Off the Bitumen Track

Just west of Burketown, Highway 1 on the map turns into a dotted line that staggers all the way to Borroloola, across the Northern Territory border. On the ground, that translates to 480 corrugated kilometers of red dirt and gravel—a track that’s bone-jarring at the best of times and, in the wet season, impassable. For the people who live along the road, keeping that dotted line from disappearing off the map is an unrelenting struggle.

“There’s never a dull moment,” says Burke Shire Mayor Annie Clarke, whose tiny council oversees the 225-km stretch from Burketown to the border. Floods create much of the drama: monsoonal rains and cyclones regularly swell Gulf Country rivers and send stormy seas surging across the low coastline. Early this year, floods inundated 6,000 sq. km of Burke Shire, turning Highway 1 into a chain of atolls; supplies had to be dropped to some settlements by helicopter. At Floraville station, 73 km south of the town—and 80 km inland—the homestead was an island for two weeks, and sharks were seen circling the henhouse. Owner Kylie Camp says her husband Ernie was about to rescue some floating oil drums when “he saw the fins and decided, No way.”

When the floods subsided—after months, in some places—the road was covered with piles of sand that towered above graders and took weeks to shift. Not for nothing is the roadhouse 50 km east of the border called Hell’s Gate.

Despite the rough going, the area’s spectacular scenery draws a steady stream of tourists, who set off like explorers, their four-wheel-drives and caravans laden with water, food and fuel. Of the 100 vehicles a day that travel this stretch of Highway 1 in the dry season, Clarke says, around 60 belong to tourists. Even a hell ride has its allure.