After boarding the bus earlier in the morning than should be legal, our first stop for the day was at the small town of Winton, just over 150 miles from Hughenden. We were now well and truly in the outback, the roads being very rarely much more than dirt tracks anymore, but the scenery was starting to become more interesting and the driver was forever pointing out some strange landmark or another. You really have to have your wits about you driving on Australian outback roads, and not just because taking your eye off the road may result in the bus falling into a pothole and never being seen again. With thousands of miles of wilderness to cover, the dirt roads in the outback have a tendency to run in a perfectly straight line for sixty or seventy miles until the point when your brain is just starting to switch onto autopilot, and then they'll suddenly turn left for no apparent reason or you'll hit a T-Junction with another dirt road running for hundreds of miles in another direction. Of course, with nothing to crash into for miles around, running off the road out here probably wouldn't dent much more than the bus driver's ego - it really would be a supreme irony if somebody managed to drive for hundreds of miles without seeing anything on either side of the road and then crashed into the only building in a two hundred mile radius, wouldn't it?

When I say that Winton is a small town, I'm not joking. It's not so much that you might miss it if you blink, it's more that you might miss it even if you're really looking out for it. Having said that, for such a small town Winton certainly seems to be absolutely crammed full of history. It was here, for example, that the Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service - now, of course, known as QANTAS, was created in 1920 by a small group of pioneers who had to hold their first board meeting in the local club house. Originally settled in 1875, the town started out with the slightly more interesting name of Pelican Waterholes - according to the story, the local postmaster simply got fed up with writing the name of the town on official documents and envelopes and decided that he was going to start writing the name of his birthplace back in England instead. Hence, simply because the local postman couldn't be bothered to write two words, the town became known as Winton and has stayed that way ever since. This, truly, must be the sort of story you would only hear in Australia. Every two years, Winton holds what has become known as the Winton Outback Festival - If you happen to stop by at the right time to catch it, you might be slightly bemused to observe such wonderful events as the Egg Tossing, Goanna pulling, Wool-bale rolling, and my own personal favourite, the Dunny Derby. This last event involves placing wheels onto the bottom of wooden outdoor toilets (dunnys) and teams of athletes pulling them along on ropes while a "jockey" sits inside on the toilet and steers. Things like this would probably seem slightly stranger to me if I didn't remind myself often that I'm in Australia where the word normal simply doesn't exist.

Normally, supplying services such as water and electricity to remote settlements such as Winton is one of the perennial nightmares which the Australian government has to cope with. Winton, however, has its own rather handy solution to getting hold of fresh water - the town just happens to be sitting on top of three artesian bore holes which tunnel their way over a thousand metres down into the Earth and supply constant water from the Great Artesian Basin at a temperature of eighty-three degrees centigrade. They don't even need to install pumps - the Earth forces the water up through the bore holes to ground level without any help from anybody. Now that's what you call handy. It must be interesting to live somewhere where the water automatically comes out hot and you have to make it cold, rather than the other way around.

But there's one thing which Winton is more famous for than anything else - something recognised the whole world over as being truly Australian. Go up to somebody at random on the street and ask them to name one thing that they think about when you mention Australia, and what do you think many of them will say? Besides "You're weird, get away from me."

The town history states that, In 1895, a famous wandering poet and author called Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson stayed at Dagworth Station, just outside town. One evening, while listening to the after dinner entertainment, he was particularly moved by a tune that was being played by the station manager's sister, a woman by the name of Christina Macpherson. The tune was, by most accounts, a Scottish ballad called Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea, and Banjo enquired about the words. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending on how you look at it, she only knew the tune. Choosing to take this as an opportunity to show off to a woman who he clearly had his eye on, and to display his particular talent for poetry, Banjo Paterson set about the task of putting words to the music with the help of Miss Macpherson. The words they wrote were inspired by events he had witnessed during his stay at the station. The previous day, Banjo had been wandering across the estate when he had come across a sheep which had been deliberately killed by a swagman (1) and had parts of its body removed to make it look as though it had been killed by an animal - swagmen would steal sheep if they thought they could get away with

