savvy and abundant time, but there are lots of things to love about outback driving: feathery mulla-mulla flowers, Gaudi-esque termite mounds, tombstones lopsided under lonely gum trees, pink-tongued dogs lolling at petrol stations. Cockatoos cackle in the blue sky above gnarly gum trees.

Take the time to pause at seemingly uninteresting roadside stops and meet eccentric, entertaining people: a Mad Max, Priscilla, barefoot poet, opal prospector, grey nomad or Russell Coight. One of the pleasures of the outback is that you journey beyond the mainstream: get talking for wonderfully unexpected encounters.

Bunyeroo Lookout in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia.Credit: Adam Bruzzone/SATC

This is a journey through time as well as space. You can drive from some of the world’s youngest cities into the ancient Aboriginal heartland. Gorges reveal fossils of creatures once under the sea. Indigenous rock art is a haunting message from thousands of years ago. Abandoned homesteads in Waltzing Matilda landscapes speak of a pioneering spirit.

Let our continent’s raw, ragged beauty percolate into your soul. Revel in the silence, and declutter your mind. The immensity of the outback reminds you of your total insignificance. You can let it frighten you, or be liberated.

Drive across a vast landscape tens of millions of years in the making and petty concerns about work and daily life dwindle to irrelevance. The outback gives you space to re-energise, and time to reflect on your life.

Resist the modern urge to rush, and the need to see things. The outback isn’t a sight but an experience. Move on only when the spirit takes you. Or don’t. You won’t see more explosive sunsets or more extravagant stars anywhere else in the world, so why not linger another day?