Word: outbacker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tall tales you might hear while holidaying in Australia-a land whose residents famously love to regale visitors with made-up stories-perhaps the tallest of all will be the one you hear in Murchison Station House, a 200,000-hectare sheep farm in the Western Australian outback. There you will be told that everything you see once belonged to Mukarram Jah, the eighth Nizam of Hyderabad, and that it was all seized when he failed to pay his debts. You may be inclined to laugh when you hear this. How could Jah, the grandest of Indian kings, inheritor...
...last Caliph of Islam in Turkey; the Indian government hoped he would become a diplomat. But the impetuous young man, still sulking over the end of his kingdom, was more interested in tinkering with cars. Then, in 1972, he discovered Australia. After his first glance of the outback, he is said to have exclaimed: "I love this place, miles and miles of open country, and not a bloody Indian in sight." He bought Murchison House Station, noting that it was "the size of a country"-large enough to compensate for his lost kingdom. His pedigree would matter little there...
...through water that would flood a Falcon. The $58,000 Blizzard has a Nissan Patrol chassis, engine and gearbox, but nothing else about it is ordinary. It's Mad Max in a suit: stylish, smooth riding, thanks to adjustable shock absorbers, but tough enough for anything, from the Outback to the Apocalypse. That's too tough for Australian transport authorities. "They say it's too intimidating for on-road use," says Watson. (Most of his clients live on farms or overseas; his Blizzard variant has dealer license plates...
Driving south from Port Augusta, travelers could be forgiven for missing the sign to Ray Myers' hobby farm. On a sunny morning, the lead smelters of Port Pirie shimmer on the horizon to the south like an outback Venice, while to the north, the Flinders Ranges begin their majestic roll. They were partly what brought Sydney-born Myers, 64, to the area on holiday in 1966, and his love affair with the landscape has continued ever since. "Change color every hour," he says...
...Instead, like most business travelers, I was confined to restaurant food, and in towns the size of Jamestown (pop. 15,500), that means "casual dining" establishments. Before the era of chain dining - of Applebee's and Outback and that graybeard T.G.I. Friday?s (founded 1965) - business-traveler dining was different. I like to imagine that a gentleman in a Cary Grant suit stepped from his plane (itself stewarded by a pillbox-hatted attendant who had served gin martinis) and drove to a local place to eat crunchy fried chicken and flaky blueberry pie. I like to imagine the gentleman then...