it. Banjo mixed this story with that of a local stockman by the name of Harry Wood, who had beaten a young Aboriginal boy to death. While searching for the murderer, Winton police happened to stumble across a jolly swagman, camped by a local billabong (watering hole). Mistaking him for Wood, the police attempted to apprehend the swagman who responded by jumping into the billabong and drowning himself to avoid what would clearly have been an unpleasant arrest. Taking these stories, and the tune he had heard at dinner, Banjo Paterson and Christina Macpherson put their poetry skills to work and Australia's unofficial national anthem, Waltzing Matilda, was born.

Winton is home to the Waltzing Matilda Centre, the only museum in Australia dedicated to a song. Now, at first glance, you might not think that being a museum dedicated to a song would be something worth shouting about - a little like boasting that you've got the world's only museum dedicated to belly button fluff, you might think - but Eloise and I both found the experience surprisingly interesting. After entering the museum, the first room turned out to be an elaborate mock up of the events portrayed in Banjo Paterson's song. As the door closed behind us, we found ourselves standing on a wooden bridge over a billabong - the floor had been mostly dug away and filled with water, and on a grassy verge across from us were life size models of the swagman by the waters edge, a mounted policeman sitting on a horse and another pointing a gun. As we stood on the bridge, the louvered roof above our heads closed silently and soft lights came on around the water so that the scene before us was suddenly bathed in a dim light. Mist began to rise from the water, and a ghostly apparition appeared before us to tell us the story of Waltzing Matilda, accompanied by the eerie movements of the swagman, which turned out to be an animatronic figure. To be absolutely honest with you, I don't think anybody had been expecting, when we'd walked through the front door into the centre, that we'd be talked to by a ghost or get to watch robots acting out a play for us. At least a few of our group perked up straight away at the realisation that perhaps this innocent looking building dedicated to a song might have something to offer them after all.

In an adjoining room, a really quite detailed exhibition told us far more than we could've ever wanted to know about swagmen, the way they were treated and looked down on by many, and how they went about living their lives and scraping a living day to day. Eloise and I particularly enjoyed a section at the far end of the museum where the centre of the room was divided into lots of cubicles, each of which contained a screen and a button. By standing in front of each screen and pressing the button, we would find ourselves being treated to many different renditions of Waltzing Matilda, sometimes with an accompanying visual display, from the original version to one with a totally different tune to an absolutely insane rock version. By far my favourite, however, was the version sung by Rolf Harris with the help of his famous wobbleboard and "heavy breathing". To be honest, we probably could've spent more time listening to many of them again and rolling around on the floor in laughter - and, believe me, I'll be the first to admit that if somebody had told me a few years ago that one day I'd be standing in a room listening to multiple recordings of Waltzing Matilda for fun, I would've laughed in their face.

Back on the road, we stopped for lunch at Middleton, where the local pub reminded us once again of that wonderful Australian sense of humour. With a total population of five, and nothing as far as the eye could see in any direction except red rocks and desert, a handful of plastic tables and wooden benches had been arranged under the shade of a rickety wooden awning for passers by to stop with their picnic lunches. Hung on the outside of this structure was a wooden sign pointing towards the pub which read:

HILTON HOTEL. VACANCIES. NO TV, NO AIR CONDITIONING, NO SWIMMING POOL. NO CHARGE

I suppose that, when you live in a place as desolate as this, hundreds of miles from anywhere and with a population of five including the family dog, a sense of humour is probably the best thing you can possibly have. The thing which really struck me was how well presented the pub was - I mean, when you bear in mind the population of the town and the handful of people who must pass through, a full sized bar with large verandah out the front seems a little like overkill to me - but again, perhaps there's so little to do out here that building a large fully equipped pub is the only way they can find to pass the time...

