The road from Tibooburra to White Cliffs is all dirt. You only know you’re on a road because of the occasional DIP sign, the ever-present cattle grids and the well-carved ruts of cars and trucks. Otherwise it simply blends with the desert. If you’ve ever flown in small commercial or light planes over this part of the world, you can see these tracks cutting their way through the scrub and brush. They seem to come from nowhere and go nowhere. I spend a lot of time flying over them; now I’m on one and it’s great to know that they start in towns like Tibooburra and end up in the old opal mining settlement of White Cliffs.

The run in is extraordinary. As you leave Tibooburra the white quartz covering so much of the ground, snow-like, gives way to a black rock – a rock that here and there makes the vast plains look as if they have been tarred. The effect is surreal. From white to black, it all seems unnatural. But this land, so untouched in most places by human hand, is exactly as ‘nature intended’ – an enthralling pallet of colour and form.

It’s a 280-km trip that takes about four hours – sometimes at a snail’s, as you dip through the desert’s natural floodways; at others, a dust-churning thunder. As you come up on the final 50 km into White Cliffs, the land, the hills, the colours and light all begin to play the most wonderful tricks – under a clear sky that starts soft and pale on the horizon, rising to a deep, deep blue at its zenith. The oranges and violets of the earth are like no colour you will ever see. Perhaps an artist somewhere sometime – perhaps Namatjira – has caught them. But I doubt it. Flecking through these luminescent red shades is a green of grasses, somewhere between khaki and olive, lifting the whole scheme further into the unreal. It’s a kaleidoscope of colour like none other. You stare, and stare, and stare at it, trying to make sense of such richness. Coastal dwellers know the rich greens of gum forests and the deep blue of oceans, but these shades are unique.

Then as you first see the white cliffs of White Cliffs, perhaps 30 km from town, you notice the ridges and long stands of trees – or are they? – disappear and appear, in and out of the haze of distance. Far away in the distance, or perhaps not, mountains seem to move in the shimmer, houses appear and disappear. You start to doubt any movement, anything you see, long off – a true mirage!

This trip has been the best feast for the eyes I have had since Coober Pedy to Port Augusta last year. But I’m here to show movies. So we set up in the community hall to screen on Easter Monday: a 5:30pm Storm Boy session for the kids, and The Proposition at 7:30pm for mums and dads. White Cliffs is a pub, a post office and a general store. There’s a motel and a guest house for the tourists who come through; there’re quite a few of those now, but they usually only stay for one night. White Cliffs was the first commercial opal-mining town in Australia, discovered by some roo shooters in the mid-19th century. The locals are a hardy bunch, and mostly retirees who are after a very, very quiet life, mixed with a bit of prospecting. You could almost say it’s the most remote retirement village in Australia.

Over the two Big Screen sessions we get about 35 people, more than half of them locals, which in Tibooburra is a great turnout. The kids loved seeing Storm Boy, their parents loved seeing it again, and the adults were “blown away” by The Proposition. One ol’ fella commented that it was a long time since they showed a movie of any sort in White Cliffs. When I asked him how long ago that was… “Oohhhh, a long time, a long time”. So the pictures were back in White Cliffs for one night at least, and they were Australian.

Next stop Wilcannia, 100 km up the track, for an outdoor screening of The Tracker.