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The Beginning (or Maybe End) of the World I left pleasant Tennant Creek early the next morning and, a bit north of town, I turned off the Stuart Highway and headed east onto the Barkly Highway. The Stuart Highway – the only paved road within a thousand miles on either side of it – had been my companion for the past 10 days, guiding me safely across the heart of the Australian Outback, and I was a bit saddened to leave it.
I drove the rest of the day heading east on the Barkly Highway, while passing just a handful of cars and trucks, then I pulled in that evening to the mining town of Mt. Isa. The town sits just inside the Queensland border and is the site of one of the richest copper, silver, lead and zinc mines in the world. With a population of about 25,000, Mt. Isa is an oasis of civilization on the edge of the Outback.
The American travel writer, Bill Bryson, wrote about the town of Mt. Isa a few years ago in his wonderfully funny and insightful book about Australia called "In a Sunburned Country." Bill, however, was going in the opposite direction, heading west into the heart of the Outback instead of slowly emerging from it, like I was as I drove east. Bill compared Mt. Isa to the end of the world as he traveled towards the desolate Outback, the same thoughts that I had about Port Augusta a few weeks ago, near Adelaide, as I headed north into the empty desert. I really did feel like I was leaving civilization at Port Augusta, so it was to nice to know that others have felt the same way as they've ventured into this area, one of the most desolate places in the world.
There isn't much else to say about Mt. Isa, so I won't. No, actually it's not that bad of a town. The folks seemed pretty nice and the fish & chips dinner I had here, hundreds of miles from the coast, was surprisingly delicious.
There's a rhetorical saying in the U.S. that goes something like, "Have you ever seen anyone wash their rental car?" The implication, of course, is that if you don't actually own something, you don't feel attached to it or responsible for it. Well, I've been driving my trusty Hertz Camry for a month now and I feel both responsible and attached to it. So the next morning, hot and glorious it was, I did indeed give my rental car a much-needed washing. Shortly afterwards, I filled its tank at a BP and left Mt. Isa, continuing my eastward journey across the empty Outback.
Above left: The Barkly Homestead roadhouse near Three Ways. As you can tell from my website, stopping at each semi-occasional roadhouse is among the few highlights of driving across the desolate Outback. There were guys in the bar here drinking beer –- at 10 o'clock in the morning. Above right: This sign used to say "460 km." But these days it's "only" 260 km to the next gas station.
Above left: The grassy plains of the Northern Territory reminded me of Kansas. Above center: Entering Queensland... Above right: ... where the Barkly Highway quickly deteriorated. It's no fun meeting a road train on a single lane of blacktop.
Above left: One of the millions of termite mounds in northern Queensland. Above center: "Beautiful" downtown Mt. Isa, a mining town with about 25,000 people in the proverbial middle of nowhere (and my home for an evening). The smokestack is from the lead smelter and, at one time, was the tallest smokestack in the world. Above right: A memorial to Burke and Wills, the "Lewis and Clark" of Australia. They passed through this remote area in 1861 and died shortly afterwards. I was hoping to have a better fate.
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