Erin Cullen hitchhikes into the Outback and goes through the looking glass in search of the real Australia: truck drivers, Aboriginal spirits, UFO landing sites, and the true meaning of “clubbing.”

In a land of such brutal extremes, it’s hard to say whether this is heaven or hell. We’re hurtling down Australia’s Route 2 at breakneck speed in the bucking cab of a 44-ton truck. My companion has fallen asleep on the leather bench behind me as I sit, feet propped up on the windscreen, nonchalantly discussing serial killers with Scottie, our hitch of the day. I’m beginning to suspect that he picked us up for someone to talk to. And after nine hours crammed into a steel box with a trucker intent on pulping roadside roo corpses, normal conversation dries up pretty quickly.

He tweaks out a perfect handmade cigarette with a rapid tumble of fingers, and reveals that he’s less repulsed by John Wayne Gacy than by Jeffrey Dahmer. “At least Gacy never ate anyone,” he mutters through the smoke. As a girl accustomed to solo travel, this type of statement sets off shrieking cerebral alarm bells, and Scottie’s sidelong grin in my direction makes me jumpy. I give my friend Jon a furtive whack, our not-so-subtle danger signal. He’s been pitching and rolling in the back for four hours now and welcomes the change of seating as I dive past him into the rear of the cabin. He’s also fascinated by the prospect of listening to another eccentric, and Scottie is as peculiar as they come.

WAYWARD AND DOWN
It’s been a long haul since we set out from Sydney six weeks ago, and these 5,000 highway miles have left a few skidmarks. We’re filthy and hungry, and last week we slept in a mine shaft on a plastic sheet, having left our tent, piece by piece, on the road. We’re out of money and have resorted to rides with road trains, the convoys of trucks that cross the Outback. It’s not the safest of ideas, but this is exactly what we came out here for. And as Scottie says, “Once you’re in the Outback, it’s tough to get back out.”

Jon and I arrived in the Sydney suburb of Bondi Beach two and a half months ago, and found it to be the antithesis of all we’d hoped to find. In a country of 20 million people spread out over roughly 3 million barren square miles, we had expected savage terrain and leathery, hardboiled guys tussling with saltwater crocs. What we found was a carbon copy of every other coastal town on the planet. The hostels drew in legions of wasted international teenagers who left slick spots of vomit on the curbs; Oxford Street clubs pumped cheesy trance and Men at Work while girls in clingy dresses crowed into their cell phones outside; the beaches teemed with gleaming hardbodies. And after one month trekking around the tourist-swarmed city, I had not met one Australian. Escape up the coast via bus was futile, as everyone I spoke to had gone the same route, and they yukked it up around hostel common rooms, discovering with delight that each had had exactly the same experience.

THE GREAT ESCAPE
Enter Jon, a tall, tattooed, like-minded Brit resolved to bolt from the backpacker trail. Two days after meeting, we were roadside in Brisbane, bags full of Marmite and hitchhiking signs in hand. (Mine: “NORTH—PLEASE!” His: “NOT A PSYCHO.”) Thumbs thrust brashly into traffic by a Bruce Highway on-ramp, we were skeptical as to whether our naïve grit would carry us across the intended 8,000 kilometers.

But within half an hour we were in a pickup, fleeing far and fast from the cesspool of backpacker life. Swimming in a warm ocean that night, we could make out Fraser Island in the distance—a tourist mecca that is, as one of our hitches told us, “the best place to get bit by a dingo.” We were wising up already.

Or so we thought. The next morning we were cocky, assuming that rides would be as plentiful as the previous day, and we aimed to reach coastal Rockhampton by nightfall. Six p.m. found us shuffling down a deserted country road just 200 kilometers away, tossing rocks at signposts and listening to cows moo as a waning moon rose over the fields. Following a tip from a passerby, we hefted our bags and set out on foot towards Rosedale, a nearby town consisting of a chapel, rec center, and an old barn–cum–truck stop, in whose postapocalyptic silence I couldn’t help humming the Tom Waits song “Don’t Go Into the Barn.” Mick and Debbie, the barn’s proprietors, tried to dispel our unease and offered us a place to sleep in their field, casually warning against poisonous snakes and the cane toads that thawed themselves out there at sun-up. Oh, and of course that pesky prowler who often came around at night to sever their power lines. No worries, mates.

No one seemed fazed by this, or by the fact that Mick was out back with a golf club, smacking venom-filled toads against the barn wall in the dark. “They puff up with poison, see?” he yelled across the field. Turning his bony sunburnt frame toward us, he offered an enthusiastic, gnarled thumbs-up. He smashed a toad full-force against a wall, then his bravado faltered. “Well, wait, that one’s dead. Check here.” He took a crack at another, which proceeded to swell up and stumble away on a crooked leg. “This is real clubbing!” he squawked, taking aim.

Mick and Debbie had moved from Sydney to get away from the increasing westernization of Australian city life. As a nightclub bouncer, Mick had been saturated with the gloss and pretension of pop culture, and decided to get as far away as possible without actually heading into the extreme Outback. He said he wanted to reestablish his roots. The more time I spent talking with people like Mick, the more I began to equate the situation to that of the United States. Like Americans, Australians often feel a tie to the land, despite Aborigines who consider them newcomers and usurpers. For this reason, they’re somewhat of a lost culture, caught between the old world they no longer belong to and a new one that somehow lacks an identity. Many cling to the vast expanses and, like Mick, end up isolating themselves in order to get closer to the hostile land their ancestors toiled upon—their only semblance of a cultural past.

