Bush and Birdsville lure Aussies

That's about it. Apart from learning how to say "gidday" in an unaffected manner, if you've ticked off the above activities you're well on your way to becoming an honorary Australian, if that is something you ever aspired to be.

Saturday, thousands of Australians and visitors curious to discover what Australia is all about will gather in central Australia at the edge of the Simpson Desert for the Birdsville Races.

The Birdsville Races are kind of like a provincial version of the Melbourne Cup -- unquestionably Australia's most celebrated horse race which is held every November.

But attending the Birdsville meeting is widely recognized as a more hard-core way to affirm your Australian credentials -- a nationalistic rite which requires a little hardship (getting there, even if it is in a light plane) and staying there (usually sleeping on the ground in a swag -- a sleeping bag).

The first race was held in September, 1882 in the then newly created township on the Diamantina River in far western Queensland just near the South Australian border.

Around 150 cattle-station owners, managers, stockmen, and other employees were present, "the weather delightful, the entrances for the various events good, and the finishes in most of the races close and exciting.''

They started the race with, quite literally, the drop of a hat, with no barriers to organize the horses.

More than a century on and the horses are still charging around the dusty course every September.

With the exception of a few years during the Second World War, the only other occasion when the races were cancelled was in 2007 during an outbreak of equine influenza in Queensland and New South Wales.

Australians, typically, didn't allow the absence of the horses stop the race day, partying through the weekend in the outback town despite the total absence of any equine entertainments.

Why this enduring affection for a horse race in the arid wastelands of the interior in a town which normally hosts a population of little more than 100 people?

It's complex, but to understand Australians you must understand how they so effortlessly combine their abiding affection, even their deep admiration for the nation's sparsely populated interior with their profound reluctance to live there.

Many of Australia's great heroes lived out in the "bush'' as the interior is vaguely known -- cattlemen, gold miners, bullock drivers and battling farmers.

Among our most enduring national figures are Burke and Wills, an Irish soldier and a surveyor who set off to find a way across the continent from south to north in 1860.

The did, but then died on the way home of exhaustion and starvation. One of the last places they were trying to reach for salvation was called, quite poignantly given what we now know, "Mount Hopeless.''

Few Australians have ever tried to follow them, hugging the coast as if their lives depended on it, even if many do enjoy wearing cattlemen's hats and dressing in the popular designer label "Country Road''.

While we may have carefully avoided following Burke and Wills' footsteps, we've never stopped talking about them.

It's a fascination which is perhaps a reflection of that strange obsession we have with heroic failure -- a trait, along with our acceptance and even admiration of eccentrics, we probably inherited from the British.

Even the bush's great chronicler, the 19th century poet Henry Lawson, who wrote of spirit-breaking droughts and lonely, hung-over tramps on bush tracks only ventured out there to gather material before bolting back home to the coastal breezes of Sydney.

Birdsville is the end of the celebrated "Birdsville Track'' which meanders more than 500 kilometres from Marree in South Australia.

The town itself was created towards the end of the 19th century to collect tolls at the border of South Australia and Queensland from the owners of herds of cattle being moved interstate.

When Australia became a federation in 1901, the tolls were abolished but the romance of a rollicking, roistering, inland cattle town never quite left the Australian consciousness.

The national broadcaster ABC reports that the Diamantina Shire Council, which includes Birdsville, is expecting crowd numbers to be up at Friday and Saturday's races.

Flooding from the wet season earlier this year has apparently made the nation's interior green (in patches) and visitors are flocking in to see it.

Council chief executive officer Scott Mason told the ABC the town was well prepared for the influx.

Feedback through visitor information centres suggests the global financial crisis has not dampened the nation's party spirit.

Mason said indications so far this year suggest between 80 and 90 planes will land at the town's isolated landing strip.

Visitor numbers will probably reach 6,000. The desert won't know what hit it.

Michael Madigan is the Free Press Australia correspondent. He is the Sunshine Coast bureau chief for the Courier-Mail.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 4, 2009 A10