What is a roadhouse in Australia?

A roadhouse in Australia is a place along an outback highway selling fuel, food and accommodation. But many, such as the UFO-obsessed Wycliffe Well roadhouse, have eccentric extras.

Australia is a vast country with an awful lot of essentially uninhabited wide open outback. You can spend 24 hours driving from Perth to Broome through not a lot, passing a 1,170km-long fence on the way. The Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory is almost the size of Wales. A train from Sydney to Melbourne takes just under 11 hours.

Because of this gargantuan size and relative emptiness, you end up with roadhouses. This is a concept that does exist elsewhere, but the Australian version is highly distinctive.

Think of a roadhouse as being like a motor era coaching inn. It’s a staging post for travellers to get fuel, supplies and, if they need to, stay the night. Just don’t expect the sort of romanticised charm that the term “coaching inn” tends to conjure up nowadays.

Roadhouse fuel prices

Along the long highways that connect the outback, there will be several roadhouses. Each will sell fuel, often at extravagant prices. They will serve food, often only barely palatable to humans and almost always deep-fried. And most will have a few rooms to sleep in, veering in standard from functionally adequate to really quite grim. These, at best, save you from having to run the kangaroo gauntlet when driving at night.

These roadhouses are spaced an hour or two apart, and they act as little hamlets along the outback highways. Nobody really wants to spend time in a Stuart Highway roadhouse, for example, but if taking a long outback journey, it’s a necessity. Even if you’re just getting petrol, stretching your legs and buying a bottle of water, there’s no way round it. Just save up the stays for the ones with half-decent accommodation.

Roadhouse gimmicks in Australia

Despite being nothing else for an hour or two in any direction, there is an element of competition with the roadhouses. They know drivers can skip one or, at a push, two. So many of them have gimmicks. Australia’s Big Things, such as the Giant Koala at Dadswell Bridge in Victoria or Big Kangaroo at Border Village in South Australia, are the most notorious example of these. But there’s plenty of silliness elsewhere.

Wycliffe Well roadhouse in Australia: Alien hotspot — The Wycliffe Well roadhouse in Australia claims to be a UFO hotspot.

Between Alice Springs and Katherine Gorge in the Northern Territory, the Wycliffe Well roadhouse claims to be Australia’s UFO hotspot. The Pink Roadhouse in Oodnadatta, South Australia, paints everything it can pink. In Balladonia, Western Australia, there’s a museum devoted to a crashed space station.

It’s this eccentricity that makes a roadhouse in Australia fundamentally different to one you might find elsewhere.