“That’s the thing about Aus. It’s vast!” my fellow passenger was saying, as we shot across the desert at 100km an hour while gulping at frosted glasses of Victoria Beer. “People from outside just can’t grasp the sheer ‘vastity’ of it.”

The Indian Pacific train had been trundling across the Western Australian Outback for close to twenty hours already and I had to admit that I was struggling to come to terms with it myself. We were now in what my friend might have called the complete ‘emptity’ of the Nullarbor Desert. The name derives from Latin for ‘treeless desert’ and apart from a few scraggy bushes there had been nothing worthy of the name for the last two hundred miles. Then we came upon a little collection of a few shacks around a railway watering point. At some point in the past some optimistic (or perhaps just humorous) souls had planted about a dozen scraggy pines here and they had named the place ‘Forest.’

The map shows an enthralling chain of place names: Kellerberrin, Kingoonya, Woomera and, in this sweltering desolation, the wonderfully named Koolyanobbing. In the village of Cook, touted as ‘Queen City of the Nullarbor,’ we stopped to explore the few sun-scorched huts and the old jailhouses while the train refilled its water-tanks. A sign beside the track said that Cook has a population of ‘four people, forty dingoes and four million flies.’

Scarcity of water aside, crossing the Nullarbor is in some ways more like making an ocean voyage. The Indian Pacific sings smoothly along on her silver rails between featureless horizons with never a bump or a lurch. This is officially the longest stretch of straight railway line in the world. You only realise what an unusual sensation this is when you suddenly find yourself careering into the wall when you reach the first kink in the track after 298 miles.

The Indian Pacific connects Perth and Sydney along 4,352km of track but I would be disembarking at Adelaide to catch another train northwards. The famous Ghan follows the supply route once used by the intrepid cameleers who brought supplies from South Australia to the embryonic settlement at Alice Springs. The cameleers came from such diverse places as Punjab, Kashmir, Sind, Rajasthan, Persia and Afghanistan but came to be known to the locals simply as ‘the Ghans.’

The Ghan claws its way for 2,979km from Adelaide right through the great Red Centre. Like a great silver spear, piercing directly into the heart of the island continent, The Ghan still offers the feeling of an expedition (albeit a delightfully relaxing and luxurious one) as it leaves behind the wheat fields of South Australia and heads off into what, even today, is one of the world’s great wildernesses.

It took the great explorer John McDouall Stuart many months to cross the desert from coast to coast. (Having made it that far – and on the verge of starvation – he had to turn around and walk all the way back again because nobody had thought to send a boat to meet him).
Many years ago I hitch-hiked and drove across this same route in a month. With The Ghan I made the crossing easily in just over a week (with a stop at ‘the Alice’). Nevertheless, by the time The Ghan rolled through the steaming tropical rainforests of ‘The Top End’ and into Darwin I had once again found an increased respect for the incredible vastity of Australia.