The idea started, as most of mine do, with Google Maps. I’d been zooming into the blank stretch where NSW nears South Australia. I mapped a loose route and now all I needed was someone with an open calendar to join me on this adventure. Coincidentally, a neighbouring friend mentioned she was headed out that way and wanted a companion. She had a four-wheel drive and didn’t mind driving the long stretches. We packed cameras, film, sleeping bags, a jerry can, hiking boots and wide-brim hats. Thirteen days. Roughly 4,000 kilometres and a wide open plan.
BLUE MOUNTAINS
Blackheath first. Within two hours of leaving Sydney, we were staring into the Grose Valley from Evans Lookout — looking through the trees and finding that ‘blue’ mountains look. We’re staying the night at Chalets at Blackheath, in one of four standalone cabins — understated, private, a little luxury before leaving civilization completely.
That afternoon we dropped into the Grand Canyon track as far as the first waterfall for a refreshing swim — being mindful not to step on the orange yabbies sitting still in the shallows, canyon walls closing in overhead — then came back up in time for sunset to see the golden light shining on the sandstone cliffs as the kookaburras laugh in the trees above. We had dinner in town at Ateş – lots of seasonal share plates between us; I’d say Mediterranean-Australian. The town gets pretty quiet after dark, so we settle back at Chalets with Hominy biscuits we’d picked up from Katoomba earlier — the best choc-hazelnut biscuits in town (their pear and ginger cake also exceptional) with a cup of tea on the verandah under a starry night sky.
If we’d stayed a little longer, we would have gone back into Blackheath during the day and soaked at the Japanese inspired Aqua Inis Bathhouse, had a natural wine with home made gnocchi at Frankie and Mo’s and dug through antique treasures at Victory Theatre — or seen a movie at Mount Vic Flicks. But alas, we’ve only just begun our journey and we have so much further to go. Up early, we enjoy the last of the comforts at Chalets with fresh pastry from Black Cockatoo, avocado on toast with Meredith’s goat cheese and green juice.
WAGGA WAGGA + MILDURA
The plains opened, the horizon went flat, the wool trucks appeared and we learned their left-blinker code — it means the road ahead is clear, safe to pass on the one-lane highway ahead.
A few motel stops to break up the driving; first up was Wagga Wagga. We’d heard great things about the art gallery — but arrived just as it was closing. On the road out, we found a citrus truck running on the honesty box system and a sign for Varapodio Estate, an award-winning cold-press olive oil producer in the Riverina. I always like to stop for locally grown produce. A bottle of oil, a box of mandarins, back on the road. We fill the jerry can in Mildura. It’s 3.5 hours from there to Mungo and it’s the last petrol station before Mungo.
MUNGO NATIONAL PARK
Google Maps shows a lake; however, there is no lake. The water has been gone for 15,000 years. What remains is a dried lake bed the colour of pale clay, ringed by the lunettes — great crescent dunes that go amber and white as the sun drops.
We were the only guests at the Mungo Shearers Quarters — basic corrugated iron cabins beside the visitor centre, two single beds, a heater, shared bathrooms, a communal kitchen. We brought our own pillows, bedding, towels and sleeping bag. It felt appropriate, the modesty of it, given what was outside.
That evening, we’d booked a sunset tour with the local on-site ranger. The only way to access the lakebed — you can’t wander freely — with eight campers joining us from nearby. The ranger walked us out across the ancient lake floor with the ease of someone who has done this a thousand times, picking up middens and fossilised bones, and explaining more about the history of the place. Mungo Lady was found here in 1968: 42,000 years old, the oldest human remains in Australia and earliest evidence of cremation anywhere in the world. In 2003, 460 fossilised footprints were found in the clay pan nearby — the largest collection on earth. We stood there as the light turned gold and disappeared into the darkness. The clearest sky filled with stars, me wishing I’d brought my tripod for some nighttime photography. We returned back to the Shearers Quarters to make dinner, spaghetti with tomato sauce topped with smoked trout from the snowy region.
The next day we took the self-drive tour around the national park, spotting emus dissolving into the low scrub, before heading to the Walls of China viewing platform for sunset. This is the moment we’d both been building toward — and neither of us had thought carefully enough about scale. We’d seen so many photographs online that somewhere along the way we’d constructed a Bryce Canyon in our heads. Towering. Dramatic. The reality, viewed from the platform, was a lot smaller. Despite their size, seeing them within the landscape is magnificent and it’s hard not to start imagining what the lake would have looked like filled to the brim, the source of life to so many communities all those years ago.
BROKEN HILL
There’s a road connecting Mungo to Broken Hill, but the ranger told us it was better to go the long way. We backtracked to Mildura, stopped at Pomona by the river for lunch, and made it to Broken Hill with enough light left for the Living Desert sculptures at sunset.
