It ultimately connects Perth with Cairns in a great diagonal shortcut that cuts thousands of kilometres (and weeks of travel) from the paved route that follows the coast for part of the way. Along the 2,700km from Laverton in Western Australia to Winton in far-off Queensland, the Outback Way passes through countless indigenous homelands, skirts isolated national parks and stops in at life-saving outback roadhouses. Tracking north-west, connecting one side of Australia to the other, the Outback Way is the most direct route through the heart of the country. And before setting out, it was difficult not to contemplate the enormity of the undertaking. Standing here nearly 70 years later, there were signs to what lay ahead: the Great Beyond Visitor Centre the Explorers Hall of Fame the big-sky views of an endless desert landscape from Windarra Lookout. The marks his bulldozers left behind in the desert sands terrified desert peoples who wondered what great animal had passed this way. One of the world's great transcontinental traverses, it was laid out by Len Beadell in the 1950s in what was surely one of the road-building achievements of the time from 1947 until 1963, Beadell forged more than 6,000km of outback tracks for the Australian government. Laverton, founded on the traditional lands of the Wongutha and Tjalkanti people, marks the starting point of the Outback Way, also known in Western Australia as the Great Central Road. After the dust settles, when darkness falls, the stars come out, more stars than seem possible. When the wind picks up, the sand turns to dust and blankets the town with a fine, coppery sheen. Tarmac roads disappear beneath the red sand long before they reach the town's outskirts.
Otherwise, it is eerily, gloriously quiet. Whenever a road train rumbled through town, Laverton rouses into life. Marooned on the edge of Australia's two largest deserts – the Victoria and the Great Sandy – Laverton felt like the last outpost of frontier civilisation, a 12-hour drive from Perth, five hours from already-remote Kalgoorlie. Laverton is the kind of outback town you might expect at the end of an epic desert road trip, not at the start of one.
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