Fly-past ... the Darling River in flood.Credit: Quentin Jones
Penny Watson buckles up for a bird's-eye view of the outback during a tour in a small plane.
Up, up and away. The engine, only slightly muffled by oversized headphones, sounds more like a lawnmower than a plane, raising an eyebrow or two in the cabin before an otherwise graceful ascent.
Up we go, 300 metres, 600 metres, 900 metres, until the houses look like Lego, the cars like ants tracking along a grid and the swimming pools like diminishing pale-blue dots on a vast canvas.
We're in a six-seater Piper Lance on a NSW outback odyssey from the Victorian border town of Echuca, north to the mining towns of Broken Hill, White Cliffs and Lightning Ridge - some of the strangest places on the planet.
I've done parts of this trip before; twice in a small plane to Queensland's Birdsville Races and twice by car on a road like one I can see now - a snail trail with a dust-wake inching through the scrub. But already I can see the land has undergone a rare and beautiful transformation.
Any trip out here at some point recalls the legendary journeys undertaken by the early explorers (only partly due to the surplus of places and things named after them). Whether travelling by car or plane, it's hard to imagine that Burke and Wills gathered a group of men, saddled up horses and set off on a 3250-kilometre journey to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Or that Sturt walked where we're about to fly on a mission to find inland waterways. That he became the first white man to stand in the centre of the continent and returned to tell the tale is unimaginable.
That Burke and Wills reached their destination but died on the return journey is perhaps the only end we mere mortals looking down on it from a plane can contemplate.
The early explorers would not recognise the scene below me. Behind us, Deniliquin's Edward River has swollen, making big, dark, blue and green paisley swirls in the land. The Murray River has flooded through Swan Hill, its waters like giant silver mirrors reflecting our plane in the blue sky. Below us, the wide-open land around Balranald, on the edge of the outback proper, is covered with a thin patina of green, like icing sugar dusted over the browny red soils, or a thin shadecloth laid down, the trees poking through. Like a graphically enhanced nature documentary, abundant rains have fallen and the once-parched land has been brought to life.
Our pilot, Ralph Guerry, owns Aus Air, a charter-plane business flying tourists on bespoke outback adventures. He has been flying out here for 25 years and is amazed at the excess of water and broad expanses of green seen on our trip.
We chart our route on a road map, the topographical landmarks telling the story: the small, inner, tree-lined snake of the once-dry Darling River has been overtaken by a fatter serpent of water, the hook turns and bends flooded so aged river gums stand knee-deep.
The 30-kilometre "Walls of China" sand dune in Mungo National Park rises from the flat landscape. Within its big sandy arc, ancient indentations have filled with water, making it look like an inland beach.
South-east of Broken Hill, the Menindee Lakes, shimmering like big footsteps of water, are at capacity for the first time in more than a decade. One of them, Lake Cawndilla, has no doubt brought the surrounding Kinchega National Park to life.
The closer we get to Broken Hill, the fewer trees we see and the earth starts to crack in big, long fissures like shards of glass. But still, in a show of nature's quest for survival, green veins of water creep out from the muddy-bottomed creek beds and thriving spinifex softens the red topsoil with pale-green smudges of fuzzy new foliage.
Broken Hill is a quirky place, with a personality shaped by its mining history, its desert isolation and its eccentric populace. The first is hard to ignore, given the hill-size Line of Lode mullock heap through the middle of town; the last adds a layer of intrigue to a visit, especially for those fond of an archetypal Aussie character.
In previous trips, I've seen the 42-kilogram silver nugget at the Geocentre, tramped about town admiring the heritage buildings and lovely old pubs with their wide verandahs and done the rounds of the art galleries and studios (Broken Hill has about 30 galleries and the second-oldest regional gallery in Australia).
I've also trekked nine kilometres out of town to the marvellous Living Desert Sculpture Symposium for a sunset with views so wide and flat, it's possible to see the Earth's curvature.
On this visit, we take the long, straight road out to marvellous Silverton, a tiny town that has starred in TV advertisements and films such as Mad Max 2 and A Town Like Alice, where extreme isolation is eulogised. Its old churches, school and jail haven't changed since its short-lived mining heyday at the end of the 19th century, while its unrivalled epicentre, the Silverton Hotel, still serves beer so chilled it brings a tear to my eye.