Twelve sandstone figures on top of Sundown Hill, carved in 1993 by artists from Syria, Georgia, Mexico, Bathurst Island and across Australia — 53 tonnes of stone trucked in from Wilcannia, chiselled over six weeks, left there for good. At dusk, with the light going orange across the plains in every direction, they look less like sculptures and more like something the landscape produced itself.
MUTAWINTJI NATIONAL PARK
We weren’t going to be back this way anytime soon, so we drove the extra hours. Mutawintji is 130 kilometres northeast of Broken Hill on a mostly unsealed road — give it two hours. The Byngnano Range appears gradually out of the scrub, red sandstone gorges opening where you expected only flat ground. In 1998 it became the first national park in NSW handed back to its traditional owners.
We met the national park ranger on his morning patrol and he pointed us toward the 6km Mutawintji Gorge walk. Self-guided, easy walk to the most picturesque gorge. A sandy dried riverbed, deep terracotta coloured earth, river red gums catching the light. We reached the two watering holes, the second enclosed by rust-red cliffs and paused to take photos of the gorge itself. On the way back, Wright’s Cave — Aboriginal paintings and engravings on rock, thousands of years old, held in the shade of an overhang.
WHITE CLIFFS
After our Mutawintji adventure, we were back on the wide red dirt roads without a tree in sight. Wild sheep abruptly bounded across the dusty road, confused which way to go as soon as our car came into sight, testing our reflexes on the brakes. We slowed for packs of inquisitive emus who couldn’t quite decide whether to investigate or flee.
We arrived at sunset to White Cliffs to spend the night at the Underground Motel — we joined everyone up on the hill to watch the sun go down before entering the labyrinth underground tunnels where we’ll spend the night.
The town is here because of opal — miners have been digging into these hillsides since the 1890s, first for gems, then for escape from heat that regularly clears 40°C. Going underground made obvious sense then. It still does. The motel has 44 rooms carved into Poor Man’s Hill — named for its absence of opal — white-walled, minimal, a constant 22 degrees year-round. No phone signal. No television. No sound from other guests. The largest underground hotel in the world, which is the sort of fact that makes total sense once you’re inside it and none whatsoever before.
Getting lost in the tunnels at midnight, every corridor identical, the silence complete — I haven’t felt that particular variety of disorientation before and I’m not sure I want to again. That said: go once. The schnitzel in the underground restaurant was better than it had any right to be, and the strangeness of the place is genuinely its own reward. I wouldn’t book a second night, but I thought about it longer than I expected to.
ORANGE + BATHURST
Back on the road with one more motel stop in Nyngan, where we found the only place open — a local pub serving plates of the classics: steak, schnitzel, bangers and mash, finished with caramel pudding and ice cream. The next day we headed for a property just outside Bathurst for two nights via Bathurst about 4 hours on the road from Nyngan.
We stopped in Bathurst to stock up on local produce, visit the local Vinnies finding two vintage travel books for $4 each and take a tour at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; they always seem to have interesting exhibitions on.
Wilga Station is a 260-acre working sheep farm twelve minutes outside Bathurst, in the Keith family for three generations. The land traces back to explorer William Lawson, gifted to him after he helped cross the Blue Mountains in the early 1800s. We stayed in the Farmers Hut, perched on top of a hill with views across the valley. A cushioned bay window frames the landscape and the grazing sheep below in a way that makes you want to sit in it longer than is probably reasonable. Every detail has been thought of, and after more than a week of motel rooms and corrugated iron, arriving here was something in itself.
We drew the outdoor bath as the sun went down and watched the sheep drift closer, the lambs entirely unbothered by us, grazing right up to the edge of the bath and lambs bounding between the fields as the light faded. The next morning we read under the willow by the creek for a couple of hours, taking periodic dips to cool off, and felt no particular need to be anywhere else.
Then backtracking to Orange to try Hey Rosey. Twenty seats, tangerine tiles, vinyl on the turntable, menu that changes with the seasons. The chef came from Dear Sainte Eloise in Potts Point — one of my favourite bars in Sydney — so I had expectations, and they were met, then exceeded. Kingfish ceviche, pasta, and cocktails arrived. After ten days of pub food and roadside wraps — Hey Rosey felt like the city had sent a care package. We went back that evening for a glass of local wine (compliments of Wilga station) and a game of scrabble.
If we’d stayed a little longer, we would have had lunch at the Rockley Pub, where chef Matt Moran re-invented it after it first opened in 1872. Make an appointment for a wine tasting at Renzaglia Wines and book a truffle hunting day at Red Ground Truffles.
BACK TO SYDNEY
Thirteen days, and coming home knowing our country a little better. The slower pace of it, the scale of it, the quiet of it, stays with us as we make our way back into the city. The density building around us, the harbour appearing in gaps between buildings. There’s so much of this country still to see.
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