Australia Road Trip - From Melbourne to Darwin through the outback

David Whitley takes on crocodiles, opal miners, UFOs and a whole lot of sunburned nothing as he embarks on a 5,500km drive through the middle of Australia.

You don’t get much more Outback than Coober Pedy. The only ones brave enough to live above ground are the kangaroos, which seem happy playing in the salmon pink dirt next to the mineshafts. For everyone else, underground dugouts - blown out from hillsides using home-made explosives - are the way forward.

It’s the sort of town where you can walk into a café, only to be told that the best place to eat is "the Mobil Service Station". But it's also the sort of town where a fortune can be made - 95% of the world's opal comes from the South Australian outback, and most of that comes from around Coober Pedy. It's these opals that fund the lavish subterranean showhomes and extraordinary underground churches.

Half the fun is getting there, however. Our last sniff of civilisation was 825km to the south-east in Australia’s most famous wine region, the Barossa Valley. Many visitors head here on a short day trip, visit the likes of Penfold's, Wolf Blass and Jacob’s Creek, then head back to Adelaide in an hour. We were heading the other way, boot clanking with bottles, into Australia’s great nothing.

The Outback proper starts when you hit the Stuart Highway in Port Augusta. The road - only properly sealed in 1987 - crosses the country for 2,834km until it fizzles into a roundabout on Darwin’s portside Esplanade. It roughly follows the route of John McDouall Stuart, the first man to cross Australia from north to south and make it back alive. Doing it by car - with fuel stops interspersing the featureless sheep stations and giant salt lakes every 200km - feels like an achievement. To have done it walking into the unknown with no support is unthinkable.

What comes as a great surprise is that the drive isn't (that) boring. The scenery is bleak, but a stark beauty burns its way in. The visions of vast desert plains from the tops of small hills become what you see when you close your eyes at night.

By the time you arrive at the Outback’s best-known calling card - another 741km away - you begin to feel sorry for those who fly in to Uluru, gawp at the rock and fly out again. They’re missing the point. The base walk around Uluru is mesmerising, as is nature's light show at sunset, but Uluru’s true magic comes from its sheer remoteness. To have ploughed halfway across a country to see it gives the monolith formerly known as Ayers Rock an extra edge that those on fly-in packages will never experience.

Driving north, the scenery subtly begins to change. The saltbush and spinifex get bigger, then start to give way to shrubs and trees. The locusts smashing into the windscreen are replaced by wedge-tailed eagles soaring above the car.

But the route to the tropics is lined with weird outposts. At Aileron, top shelf liquor is kept in a coffin - the 'spirit cabinet' - while a giant fibre-glass lizard models a bikini outside. At Wycliffe Well, we get to sleep in the caravan park that calls itself Australia's UFO-spotting capital, surrounded by plastic models of Elvis and the Incredible Hulk. In Daly Waters (population: 9) a drink at the pub turns into an evening singalong surrounded by Irish hurling shirts, German police badges and ropey-looking underwear donated by previous visitors.

The last detour off the Stuart Highway is Kakadu National Park. It’s the biggest in Australia, and said to be the biggest in the world that covers an entire river system. The huge termite mounds, crocodile warning signs by the waterways and sticky heat announce that you’ve properly entered tropical Australia.

Kakadu is a refuge for a vast realm of bird and plant life, but it’s a place where man has to bow down to nature. During the Wet Season, much of the National Park is inaccessible due to flooding - and it takes a special type of insanity to venture into the water. The saltwater crocs rule here and even the local Aboriginal people tend to send a dog over first when crossing the East Alligator River into the Arnhem Land.

While Darwin is the physical end of our 5,500km journey from Melbourne across some of the toughest country on earth, Ubirr feels like the spiritual end. Ubirr is at the north-eastern edge of Kakadu, and a climb up to the top of the escarpment gives a frog-in-throat view out over the floodplain that eventually becomes the sea. Ubirr is also home to rock art that has been there for tens of thousands of years. It tells stories of the oldest civilisation on earth, and reminds that the European way of life is only a recent imposition on this remote continent.

And that's what Australia is - a continent. To cross it - through UFOs, gimmick-ridden Outback roadhouses and kamikaze kangaroos crossing the Stuart Highway every dusk and dawn - is an epic journey unquestionably worthy of the time spent at the wheel.