Back in the early 80s my wife, 6 month old daughter and I drove home from Dampier to Newcastle after a couple of years working in the iron ore industry. The trip went well until we got to Broken Hill late one afternoon, as we had reached NSW and seemed so close to home we decided to push on a bit further. There had been a lot of negative press at the time about outback towns in NSW due to problems that some of them had been experiencing with "locals". When we got to Wilcannia we felt absolutely intimidated by the number of indigenous people hanging around the streets and decided to push on, same again in Cobar so we took off for Nyngan. About midnight we hit a large roo 5kms from town, damaged the car and put us out of action. That irrational and unwarranted fear of indigenous people caused us to make a pretty stupid decision in travelling a dangerous section of road late at night particularly as we had been on the go for over 14hrs..

I'm now almost 40 years older (and hopefully a little wiser) I tend to judge both people and places from my own personal experience and not what I hear from others, the next time that we are travelling out that way I will look forward to staying in Wilcannia, Cobar or any of the other outback towns.