The Australian Outback

Story & Photography by Dean Pfeiffer

“WELL I ONCE PULLED A KNIFE ON SOMEONE IN THE AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK”

has become my travel story show stopper. Utter that sentence and you can silence a room and turn all eyes and ears in your direction. While it’s a quick way to earn badass points, that act of opening a knife and pointing it at someone was much more to me.

But let me back up a little bit. Two years prior to my trip down under I met a young Australian doctor on a medical expedition to the Himalayas. We bonded quickly and formed a long distance friendship that took us both across the world. Her to visit me in America in 2017 and me to return the favor in 2019. I definitely got the better end of that deal.

Our mapped out Aussie road trip clocked in at just under four weeks, was over 10,000 kilometers long, and covered practically the entirety of the northeastern quadrant of the continent of Australia. We began in Cairns (think Great Barrier Reef), turned south for a short stint to experience a bit more of the lush coast, and then swung the trusty Mazda CX5 west and faced the flat, red expanse of the terrifyingly huge, mostly empty Australian Outback.

Almost surprisingly, it was just like the movies. We almost ran out of gas a half dozen times. We dodged hitting kangaroos

on the road. We saw quite a few dead cows, who had clearly died of dehydration, on single family farms the size of European nations. And I will never forget the time we walked through the literal swinging doors of a saloon in the middle of nowhere only to have an entire bartop full of weathered construction workers turn in unison to eye us up and down with suspicion.

The further towards the center of the continent we went the more on the fringes we became. We started to make a game of what constituted an actual town and decided that if it had the “Three B’s” (bottle shop, butchers, and bank) it qualified.

One evening we pulled into a settlement that fell one “B” short of a town. We were tired and grateful to have found a cheap campground after a long day of driving. This sounds like a joke, but we had kangaroo meatballs for dinner and turned in early. I journaled for a bit in the tent and my companion popped out to the car to grab some ibuprofen for her sciatica. She forgot to re-lock the car.

The next memory I have is waking up at 2AM to my friend yelling “What the F#CK are you doing” and furiously unzipping the tent. Unsure if I was dreaming, I half tripped/half crawled behind her and was met with the sight of two men running off into the bush, my wallet in hand. As my friend shouted expletives into the night I quickly began searching for my knife. Once located, I focused on the task of tearing down camp as fast as I could.

Halfway through furiously throwing pots and pans into a storage bin, I heard a laugh that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I whipped around. Just out of reach of the headlights I saw the shadowy figure of a young man slowly approaching, holding out my wallet in

front of him. I had a sudden flashback to a lesson I’d been taught in my Self Defense for Women course: “Don’t approach if they offer something. It’s a quick way to find yourself in a chokehold.”

He moved closer, laughing the whole way. Brandishing my knife in front of me (a sentence I never thought I’d say) I shakily said, “Stop right there,” and then more forcefully, “Drop it.” I’ll never know if I actually scared him, if he decided my American currency wasn’t worth it, or if he had a true change of heart. But I do know that I left that not-quite-a-town with my wallet and a new sense of confidence.

As we drove further into the Outback and away from that ill-fated campground my anxiety turned into laughter and I marveled at my own response. By the time we reached the heart of the continent later that afternoon I was worn out but giddy.

Uluru. The 600 million year old monolith in the center of the country was the midpoint of our trip before we headed north to Darwin at the top of Australia. It creeps up on you. A speck in the flat red expanse of the Outback until it suddenly consumes your field of vision with its 5.8 mile perimeter.

It’s magnificent. Bigger than you thought, a little less red than you thought, but utterly captivating. As I stared up at the 1,142 foot monument less than 12 hours from standing up to a highway robber, I began to think about power. Uluru is potentially the single best place in the world to confront your own empowerment. This rock had the audacity to assert itself against erosion for longer than the dinosaurs had been around. If it could do that, then I could assert my rights to my property, my body and my safety. And while I can’t outlast the dinosaurs, I plan to keep my wits and my wallet for a long time.