The second time I saw Fred Hughes, his image passed quickly through the corner of my left eye, a speed-blurred figure of a cowboy leaning against a tailgate, shooing a fly from his face. Hughes's truck was parked next to his airstrip, a red-dirt affair that was, at the moment, rising toward me much too quickly.
I hauled back on the Cessna's control column, but the airplane hit the dirt with all three wheels and bounced skyward, pitching forward and yawing to the left "a bit sickeningly," as Hughes would later put it. As the craft settled again toward the ground, I got the nose up and pointed to the end of the runway and eased the plane down on the rear wheels.
Taxiing back toward the truck, I noticed Hughes rummaging around in a cooler. I cut the engine and hopped down to the dusty earth, where his outstretched hand held an icy bottle of Coopers Original Pale Ale.
"No offense, mate," Hughes said, "but I'm glad it's not my plane you're learning in."
Fred Hughes's Kars Station was my first overnight stop on a 1,700-mile (2,736-kilometer) learn-to-fly journey around Australia's eastern outback. Traveling with me, in the copilot's seat, was instructor Pablo Mueller, 23, a fresh-faced German with the patience of a stone Buddha and the reflexes of a mongoose. I had spent the past week with Mueller, learning the basics of flying at Moorabbin Airport, outside of Melbourne. After seven days of intensive theory and twice-daily flights, we had packed our gear into a Cessna 182—an ideal aircraft to access remote outback airstrips, with its long range and short takeoff and landing capability—and flown north into the clouds. The coastal overcast gave way to scattered puffs as we crossed the wine and grain country of the Murray Basin. Then the green fields below us faded to mauve and sage and bare red earth, and the sky spread around us in a deep and seamless blue.
In the rear seat was Australian Peter Sherlock, also a pilot and co-owner of a Melbourne-based company called Big Blue Air Touring. Sherlock specializes in airborne tours of the outback's roadhouses and remote ranches, which Aussies call stations. At my request he had put together an itinerary that would combine flight instruction with visits to his far-flung friends in four Australian states: Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia.
On the way up from Moorabbin we had stopped for fuel at Broken Hill, the mining town that served as a base for filming Road Warrior and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Then, after checking in with Hughes, we had gone up to practice a few touch-and-go landings in the last strands of orange sunlight. Each takeoff generated dense cyclones of red dust, which the light breeze carried toward Hughes's house.
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