Hitting the Northern Territory

The drive from Broome to Katherine (the first town you hit in Northern Territory) is about 1600kms and the road (Highway 1) goes through three towns. So that's like driving from Lands End to John O'Groats and only going through three places the size of English villages on the way, with perhaps two or three petrol stations (or roadhouses, in Australia) in between these. It is an experience we will never forget.

It is a boundless void: inhospitable, oven hot, empty - with threats of cyclones imminent. We saw nothing for miles, just red soil, scrubby vegetation, termite mounds (some with painted faces or shoes hanging off them), the odd mailbox signalling a cattle station, kangaroo corpses, huge skies and the occasional, skeletal eucalpyt tree.

We passed through many primarily Aboriginal towns on the road up to Darwin. I have to say that, although this is something we couldn't fully appreciate or understand, we felt uneasy here. Many Aboriginal people seem to sit around, under the shade of trees or in small shopping centres, quite outcast from modern, Australian society.

Australia's indigenous population (or 'Aboriginal', which comes from the Latin, Aborigines, derived from ab (from) and origo (origin)) have led quite a disrupted life since the First Fleet of British convicts and officials arrived at Botany Bay in 1788. There has been a great deal of conflict and mistreatment since that time, the most horrifying being 'The Stolen Generations'.

From 1869 until as late as the 1970s, children of the Aboriginal people were forcibly removed from their families by the Australian government and church missions, through fear of miscegenation (the mixing of racial groups). A formal apology was only offered by the Australian government in 2008.

There are still huge health and economic difficulties facing Aboriginal people, with both remote and urban populations having adverse rates of lack of education, unemployment, poverty, crime and even child suicide. There is also a big alcohol problem. In towns where Aboriginal people live, bars are scarce and there are strict rules for the purchase of alcohol, including a kind of license system only enforced on the Aborigine people. What's more, jobs in these towns seem to have evaded the Aboriginals, with many foreigners taking roles in roadhouses, shops and tourist information centres (where they sell black dolls painted with Aboriginal markings, and didgeredoos that are made in Indonesia).

We don't know the whole story, and we know that they receive financial support from the Government, but it was quite unsettling to see large groups of people trying, and failing, to fit in with the local community. Of course, there are many Aboriginals who have chosen to avoid the westernisation of Australia and live in much the same way as their ancestors: we saw one man sat on a stool, under a tree, in the middle of nowhere.

We took five days to cross the barren expanse from Broome to Darwin, and they usually went like this.

-Wake up with the sun around 5am, soon be in a pool of your own sweat, so you get up.

- Perhaps bucket-shower off the sweat. Usually not, if we're being honest here. Water was precious and everything we owned was already dirty.

-Hit the road before 6am and have two hours of a fairly comfortable driving temperature.

-Ignore the sweat dripping from the backs of your knees by 9am.

-Watch the fuel guage and continuously keep checking the map to reassure yourself that we weren't going to get stranded in the bush.

-Drink copious amounts of water that started the day cold would be hot and taste like chlorinated soil by midday.

-Lunch would be somewhere nice in the shade, but the sandwiches would be almost cooked.

-Hold your breath as a beast of a road train overtakes you and spews dust and stones at the windscreen.

-Get back into the Beatle wagon and repeat the morning, with the drinking water temperature increasing.

-Find a camp site before it gets dark.

-Hang up the day's clothes to dry off.

-Brave the bush toilet in the dark and hope for the best.

-Wait for the temperature to drop a few degrees before making the bed, all the while trying not to be bitten by mosquitoes.

-Lay in a pool of your own sweat until falling asleep. Attempt to squat said mosquitoes.

-Fantasise about ice and other cold things. Consider ways of getting cool. Sometimes eat some ice from the cool box and place one piece on your forehead.

-Repeat.

We stopped off in Katherine, and then drove to Kakadu - a National Park the size of Israel. It's full of crocs, especially at this time of year, oh, and there are dingoes too! I got food poisoning from some red wine that had all but boiled in the heat (I thought it would make me sleep - how wrong I was!) and had to run in and out the van in 30 degree heat at night to be sick - fearing crocs, dingos, and the electrical storm overhead. 24 hours I will never forget.

But it was all part of an unforgetable journey and to drive on the cusp of the Kimberly region and experience the vastness of the area (twice the size of the UK) and it's remoteness was a true adventure. This was real Australia: remote, wild and free.