South Australia’s Oodnadatta Track is renowned as one of the world’s greatest outback-motoring adventures – and it’s all thanks to one woman

Oodnadatta was little more than another hick town in the South Australian outback when 22-year-old Lynnie Trevillian arrived with her boyfriend and a motley assortment of friends, wild camels and donkeys.

They were only two months into their epic overland trek from Alice Springs to Gulgong in NSW, and Oodnadatta provided a handy pitstop after walking 700km in 45ºC temperatures across some of Australia’s harshest desert.

Oodnadatta was officially the hottest place in the country. With a population of just 300 (half of those Aborigines), unsealed roads, a few houses and outlying pastoral stations and a single hotel, it seemed to offer scant respite.

Yet as Lynnie stayed on, she became entranced by the little settlement at the heart of the great desert plains – more than 1000km north of Adelaide, 670km south of Alice Springs and nearly 200km north-east of Coober Pedy.

“I found it a fantastic place,” she says, still a resident 33 years later. “You leave Port Augusta and suddenly there’s no trees, just some hills and low scrub. It’s so open and free. I loved it.”

And now she’s not alone. Thanks to her efforts, a steady stream of local and overseas visitors are discovering the area’s charm and stunning landscape.

She and her now-husband, Adam Plate, realised it would make the perfect stop-off for people travelling in a number of directions. They named the route The Oodnadatta Track and hand-painted signs on 44-gallon drum lids to indicate points of interest along the way. “We had a real belief in the area for tourism,” says Lynnie. “But in those days everything was un-signposted, so you took your life in your hands if you went anywhere.

“If you were from the city like me, you’d end up following the most-used track and end up at a bore somewhere. So Adam started the signposting to make your average traveller feel safe in the outback.”

Lynnie then opened a roadhouse in the town. To make it stand out, she sprayed everything pink – including the building, an old vehicle parked out the front, the garbage bins, the seats, the scales and a tractor. Lynnie also gave the staff pink aprons and started wearing a pink T-shirt, a pink headband and bright pink lipstick.

It only seemed natural to call the place The Pink Roadhouse. “It’s just to make people smile and relax when they arrive,” says Lynnie of the place that’s become an outback icon and a beacon for weary travellers. “It’s a very happy colour.” Even the special Oodnadatta burgers served up are liberally topped with beetroot to give them a pink hue.

Nowadays, the roadhouse offers accommodation, meals, fuel, a store, a post office, a bank and limitless information about the Oodnadatta Track, such as conditions, places to see, where to stop and routes all around it.

The track has an embarrassment of riches. Following the line of natural springs from Marree, there are reminders all the way about the people who have gone before, from the local Aboriginals who used it as a trade route, to the European explorers, Afghan camel men, and the workers who put in the telegraph poles, laid railway tracks and erected a 5300km dog fence (which crosses the track 40km north of its starting point).

There’s also the massive Lake Eyre, whose salty basin covers more than a million square kilometres and one sixth of the continent to the west (the track has a lookout), the Stuart Creek railway bridge, the bubbling Mound Springs and the burnished red dunes of Irrapatana. Midway to Oodnadatta is William Creek – population five. Nearby is the massive Anna Creek Station, along with various homestead ruins and stunning sandhills.

Oodnadatta itself has plenty to see, including graves of pioneers and Afghan cameleers, the old Ghan railway station, a bush nursing hospital and an Aboriginal school. Off the track to the south-west is the Painted Desert, a mountainous area streaked with reds, pinks, mauves and purples. To the north-east is Dalhousie Springs, which offers 37ºC hot ponds for bathing.

Further up the track there are numerous bores, stations, creeks and a white-crusted landscape that could well be mistaken for the moon’s surface.

It finally ends at Marla, joining the road north to Uluru and south to Coober Pedy. “Many people on the coast believe the outback is just endlessly bland,” says Lynnie, now a 54-year-old mother of four. “But The Oodnadatta Track has constant variety. You live here with the feeling of being absolutely surrounded by contrast.

“I just want to inspire people who haven’t ventured out of the comfort zone of the city to come and see the outback for themselves.”

Award-winning author Sue Williams has chronicled the incredible adventures of Lynnie Plate in her new book, Women of the Outback, about 14 astonishing women who survived and thrived in the world’s harshest living conditions. It is published by Penguin Books. RRP $32.95.

Open Road September/October 2008