As we continue west on our journey towards the red centre of Australia, it's becoming more and more obvious to me that this whole region of northern Queensland has clearly been secretly twinned with the twilight zone when nobody was looking. It's something you don't notice at first - you just turn up in each place along the way, put all its local eccentricities down to cultural differences, and move on to the next stop along your route. It's only when you look at your voyage overall that things start to seem a little odd. If you remember, I commented during my stay in Mount Isa that the town felt like something out of a Stephen King horror novel, with empty streets and deserted shops. A little further along the road back to the east, Hughenden boasts about being the dinosaur capital of Australia and presents you with a giant life size plastic model in the middle of the town square just in case you don't know what one looks like, and now it would seem as though Boulia, our stop for the night, isn't just going to stand by and let its neighbours upstage it. Boulia, apparently, is known everywhere for the mysterious ethereal lights which appear in the night sky above it. These are lights, I hasten to add, which have been seen by everybody you talk to about it - not just some country yokel who was wandering home from the pub drunk one night and swears he was abducted by aliens.

All joking aside, the so-called Min Min lights are actually something of a phenomenon. Taking their name from a term in Aboriginal myths and legends dating back to a time long before western feet ever set foot in Australia, it is claimed that the lights will suddenly appear out of nowhere in the sky over large parts of outback Queensland and New South Wales and follow people around in their cars for several hours at a time before mysteriously vanishing as quickly as they came. Some insist that the Min Min lights display a high degree of intelligence, vanishing when approached or threatened with gun fire only to appear again after the threat has passed. Depending on who you talk to, the lights either pulse softly with a white light or change colour as you watch; are either spherical or disc shaped; either glow as bright as the sun or are only vaguely discernable; and either follow you closely wherever you go or keep their distance as though afraid. Naturally, explanations range from the credible to the patently absurd and have been put forward by people in all walks of life from scientists to local pub landlords. It is constantly claimed, often by newspaper articles published on the other side of the world, that a definitive explanation for the lights has finally been discovered and that the phenomenon has been successfully reproduced in a laboratory somewhere - but as with all popular mysteries, nobody really wants to listen. People the world over love things that they don't understand, but they never like being given a reasonable explanation - especially if it's a simple one.

My favourite explanation, and to me the most credible, is that the Min Min lights are a rare but well documented form of mirage known as a Fata Morgana. Once believed to be the work of witches, the phenomenon was named after Morgan le Fay, the fairy sorceress and half sister to King Arthur in Arthurian legend. Around the world, it is surmised, the same phenomenon could well be responsible for similar recurring legends such as that of the Will-o' the-wisp. This explanation seems all the more likely given that mirages are not at all unusual in the outback - we've seen many of them ourselves on our trip from Cairns. Normally, a mirage is caused by refraction of light waves as they travel from the sky or a distant object towards the ground. Materials of different densities bend and refract light in different ways, the most obvious example being the prisms we all experimented with at school which could redirect a beam of light at a ninety degree angle so that light projected at them from the front would be refracted upwards to hit the ceiling. Since cold air has a greater density than warm air, light travelling from a cool sky towards the hot desert at ground level is bent quite strongly back upwards at an angle away from the ground, as though somebody has placed a large reflective lens over the desert. To put it simply, this means that light from the sky which was destined to strike the ground instead gets bent away from it and travels on until it is seen by a distant observer. Since the human brain is only set up to expect light to have arrived in a straight line, it naturally draws an imaginary line in the direction from which the light arrived at our eyes and plots the origin where the line hits the ground - there is no way for our brains to know that the light was bent between leaving its destination and arriving at our eyes. The result is that we interpret the sky or the distant object from which the light originated, as being on the ground at the point where the light was bent back towards us. Because the light has been bent and distorted, the image arriving at our eyes is also upside down, so the brain will attempt to make sense of what we are seeing and will normally deduce logically that what we are seeing is a blue shimmering lake of water on the ground. In reality, what we are seeing is simply the sky superimposed at ground level. What makes mirages particularly interesting is that they are not a traditional optical illusion - you can take a photograph of them because a camera will capture exactly the same light that your eyes see. When you look at the photograph later, your brain does somersaults again trying to work out what it is looking at and you get the same result.

