A Portrait of Australia: Outback

More of a space than a place, the outback is where big blue skies meet a red-dirt horizon. If the bush is where we've developed our country's sense of community outside the major cities, where the heck then is the outback? The beguiling but often unsatisfactory answer is that it's nowhere but everywhere: close to nothing and a long way from everything.

Travel with Australian Geographic through the 6 million sq. km that could be called outback - with a resident population of no more than 60,000 but an ever-growing number of visitors. Once, you could travel for weeks without seeing a soul, but these days even the outback's iconic Birdsville Track is a two-lane graded highway where you'll find it hard to be alone.