This issue of R.M.Williams OUTBACK celebrates a decade of bringing you the good news from beyond Australia's cities.
Story By Emma Mulholland
You'll forgive us here at R.M.Williams OUTBACK for being a little nostalgic as we scramble around the country collecting yarns and photographs for another edition of our magazine. As this 61st issue rolls through the presses we’ll be celebrating our first decade of publication. Ten years ago this unknown bush magazine nudged its way into the nation’s small but fiercely competitive publishing landscape with wild red dunes and a lone Akubra on the cover. Taking its place alongside glossy celebrity covers and more sedate lifestyle magazines, OUTBACK took to the newsstands with something new – a positive, unapologetic and quintessentially Australian stance.
Since then, our hundreds of contributors have conquered deadlines, droughts and floods to report on the innovative, worthy and inspiring things that happen away from our city centres every day. We’ve gotten to know station owners, flying doctors, volunteers and collectors of bowsers, tractors and chainsaws. We’ve downed beers in some of the world’s most isolated pubs and watched almost every species in this wide brown land race against one another, from horses in Goondiwindi to camels in the Alice, sheep in Boorowa and crabs in Broome.Typically, when metropolitan newspapers or news magazines turn their attention to the bush, the story is one of a drought-stricken, harsh and dangerous place where roads are poor and services inadequate. But if this is the real story of the bush, why do 20 percent of our population live there? And why do so many of us, from backpackers to grey nomads, swap our cities' smoke for the bulldust of the bush?
This story excerpt is from Issue #61
Outback Magazine: Oct/Nov 2008