On the way back to Broken Hill, we don hard hats and take a tour of Day Dream Mine, the only one in the area still open to the public. It is slightly unnerving stepping through caverns of rock backfill held up by tree trunks wedged into place over a century ago. When our guide mentions never having seen, until now, water seeping this far into the mine, he's commenting on the recent rain more than the soundness of the structure but we exit a little faster than we entered.
The next day we fly north-east to White Cliffs, straight over the unnaturally angular green patch of Mutawintji National Park on the edge of the Byngano Ranges. According to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, it is the tribal area of the Malyankapa and Pandjikali people and used for initiation and ceremonies, including rainmaking.
The flight takes just 45 minutes, where a road trip would have taken three hours. Perhaps foolishly, we're travelling in the height of summer but the extreme temperatures have given White Cliffs its most unique characteristic - a populace living underground in dugout homes.
PJ's Underground B&B truly is an outback oasis, with a cooling green hilltop garden growing over a labyrinthine opal mine-turned-dwelling. With a constant natural temperature of 23 degrees, the subterranean stillness makes for excellent sleeping and gives respite from the oppressive heat outside.
At about the same time Silverton was thriving, White Cliffs was home to an estimated 5000 people, many of them getting rich on opals - fossilised reptiles from the Cretaceous period, when this area was an inland sea. Today, nobody lets on exactly how many opals are being mined.
But tourists can visit a handful of opal showrooms and take a mud-map tour of the town to see the pock-marked, white-earth mine shafts for themselves.
The Paroo Darling National Park, 20 kilometres east of town, also attracts visitors. We fly over it on our way north-east to Lightning Ridge, just off the Castlereagh Highway, 60 kilometres from the Queensland border. The heavy rain that brought devastation to parts of Queensland has evidently hit here and the waters are syrupy and lagoon-like, ignoring paddock boundaries, cutting off roads and spreading across otherwise-dry land like beer spilt on a bar mat. We hitch a ride from the airport into town with the SES, a memorable gesture given their heavy workload.
Like White Cliffs, Lightning Ridge is an opal-mining town, albeit a bigger one that has offset its declining opal trade by harnessing the talents of its eccentric population (yes, another one). There's a house made entirely of bottles, an old opal mine turned into a vast underground sculpture museum and enough studios and galleries to keep most visitors out of trouble.
Australian larrikin humour abounds, with signed "car door" tours out to the pimpled opal fields of Glengarry, where the Hilton is "nothing like the Sydney Hilton but with lots more atmosphere" and the Pub in the Scrub offers "a yarn with the miners and a golf course with wildlife". In 46 degrees, the local bowls club serves as today's oasis in the desert and we settle in for steak, cold beer and live music.
Considering the ground we've covered, the return flight across NSW to Echuca is relatively painless, the four-hour trip countered by extraordinary scenery. Fifteen minutes south of Bourke, Gundabooka, the state's newest national park (known for its Aboriginal artwork), erupts from the flat plain in a semi-circular crater. We see an airstrip and make a note for next time - a night in the shearers' quarters would be a fine addition to the itinerary.
We follow the long, straight, gun-barrel road over the town of Cobar, where a tiered, open-cut mine yawns. A spider's web of roads stretches out to remote properties and outstations, identified from above by their corrugated-iron rooftops and murky, brimming brown dams. B-double windscreens wink and blink in the sun.
As we pass over the cool, treed expanse of Yathung National Park, bulbous cloud shadows spot the countryside like voice bubbles and virgas - showers of rain that don't reach the ground - stripe the middle sky. At any other time, this would seem to be one of nature's cruel paradoxes. But now, with the desert in bloom below us, it feels just as it should - like nature doing its thing and life prevailing.
Aus Air operates charter flights and tours from Echuca to Broken Hill from $1000 for a day trip and Birdsville from $1950 for a day trip. Departures from Melbourne can also be arranged, as well as bespoke itineraries to White Cliffs, Tibooburra, Bourke, Lightning Ridge and beyond. Phone 0429 400 400, see ausair.com.au.
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