And as settlers in a land that, as Bill Bryson put it so succinctly, “has more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else,” those Australians who reject the city-slicker lifestyle have to be modern-day cowboys out of necessity. This territory regularly lashes out with devastating floods and bone-parching droughts—out here there are few in-betweens and no guarantees, which is where the Crocodile Dundee stereotype comes from. Take our next hitches, for instance: Frank and Roger, two wizened good-ol’-boy fishing buddies in a beat-up 4x4, who picked us up from Rosedale to help us escape the triple-digit heat and to dispel our fears of bull sharks (“They’ll just nibble on ya for the salt”), great whites (“If you don’t think about ’em, you don’t worry about ’em”), and box jellyfish (“Not a real problem”).

What concerned them was the weather: Frank said that back in Wagga Wagga, sheep sales had gone down because of the drought. When you can’t feed your family, deadly funnel spiders just aren’t on your list of worries. But for all the harsh realities, still this wasn’t the Outback; it was two weeks later, in Cape Tribulation, that we decided to hire a car and mosey on out to the red center.

ALICE IN UNDERLAND
Setting foot in the settlements outside Mount Isa and Alice Springs was a step through the looking glass. We spent our first days in quiet wonder, hearing only the blood thrumming in our ears and the fiery wind that blustered in off the plains and buried everything under a blanket of inescapable heat. We spent an entire day inspecting cow, camel, and kangaroo carcasses on the roadsides, watching three-foot-tall wedge-tailed eagles rip and rend them to pieces—the scene soundless but for beak clacking on bone.

Life and death, we soon realized, were more frighteningly palpable out here (if not so palatable) than in the cities. As the weeks crept by and the ocean became a distant memory, the stillness morphed into terrible isolation—were we agoraphobic or claustrophobic? Our nerves itched, and it was hard to tell just why. We began dropping into odd, dodgy little bars just for human contact, receiving angry glares or outright verbal attacks from locals who mistook us for tour bus passengers.

Then we found the UFO landing site in Wycliffe Wells.

We’d assumed it was just another tourist-baiting ploy, and went in seeking diversion from the road. A stout, red-faced caretaker in a broken straw hat and thigh-high boots approached, offering an enthusiastic tour of the landing site murals, the Incredible Hulk sculpture garden, and an introduction to Rolf and Lady, his pet donkey and camel, which were lazing out back. Asked if he’d ever seen a spaceship, he replied reverently, “It’s been a long time, but they’re always coming around.” He explained that the government had a crashed ship in their possession just down the road.

We encountered similar settlements in the weeks following, and it seemed that aside from attracting tourists with promises of the world’s biggest artifical prawn (Ballina), these places also lent the land a lighter, less tragic air. Focusing on something tangible and manageable, like international doll collections (Wycliffe Wells) or concrete potatoes the size of trailer homes (Robertson), gives people a sense of control in an environment trying to annihilate them. They try to project something of themselves onto a place that has firmly resisted large-scale colonization since 1606, when Europeans optimistically began calling it “New Holland.” And since nothing much changes on its own in this treacherous stillness, perhaps you have to build something, imagine something, create something, or risk losing your marbles.

Even Oz’s touted natural wonders are brutal reminders of the futility of habitation here. Reaching Uluru (formerly Ayres’ Rock) late one afternoon, I anticipated seeing that smooth mauve mountain—plastered on so many postcards—sloping up from a red clay floor. I wasn’t ready for the colossal mass of lava folds bursting like tidal waves from a scrubby wasteland. Holes and pockets half-covered in rock drippings glowed red in the twilight, like satanic stained-glass windows, and I understood why this was a sacred Aboriginal site. There’s just no winning against the forces of Australia’s natural world, so you may as well worship it and hope for the best.

Or, in some cases, go into hiding. Coober Pedy was our last stop before reaching the civilization of Adelaide. Days averaging 122 degrees demand submission: If you can’t take the heat, carve out a giant hole in the hills and live underground. In Coober Pedy, you tuck yourself behind Victorian-façade caves-homes carved into the opal-rich earth. And when you come out, build replicas of the Millennium Falcon and Mad Max vehicles (Beyond Thunderdome was filmed here) and scatter them in dusty, barren lots around “town.” No one in Coober Pedy could say what day it was, and I spotted a girl opening a shop adorned with a “Closed Sundays” sign.

It was Sunday.

Then it hit us: Enough was enough. Six weeks haven’t sufficiently toughened us sissy urbanites, and we’re ready for hostel beds and hot showers. It was time to drop the car, hitch onto a road train, and high-tail it out of Coober Pedy. And so we ended up in Scottie’s claustrophobic cab, nearing Sydney, debating the merits of cannibalism versus plain old serial murder.

BACK ON THE OTHER SIDE
I know now that it takes something extraordinary to hack life in the Outback. But I find, too, that once you’ve been out there, it’s impossible to fully come back to city life. It’s comfortable back here in Sydney. It’s polished and clean. Trains run on time; life is predictable. But recently, my mind conjures up memories of that late afternoon sun searing the sky white, feet smearing fine red dust prints on a cool windscreen, and the sound of empty cans clinking below, shifting with the rhythm of a speeding car, heading into a blank horizon.