A Fata Morgana is a sort of reverse mirage. Instead of the ground being warmer than the sky, the reverse is true - the sky is warmer than the ground. This is why, although Fata Morgana are more common over cold seas, they only tend to happen in the desert at night when the temperature at ground level cools and the heat of the day rises into the atmosphere. With this type of mirage, light heading towards the sky from objects on the ground is refracted back downwards at an angle to be seen by an observer at ground level instead of continuing in a straight line into space. Because our brains plot the objects at the point in the sky where the light bounced, the object appears closer and to be floating in the air. Because the Earth is round it is possible for the light, after being bent downward, to follow the curvature of the planet and not reach an observer for vast distances. This creates quite a spooky effect where distant cliffs and mountains appear to be right in front of us. The image reaching our eyes also appears to hover over the ground due to the refracted image reaching our eyes upside down. What makes the Fata Morgana a reasonable explanation for the Min Min lights is that the headlights of far off cars, travelling along roads way beyond our normal range of vision and often below the horizon, could suddenly appear floating in the air apparently quite close to us. If we are travelling along a road in a car, and the distant headlights are travelling at the same speed along a parallel road below the horizon, these mysterious lights will naturally keep pace with us and appear to be following along. Fata Morgana are also responsible for many reported sightings of ghost ships floating over the sea, UFOs (the planet Venus on the horizon can bob around all over the sky when affected by this phenomenon), and the most famous was that of "Crocker Land", an island sighted by a North Pole expedition in 1906. The American Museum of Natural History handed over one hundred thousand dollars for the expedition to return and claim the mysterious island they had seen off the coast on their previous visit, only to discover some time later that they had been viewing the worlds largest Fata Morgana, an island many hundreds of miles away projected to appear just off the coast. Money well spent.

Of course, the car headlight explanation doesn't account for the appearance of the Min Min lights in Aboriginal folklore long before such things were invented, but it is conceivable that the same effect could have been created by the light from campfires in distant settlements, given the right conditions. Sceptics also claim that the lights exhibit intelligence and react to humans, darting out of the way when fired at by trigger happy residents, for example. It looks as though the Min Min lights will remain a mystery for a long time to come, and will continue to peak the curiosity of people the world over. I sure hope so, because without weird and wonderful things like this to talk about, many of these pages would consist of nothing more than descriptions of mountain ranges and lists of dead kangaroos we saw by the roadside!

We were staying for the night in the centre of Boulia, if it's possible for such a small town to have a centre. Apparently, there used to be several places to stop for the night in town, but the choices have now been whittled down to the Australian Hotel and a large cattle station out of town. I wouldn't want it any other way, of course - the last thing these small towns need is to be suddenly overrun with tourism. Anyway, our stay was - um - interesting. For a start, our experience of the large downstairs pub at the hotel was enough to give us the impression that a hundred years of friendly relations with the local Aboriginal people had sailed straight past the town without stopping - it was like stepping back into the nineteenth century. Clearly the main pub in town, if not the only one, the Australian Hotel seemed to be the focal point for social gatherings in Boulia. After dropping our suitcases off in our room and going downstairs for a drink, however, we both had to reattach our jaws from the sheer surprise at what we found. The bar formed an L-Shape around the inside wall, and the first thing that struck us as ever so slightly odd about the place was that one section of the room was clearly filled with Aborigines and the other with white people. There was a very obvious divide down the middle in which nobody was standing, the two groups were not interacting in any way, and we could almost hear somebody flushing one hundred years of race relations down the toilet. For a moment, as our group entered the room, a silence fell on the gathering as we were taken in and given the once over with suspicion by fifty pairs of eyes, but after a few seconds everybody obviously decided we were harmless and went back to discussing whatever it is that people living hundreds of miles from the nearest other town find to talk about.

