The Great Australian Outback

From Silverton, a flat and limitless desert stretched as far as the eye could see. This was Mundi Mundi, a place where one could actually see the curvature of the earth.

G'day mate... ya on ya pat?... Good on ya!!  Pull a tennie from the esky and join us for some tucker. Ya good on the fang? Take a squiz at the snags on the barbie, no salad pushers here mate. Let me translate the above greeting from Aussie speak to Yankee English.

"Good evening, are you traveling alone? (Aussies like things that rhyme:  "pat," as in Pat Malone, rhymes with alone. So if you are "on your Pat," then you are traveling alone. Make sense? Ok, not really. But when you pass through the equatorial zones heading for the land down under, the world takes on a different look. I digress:  "Grab a beer from the ice chest and join us for dinner. Are you hungry? Check out the hot dogs on the BBQ, no vegetarians here ay? Ahhhh, Australia. It is a place everyone should experience:

Michael and Joanne McCulkin, owners of Tri-State Tours who know the Outback like the backs of their hands have won numerous tourism awards and kept our motley crew on track and well fed.

Australians' have a perpetually humorous fashion and a different word for everything.

Tucked in between the Coral and Tasman Seas to the east, and the Southern and Indian Oceans to the west, Australia sat alone, "on it's Pat," as an island for centuries after the Americas were discovered. It wasn't until Englishman Capitan James Cook sailed his crippled ship, The Endeavor, into a safe harbor that became Cooktown in 1770 that Australia was claimed by a European entity. In 1787, England dispatched the First Fleet in an attempt to colonize their new acquisition. Early the following spring, a flotilla of eleven ships loaded with livestock, seed, solders and 736 convicts landed near what is now Sidney on the continent's southeast coast. With an overburdened prison system, England deemed this remote southern island to be the perfect depository for the unwanted dregs of its society. The result was a two-fold win for Britain,

alleviating the prison issue and colonizing their Empire's newest acquisition.

It was a prison with 10,000-mile thick walls, only the shark-infested waters of the Coral Sea separated Australia's newest residents from freedom. On completion of a sentence of hard labor, if they survived, convicts were given the same rights as solders and the Crown's respectable colonists: twenty hectares of land. At that point, freedom lay on the western horizon, beyond the black swamp. As sentences were carried out, freed ex-cons took advantage of the opportunities of this new and wild land. It is from these arduous and humble beginnings that Australia's citizenry developed its rough-and-ready, no-nonsense disposition.
By the 1850's settlers had moved west towards

The red sands of the Simpson Desert seam to stretch out to eternity. The Simpson is known for its north-south running sand dunes. While no more that one hundred feet tall, you would ascend over fourteen hundred of them in a full crossing of the desert.

the current port city of Melbourne, and then north into the continent's great red center, the Outback. With the vast interior uncharted, these same hearty individuals homesteaded tracks of land and laid the foundation for what would become Australia's leading exports, textile quality wool and beef. The overland routes that were established became the economic arteries for the country. They were used to transport supplies in, and cattle and wool out. This past May, we joined up with the crew from ARB to retrace the wagon tracks and footprints of those intrepid Aussies of yesteryear.