Inland is different. The backpackers are gone, replaced by Australian tourists in camper cans. Leathery, and surprisingly expensive, cowboy hats protect sun-burned faces and flannel-covered shoulders from the scorching midday heat. Houses have reduced from several-floor apartment buildings to one-storey wood- and tin structures, easy to build, easy to move and easy to lose in a flood, storm or fire. Wide and empty streets get dustier towards the west, where the cooling wind blows sand from between a sea of shrubs and pitiful looking, Eucalyptus-dominated, forests onto the endlessly long, sometimes poorly paved roads, an illusory reminder of men’s conquest over the outback. The remoteness of the bush stretches on as far as the eye can see, sometimes reaching the horizon where the setting sun turns the clear blue sky into a burning red spectacle of unseen dimensions, at least for city children. The magic of dust in the air. The flatness of the country gets interrupted occasionally by the most beautiful rock formations, reddish brown, all of them unique in their own way. When the excitement of being on the road turns into dull boredom, the creative minds use the occasional break to leave their mark by dressing up abandoned termite mounds, erected by an inexhaustible army, meters tall, resembling unshaped clay solders watching over the wilderness and their inhabitants. With the decreasing number of airports and train stations the trucks grow longer, up to three trailers, called road-trains, a relic of a time when governmental safety restrictions were laughed upon, transporting increasingly live freight. Horses, sheep and cattle; this is the stockmen’s land. They even got a Hall of Fame for their legends, the heroes that single-handedly drove thousands of livestock over hundred, sometimes, thousands of kilometres of uninhabitable land, an adventurous profession that young Australian boys dreamed about, the cowboys of the down-under. As with so many children stories, those too were based on a harsh reality, one where both animals as well as humans died regularly, and life depended mostly on lucky weather conditions and an intimate knowledge of the land. But nowadays it’s a success story, at least for a few white men and the cattle, from a purely reproduction-based standpoint, of course. Cows and sheep are not native to Australia. White settlers brought them over, either completely ignoring or subjugating the local population by forcing them to abandon their ways of living. Today, virtually every blade of grass belongs to one or the other homestead, the managing centre of a cattle farm, totalling almost as many cattle as there are Australian residents, divided between dairy production and meat, which is exported and distinguished all around the globe. Just one other large animal can trump these numbers. The emblem of this country has made the outback its bitch. Its sandy-coloured fur blending in perfectly, its strong hind legs catapulting it over the thorny ground thicket in impressively large jumps and its general fearfulness keeping them far away from the humans, still prevailing cause of death. If the classic movie ‘Smiley’ taught me anything, it’s that they even kept kangaroos as pets (do they still?); and that a preteen’s wish for a gun was not as absurd as it may sound nowadays. It is a wild country indeed, large and rough; crime stats for the outback towns are usually not very encouraging. People live poorly, lacking opportunity and support from the state, or are so isolated that The Royal Flying Doctor and the School of The Air, an airborne medical service and remote school for kids, respectively, are essential to keep them connected to the rest of civilisation. Racism is a big issue, or so I hear. With the majority of people living next to the coast, even low numbers of indigenous are immediately visible; the oppression of their culture and tribal ways of life forced them into the city lower classes, living in subsidized hostel rooms and working in the mines. Mostly coal, Australia’s clean energy efforts are still in baby shoes, but also gold, diamonds and copper. One of the most beautiful lakes next to prototypical town Mount Isa is actually an abandoned uranium mine, so no swimming in here.

With all its challenges and difficulties, the people in the outback have one thing in common; they are exceptionally friendly.