We made our way over to the bar and ordered a drink, and before long one of the Aborigines had decided to buck the trend and come over for a chat. He was, I think we can safely say, the strangest individual we could've met - and the conversation which followed was the epitome of surrealism. Clearly, our new friend had no idea what sort of conversation he should attempt with visitors from Britain, and we didn't really know what we should ask about Boulia which wouldn't make us sound incredibly ignorant - so for quite a while we just stood there looking at each other awkwardly, coughing politely, smiling and occasionally sipping our drinks. It was very clear from the way this guy was dressed and the fact that he spoke with a thick guttural accent which it was quite hard to understand that he neither knew much about life outside Boulia or had even given much thought to whether there actually was any life outside Boulia. He seemed, however, to be very friendly and perhaps a little over eager to talk to us, informing us in between gaps in the conversation which could last up to a minute at a time about the things he had been doing today. After some time, we decided that we should go and have a look around Boulia before going to bed as we had a very early start in the morning, and tried to politely make our excuses. We thanked our Aboriginal friend kindly for teaching us about his life in Boulia, and were just starting to make our way towards the door when he called us back: "Where in YooKay?" he asked us in broken English.

"Oh, we're from London" we replied, thinking for a moment that this might be the start of a sensible conversation. The Aborigine smiled broadly, paused for just long enough to take a breath, and pointed at his feet on which we was wearing the most tattered pair of trainers I'd ever seen, clearly shoes which had probably not been changed in many decades.

"I bought my shoes in London" he said.

And on that note, we made our excuses and went outside. To be brutally honest here, if I said that there was nothing to do in Boulia then I would be exaggerating just how lively the place is. There's a tree in the middle of the street on a patch of grass. There's a battered wooden sign at one end of the street, pointing out the distances to places all over the world just is case anybody should forget, in this remote spot, that the rest of the world exists. The famous "red stump", at the other end of the street, is nothing more than a small red tree stump over which a sign warns travellers of the dangers of heading out into the desert without ample fuel and water, something I would've thought should be obvious even to a two year old monkey. The sign also contains one of the most incomprehensible sentences I've ever seen, something visitors can spend many hours (since there's nothing else to do) trying to make any sense of:

BOULIA'S RED STUMP. A SIGN THAT IF YOU GO ANY FURTHER OUT, YOU'LL COME OUT THE OTHER SIDE

Once a year, Boulia plays host to the local camel races at the grandly named Boulia Turf Club. People come from miles around to watch a handful of camels, clearly glad to have something to do for a change other than just standing around being gawked at by tourists, saunter around what amounts to more of a well trodden dusty track than a racecourse. Bets are placed. Money changes hands. Everybody has a good time. Then life returns to normal for another year, or as normal as life can possibly be out here. No, Boulia certainly isn't the most exciting place I've ever been - but then, the total population of the town is only three hundred, so perhaps just bumping into somebody else in the street is enough excitement to give the residents here something to talk about over dinner for days. Assuming they can find anyone to have dinner with, of course.

Walking through the darkened town, the ends of every street looking out onto endless desert, Eloise and I managed to walk from one end of Boulia to the other in a matter of minutes. The most exciting thing that happened was that two huge black dogs, possibly Rottweilers or some other vicious breed, suddenly darted out from wherever they were hiding on the other side of a fence and went into a mad frenzy of barking as we walked past, making us both jump about sixty foot in the air. They probably hadn't seen a stranger before, and continued to bark crazily into the night until we were well out of sight. They then did exactly the same thing on the way back. This didn't exactly endear as to Boulia.

(1) A swagman was a wandering homeless worker who moved from farm to farm looking for work with their possessions on their back in a pack known as a swag. In Australia, the common slang name for a swag is a Matilda, and the natural swaying of the bag back and forth as the swagman walks is described as the waltzing of the Matilda. So now you know.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.