Aussie characters as colorful as the landscape

A law of the Outback: Eccentrics attract.

On the road to Tibooburra, the winds are kicking up dust devils. Willy-willies, the Aussies call them. If they're “knock-'em-down winds” from the south, Mike says, they could bring rain and relieve Australia's interminable drought. He turns the Land Rover around to look at a salt pan, and we get out. Standing comically small and alone, engulfed by the sky, we hear only one earthly sound: the GPS cooing insistently, “Perform a U-turn when possible.”

Tibooburra, like most of these Outback settlements, came to life in the late 1800s, when Australia was flexing its nationhood, and miners and ranchers were probing the interior. Today, its landmarks are two small grocery stores with gas pumps, the Werks 'n' Jerks hardware store, the Corner Drive-In movie with eight rusty chairs upended poetically around two headless speaker posts, a pub referred to as the Two-Story Hotel because it's the only such architectural marvel around, and the 1883 Family Hotel, where we're staying. A park features a large overturned boat — an artist's take on Charles Sturt's 1845 expedition to find the inland sea, a search that ended near here and was 130 million years late.

We walk under some rare shade trees and into the Family Hotel's front bar. “When's happy hour?”

“Every hour on the hour,” assures the publican, Pete. He recommends the Coopers Pale Ale. “It's real beer,” he says, rolling it along the bar to stir up the sediment.

I feel at home because Pete Petrovich reminds me — the smoker's rasp, the beer belly, the thinning hair — of my favorite uncle, the one who had a bar in his basement. I take a stool next to a rangy leatherneck who's wearing the biggest, baddest cowboy hat I've ever seen. I introduce myself, my pen poised to record his rugged wisdom. But his ’Strylian twang is so boinky I can't make out a word.

Pete tells us our rooms are across the road. “You've got satellite TV but just one channel. Whatever I decide to watch in here is what you're watching in the rooms.”

The curly-haired barmaid, Karen, asks me, “How would you like to see some Tibooburra gold?” Her husband is a prospector. I'm playing journalist: “How many people live here?” “A hundred,” she says. “When everybody's at home.”

The Family Hotel is known for its outrageous murals, which seem to be an Outback specialty resulting from the excesses of solitude and time. Stretching across two walls of the bar is a bacchanalian romp painted in 1970 by the Melbourne portrait and landscape artist Clifton Pugh. He added some personal touches: a devil who looked like his ex-wife's boyfriend, and two nudes who turned out to be the pub owner's daughters. Other fanciful murals by recognized artists grace the hotel's back rooms, all painted for free, or leastwise for beer. A Sydney disc jockey came out here recently and declared one mural worth a million dollars. Pete laughs. “I told him I'd throw in the pub for that.”

Pete slides a couple of polished pebbles across the bar: Tibooburra gold. After 12 years, he says, he's ready to sell the pub and re-up for civilization. When he came here, he had a wife — “a city-born gal” — but she's gone. A barkeep in Broken Hill suggested, “She done too many good dances on the bar.” Pete, instead, is reflective: “It was more the pub than the isolation, working together every day. You can spend too much time with someone you love.”

After dark, at a table outside, we travelers work through some ornery rib eye steaks, a warm breeze playing restless with the trees. Later I check out the Two-Story Hotel. It's a Friday night, the backbeat coming from a car parked outside. I get ensnared by some locals who are buying Tibooburra Shooters. A big woman flings her arms around my neck, and I look for the door. When she turns to put a headlock on a guy with a Mohawk, I duck out. That's when I realize: It's raining.

It rains all night, mates, and in the morning the road signs at both ends of town announce that every way out of here is closed. We are pining to drive up to Innamincka (with its Outamincka Bar), then to the legendary Birdsville Hotel, and down the Birdsville Track to Mungarannie. But the routes up north, we're told, will be flooded for days. If we get caught trying, the fine could be $1,000 a wheel. Mike and I drive out of town for a few miles, cautiously. A truck comes by with its whole front end ripped off — the bumper, the grille. Mike murmurs, “He went into a washout too fast.”

