Mind-numbing and mesmerising: The most beautiful place in the world

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 the challenge of concentrating on a dirt track, ready to swerve around the next pothole or lizard.

Where else but the outback would you ever feel such anticipation at the approach of a roadhouse, pub or hostelry? Pause at such places and I invariably find unexpected and enjoyable things: a bowl of kangaroo-tail soup or goat curry, a bearded miner singing Jimmy Barnes covers, or ceilings festooned in backpackers’ underwear or foreign banknotes.

I love outback petrol stops where dusty dogs pant, pink tongues twitching. The petrol seems to evaporate before it makes it into the tank. Extras from Game of Thrones man the tills. Even mere laybys are a pleasure. I find easy camaraderie with retirees in RVs, hippies in clapped-out Kombis, or working-holiday Koreans looking dazed. I swap travel tips and mugs of tea, and then on I drive.

Somehow the outback’s big empty nothingness puts all my trivial worries into perspective. It gives me space to think of nothing, 500 kilometres from the ring of a mobile phone and out of reach of emails. I can’t be bothered about things when, all around me, gorges millions of years old are crumbling into dust.

Outback drives are very calming. Sometimes I pull up by the roadside and turn off the engine and just sit there. There’s nobody else in sight, and maybe not even a single sign of human existence. The silence is spectacular. I feel like I own the entire universe. Or maybe, more unnervingly, that I’m alone in the entire universe.

Driving in the outback is an act of defiance. My eyes scrunch up but my soul expands. This country of enormous emptiness is awesome. The monotony makes the few things that stand out all the better. Ancient boabs or bonsaied gum trees. Shattered peaks. Fleeing emus. A tumbledown homestead or stark chimneystack where once there was a sheep station.

By late afternoon I always know why I’ve endured the glare and heat and corrugations. As the sinking sun combusts it stripes rocks millions of years old in glowing colour, and I find myself in the most beautiful place in the world.