On the road in the Outback, Tom Huth finds himself a rainmaker in the middle of a drought. Here, at the core of Planet Australia, it's happy hour every hour on the hour

Why does Australia's lonely red heart keep bringing me back like a dog to an old shoe?

Here we go again, loading the cooler with provisions in a supermarket parking lot in the spent-out mining town of Broken Hill. Excitement reigns: Good-bye life as we know it! We are heading out—the landscape photographers Len Jenshel and Diane Cook, the Aussie guide Mike Keighley, and I—on a four-wheel-drive adventure to that parallel universe known as the Outback, and we're stocking up because once the pavement runs out, the only lunch spot we're going to find is some dry riverbed.

We linger in the ghost town of Silverton, the end-of-the-world backdrop for Mel Gibson's Road Warrior heroics. The old sandstone buildings, crumbling gracefully under the merciless blue sky, are now inhabited by artists who like to paint tripped-out emus on junked Volkswagens. But even such batty license (it's par for the course in the Outback) can't keep us from hitting the road. And soon enough we're watching real emus strut their stuff—prancing ahead as if to taunt us, then hustling away, waggling their big feathered butts.

We modern, sensitized, pre-apocalyptic road warriors are driven not by any Mad Maxian fury but by a frolicsome cross-cultural curiosity. We are out to make contact with those odd-duck Australians who've been suckered away from the lush coastal plains to serve out their sentences on the driest, flattest, least populated hellscape on earth. My rule of thumb? The bleaker the stage, the bolder the characters.

The Outback covers practically all of Australia. Imagine a waste area, a sand trap, stretching from Scranton to San Bernadino. After three previous crossings, though, I know that it's far from a featureless void. Along the dirt road to Tibooburra, the land is hillocked at first and speckled by mint-green saltbush, with the Flinders Ranges wrinkling the horizon. Later, witchy-fingered trees appear in the desert's creases, with gums standing taller in the sandy creek beds. A system of fair-weather clouds trundles across the sky. Then the land turns naked and stony.

Wherever you look, no one is home. Tire tracks lead away to an unseen cattle station, a castaway fridge serving as the mailbox. There is nothing that resembles a fence line. Every hour or so, we make out the dust plume of another car approaching. Ten minutes later we pass it, and Mike, at the wheel, lifts one finger in greeting.

It's one hundred degrees, the first day of autumn, when we pull over for lunch. Like the jolly swagman in "Waltzing Matilda," we settle under the shade of a coolibah tree, and our guide tells the story behind Australia's melancholy anthem. The swagman is a heartbroken traveling handyman who is hunted down for killing a landowner's goat and drowns rather than surrender to the authorities. "It's about our underdog mentality," Mike reckons. "It goes back to our convict days." So that Aussie swagger is a smoke screen? "We have a tall-poppy syndrome," he says. "Achievers get cut down to size. When Russell Crowe comes home, he goes back to the pubs. 'I'm one of you!' he's telling them."