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel Anna Creek Station, the world's largest working cattle farm, includes the town of William Creek (population 16).

So this is the back hand of fate, to be marooned by the rising waters of a new inland sea: to be stuck in Tibooburra with the Birdsville blues again.

Back in my ’50s-style motel room, I flip on the TV — an infomercial for a workout machine. Why is Pete watching that crap? I walk across the road and ask him if we can keep our rooms. He points out that nobody could get here to claim them. “You can't leave tonight anyway,” he says, “because we're havin' pea-and-ham soup. I make it myself!”

And what a cozy night it ends up being, for at the Family Hotel we are already regulars. Skinny Karen greets me with a Coopers: “There you go, darlin’.” I say hello to Tony, the guy from Victoria who's considering buying the hotel; to Wayne and Steven, the gas-field workers we met out scouting the roads; to Alex, the Mohawk in the headlock last night, who teaches for the Outback School of the Air; to Kate, the Two-Story's bartender; to Robert, the pipeline repairman who looks like a wrestler; to the cowboy whose palaver I cannot comprehend; to the grizzled mute who sits alone; and to Uncle Pete, who was right about the pea soup.

Outside, the sky is all stars again. A guitar appears and we sing: old American folk rock, mostly. Way out here, they know all the words. We also sing “Waltzing Matilda” and “A Bushman Can't Survive on City Lights,” and now I'm getting sentimental. I'm so lucky we had to stay another night in Tibooburra. This fellowship of outcasts, this instant community, this fleeting camaraderie in the dead center of nowhere, is what I came here hungering for.

Next morning we watch a worker in a black cowboy hat flip the giant road sign from closed to open. “An Outback traffic light,” Mike muses. “It changes every two days.”

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel The Painted Hills — the result of lively tectonics, water currents, and mineral oxidation — is a recent discovery whose exact location is a fiercely guarded secret.

We head west instead of north, and for the next 400 miles on washboard and packed-sand roads, there is only one place to stop for gas or food or anything other than flies in your face. That is Cameron Corner (population 2). This pub has truckers' caps and $5 bills thumbtacked to the ceiling. A window is patched with the welcoming sign HELLO, ONIONHEAD. Proprietor Bill Mitchell, once a trucker himself, looks crazily happy to be here as he takes our orders and talks up his new golf course. I look out the window. What golf course?

Cameron Corner is located where three of Australia's six mainland states — South Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland — come together. Also in play is the Wild Dog Fence, which is meant to keep dingoes away from sheep and which crosses Australia, incredibly, for 3,500 miles. So in his spare time (which must be most of the time), Bill has laid out a unique nine-hole, par-three course: “There's three holes in each state. You have to shoot over the dog fence twice, and over the national park fence once.”

Bill and his missus, Chris, who moved here a year ago to double the population, sit with us. I ask, looking out the window again, “Do you landscape the fairways?”

“It's just as it is,” he says, like some toothless guru. He adds that the “browns fee” includes clubs, balls, and bottled beer (buried in a cooler at hole five).

I challenge the club pro to a one-hole match, and we make like it's the Masters. But Bill is a clown, a one-man riot — stomping on my ball, whacking the flagstick with his eight-iron when he misses a “putt.” The cup is the cap end of a gas-field drill head, the pin a length of PVC. He wins the match and gives me a ball imprinted with the promise of more tomfoolery to come: the Three-State Open.

Then off we go into the wild beige yonder, driving across sand hills that give us roller-coaster rides and out onto the flatlands again, without a pretense of vegetation. As in a dream, we come upon the bullet-holed skeleton of a London double-decker bus squatting beneath the withered arms of an abandoned windmill. There are no further clues, so we drive on, searching for a rumored shortcut marked by a car door. There's no one to ask for directions except two roos up on their hind legs, duking it out. We drive through boulder fields, beside white dunes tufted with shrubs, across a gibber plain of polished stones, past the haggard humps of Mount Hopeless.

What is there to see out here? No one dares to sleep.

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