The road ahead had stopped being a road and become a shimmer.
Somewhere past Dubbo, the bitumen began to melt at its far edge, dissolving into a silvery pool that never got any closer no matter how long I drove. The sky was enormous; the kind of blue that presses down on you, that makes the car feel small and the day feel long. My windows were down. The air smelled of hot dust and dry grass, and somewhere underneath, the faint eucalyptus tang that lives in this country like a memory.
I’d left the coast because I wanted to feel far away. Out here, you get your wish quickly.
The Road Unspools
I stopped in Dubbo for coffee before the towns thinned out. A roadhouse on the edge, the kind with a bell over the door and a fridge that hums too loud. The coffee came in a paper cup, too hot, a little bitter, and I drank it leaning against the bonnet while a road train rumbled past and shook the ground. It wasn’t a good coffee, exactly. But it was the first one of a long drive, and that made it taste like beginnings.
The woman behind the counter asked where I was headed. West, I said. She nodded like that answered plenty. “Long way to nothing,” she said, then smiled. “Best kind.”
Long way to nothing. Best kind. I turned it over for the next hundred kilometres.
The land flattened as I drove. The green gave way to red and gold, the trees to low silver saltbush, the fences to long stretches where nothing needed fencing at all. This is Wiradjuri Country, and further west, Ngiyampaa and Barkindji, cared for across a span of time that makes a road trip feel like a single blink. I tried to drive through it the way you’d walk through someone’s home. Slowly. With thanks.
Cobar and the Pie that Mattered
By the time I reached Cobar, the light had gone amber and my legs had forgotten how to be legs.
There’s a bakery there that I’d been told about by a stranger two towns back: the kind of recommendation that feels like a small inheritance. I ordered a steak pie because it was late afternoon and I was hollow. It came warm in a paper bag, the pastry flaking the moment I touched it, the inside dark and peppery and unashamedly rich. I ate it on a bench outside, watching the red dust settle on the main street as the town slowed toward evening.
A man walked past with his dog and lifted his chin at me. I lifted mine back. There’s a whole conversation in that, out here.
Cobar glows at dusk. The old copper-mining town catches the last light on its tin roofs and red earth until the whole place looks lit from within. I sat until the pie was gone and the sky went from amber to bruised violet, and I understood I was already changing, quietly, in a way I couldn’t yet name.
The Long Middle
The stretch past Cobar is where the trip got honest.
The towns fall away. The radio gives up. For long hours it was just me, the engine, and a horizon that never ended; always retreating, always the same distance ahead. There’s a discomfort in that much emptiness. Your mind gets loud when the world goes quiet. I thought about people I hadn’t thought about in years. I thought about nothing at all.
Fuel matters out here in a way it doesn’t at home. I filled up whenever I could, whether I needed to or not, watching the numbers climb higher than the city ever charges. The distances that look small on a map unfold into hours. I packed water, more than I thought I’d drink. I drank all of it.
And then… awe. Slow and total. The sky at midday so wide it curved. A wedge-tailed eagle riding a thermal, unhurried, sovereign. A single tree throwing the only shadow for miles. This is what far feels like, I thought, and for the first time in a long while, I wasn’t in a rush to come back.
Broken Hill and a Shared Table
Broken Hill arrived like a mirage that decided to stay.
A proper town in the middle of all that nothing, grand old pubs, wide streets, an art-town soul beneath the mining bones. I ate dinner at a pub with pressed-tin ceilings and a floor worn soft by a century of boots. Lamb, local, slow-cooked until it gave way at the fork, with gravy and a heap of vegetables and a schooner sweating on the bar.
An older couple at the next table asked where I’d come from. Somehow we ended up sharing the space between our tables, then the tables themselves. They told me about Silverton just up the road: the old ghost town where films get made, where the pub has seen more than it lets on. They told me to go at last light. I went the next evening.
Silverton at dusk is almost too much. The desert stretches flat to the Mundi Mundi plains, and the sun drops into it whole, turning the earth to embers. I stood in the quiet with a handful of others, strangers made briefly into company, and nobody said much. Some places do the talking for you.
The Last Light
On my final evening, I pulled over on an empty stretch and killed the engine just to hear the silence.
The horizon did what it had done every day, held its distance, refused to end. And I realised that was the whole lesson. Out here, you stop chasing the far edge. You let it stay far. You learn to be where you actually are.
I came west to feel far away from where I first came. I left feeling closer to something, harder to name, easier to carry.
The road doesn’t give you answers. It gives you room. Sometimes that’s the same thing.
If You Go
Take it slow. The distances out here are longer than they look, and the whole point is the going, not the getting there. Give yourself more days than you think you need.
Fill up early and often. Fuel stops thin out fast past Cobar, so treat every open bowser as a gift and top up before you run low.
Chase the light. Dawn and dusk are when this country turns to gold; plan your driving around the middle of the day and your stopping around the edges of it.
Pack more water than feels reasonable, a hat, and a warm layer. The days scorch and the nights surprise you.
Say yes to the local tip. The best pie, the right pub, the lookout no map mentions, out here, they come from a stranger’s chin-lift and a quiet word. Take them.
For more on the beauty of food, culinary, and culture, check this article of ours to explore.
