Sylvie

At first glance, you may think that you have landed on the moon or perhaps that you have entered the film set of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi. In fact, you have arrived in Outback Australia, a place where the term ‘wide open space’ is taken to a whole new level. In the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town that I called home for 10 months, clambering up Whiskey Hill, the local landmark, left me in awe of just how a land could be so flat, dry and well… empty.

It didn’t take long before I became acquainted with the colourful characters who called Kynuna home as well as those who lived elsewhere but frequented the Blue Heeler pub as an escape from the dusty heat of the highway. There was the 82 year old who drank his rum with a dash of beer and offered to lend me his blue movies the first time I met him; the gruff truck driver named Bingo who drove those lonely roads carting cattle by day and chasing women by night; the stock agent from the next town over who wore his shirt tucked into his blue denim jeans, Akubra hat on his head, and threw the term ‘fair dinkum’ into conversation like I knew what it meant; and the helicopter pilot who lived a couple of hundred kilometres ‘that-a-way’ who parked his chopper on the common across the road from the pub, half-pissed already. Legend has it he'd put down three choppers and walked out alive each time.

As one month merged into the next, the backpackers moved on and the locals became family. I fell in love with the barren outback landscape in all of its immensity. The sunrises had me up before dawn and the night sky took my breath away. Hundreds of kilometres from the nearest café or movie theatre, I found myself sitting out the front of the pub, ice cold beer in hand, watching the road trains roll by and yarning with locals and travellers alike. Evenings were spent dancing to country classics followed by the occasional moonlit skinny dip in a spring fed by the scorching waters of the Artesian Basin.

Somewhere in the months between my arrival and the day I said goodbye, I realised that the question was no longer “how did I end up here?” but rather, “when will I be back?”. Having arrived with a naïve idea of what to expect from the outback, something about that place changed me. I came to realise that life isn’t about those comforts we take for granted but rather, clichéd as it may be, it really is the people who surround us that matter. These people can be found anywhere and all of them have a story, if you only care to ask.