15/06/2022
The Outback Way: Is this the world's emptiest road?
Stretching 2,700km from Laverton in Western Australia to Winton in far-off Queensland, the Outback Way is a great diagonal "shortcut" across the nation that saves weeks of travel.
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Laverton is the kind of outback town you might expect at the end of an epic desert road trip, not at the start of one. Marooned on the edge of Australia's two largest deserts – the Victoria and the Great Sandy – Laverton felt like the last outpost of frontier civilisation, a 12-hour drive from Perth, five hours from already-remote Kalgoorlie.
Whenever a road train rumbled through town, Laverton rouses into life. Otherwise, it is eerily, gloriously quiet. Tarmac roads disappear beneath the red sand long before they reach the town's outskirts. When the wind picks up, the sand turns to dust and blankets the town with a fine, coppery sheen. After the dust settles, when darkness falls, the stars come out, more stars than seem possible.
Laverton, founded on the traditional lands of the Wongutha and Tjalkanti people, marks the starting point of the Outback Way, also known in Western Australia as the Great Central Road. One of the world's great transcontinental traverses, it was laid out by Len Beadell in the 1950s in what was surely one of the road-building achievements of the time; from 1947 until 1963, Beadell forged more than 6,000km of outback tracks for the Australian government. The marks his bulldozers left behind in the desert sands terrified desert peoples who wondered what great animal had passed this way.
