Molly Dixon had just completed her last day in Australia on a chapter that had already stretched 3.5 years, and the question people kept sending her was always the same: does living alone on the road get lonely? It is the kind of question that assumes solitude and suffering travel together, but Molly’s answer, built slowly across thousands of kilometers of red dirt and open sky, is more complicated and more honest than a yes or no. She had just packed up her vehicle and pointed it north from Victoria, chasing warmth after a month with friends and family in a house, with a cold, heading back to the only life that has ever felt like hers.
Three states, one vehicle, and a first fuel stop over five hundred dollars
The plan from the start was to push hard: Adelaide first, roughly 9 hours, then Coober Pedy, then Alice Springs. The first fuel stop alone cost over $500, a figure Molly noted aloud without complaint, pointing out that the vast distances ahead make Outback driving a genuinely different financial reality than the tight loops she had been running in Tasmania for the previous six months. Driving days ran long. She counted 25 hours of driving across three days, pausing at rest stops every 50-odd kilometers to cook chicken soup mixed with rice on the back of the car, to watch sunsets with the sun going straight into her eyes, and to listen to the kind of quiet where there is not a breath of wind and the cars have all pulled over for the night.
Coober Pedy arrived in the dark, as predicted. In daylight it revealed itself as one of the stranger towns on the continent: the opal capital of the world, producing 70% of the world’s supply, home to just 1,800 people, and so brutally hot in summer, with temperatures regularly exceeding 50 degrees Celsius, that roughly 80% of residents live in dugouts, underground homes that hold a naturally stable temperature of around 25 degrees year-round. Molly walked through one, past the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom, the kids’ room, and simply said: ‘crazy.’
What three and a half years of silence actually teaches you
The loneliness question is the real subject of this journey, and Molly’s answer is not a motivational poster. She calls herself extroverted. She loves being social. Time with friends and family is, in her own words, very special to her. But she describes something she has come to understand about herself specifically: that for her, loneliness arrives inside a life she is unhappy in, not inside solitude itself. ‘How can I feel that way,’ she asked, ‘when I’m constantly seeing ever-changing beautiful locations?’ She sits by waterfalls for hours, hunts for four-wheel drive tracks, spends too long trying to catch new species of fish, and sleeps somewhere different every single day.
Years of being alone with her own thoughts have, she says, made her thoughts a nice place to be. She has also built a specific rhythm: completely present with the people she loves when she is with them, then strapped back in to the solo road when it is time. A month in Victoria, in a house, with her friends and family, sick with a cold. Then the vehicle packed, the cold weather left behind, and the drone back in the air over red dirt roads where, as soon as you leave the city, 95% of drivers give each other a small wave going past.
She crossed the Northern Territory border just before dark and pulled into Alice Springs to find a caravan park, a shower, and a bed.
The mark on her leg from Cape York
Before leaving Tassie, Molly had gone north to Cairns and up to Cape York for fishing and crabbing. She came back with a burn-cut on her leg from a wallaby that jumped out at a quad bike and caught her with what she believes was its tail. She mentioned it only because the drone footage made it visible, and her response was to note it and move on: ‘I think it’s going to be there for a while.’
Alice Springs sat behind the caravan park fence, waiting for a proper look in the next leg. The stars over Coober Pedy the night before had been extraordinary, no light pollution, absolutely phenomenal, she had said before going to sleep. Three days, three states, 25 hours of driving, and she was ready for bed but, she added quickly, very happy to be back.
