You can count the miles down the Stuart Highway from Alice to Urldunda in dead kangaroos. There’s not a helluva lot else to look at though and my eyes began to glaze over somewhere after the thirtieth ‘roo road-kill. These road-kills have had a horrifying effect on Australia’s biggest bird of pray. The wedge-tailed eagle, with its eight-foot wingspan, is irresistibly attracted to this transcontinental smorgasbord and, having no natural predators, it is quite ready to do battle with any vehicle that has the audacity to try to scare it off its meal. Trackside roadhouses are full of yarns about drivers who were terrified to see a half-dead wedgie coming through the windscreen at him. “He was all torn and bleeding and spitting feathers when he turned up here,” they tell you. “Funniest bloody thing you ever saw!”

Outbackers have a wry sense of humour. They continue to see themselves as pioneering characters and in a sense they still are. This is the forbidden land that the first settlers knew by such mysterious names as Beyond the Black Stump, The Never Never or simply the Red Centre. The Northern Territory is ‘the real Outback.’ Southern roadtrains are not considered worthy of the name here in the Top End where they have five trailers, stretch to over fifty metres and are capable of sucking the windscreen-wipers off your car as they pass.

Even ‘roos wouldn’t be seen dead on the Lasseter Highway from Urldunda to Uluru. This is the real desert and feral camels are more likely here. There are said to be as many as half a million wild camels in Australia and they are of such pure and hardy breed that some have been sold to Saudi Arabia for racing stock. Territorians in general seem to be delighted at this proof that they also even have the world’s toughest camels. (Although they never got around to feeling that way about the rabbits).

This is dingo country too and even in the resort around The Rock you will often see semi-tame dingoes searching through the bins. The trouble is that the dingoes have mated with dogs from the Aboriginal camps and they are not as shy as they used to be. In some camps the Aboriginals live in fear of what one little girl described to me as ‘cheeky dogs.’ She said she was frightened to go outside after dark because of the dogs. But these dogs are cheeky in a way that only Outback animals can be cheeky: there have been reports recently of people who were actually killed and eaten by ‘cheeky dogs.’

Up here termite mounds grow to cathedral-like proportions and ‘dunny budgies’ (flies) are so thick you get tennis elbow shooing them off. Legend has it that at times the flies can carry small children away. Territorians are immensely proud of their fearsome wildlife and will warn you that the snakes here are so smart that if you drive over them they’ll wrap themselves around your differential so that they can follow you into your house.

Even a relatively short roadtrip from Alice to Uluru, just 5 hours each way (a mere jaunt in the scale of the Outback), shouldn’t be undertaken without proper preparation and a reliable vehicle. This simple journey to The Rock once took me three days when I was stranded by torrential rains and trapped in the little settlement of Curtin Springs. The population of five swelled overnight to almost fifty and some people were attacked by a herd of feral camels that were driven crazy by the excess of water.

Even a relatively short roadtrip into the Outback remains an adventure. The camels and the cheeky dogs might not get you but there are countless terrible things that could happen to you on these remote highways.…and whatever it might be there will always be an Outback ‘character’ who will see the funny side to it.