"Victor Zulu Lima 269" is my personal radio outpost number registered by the Australia Communications Department. I feel like a member of the French Underground sending out vital information to the Allies..."Victor Zulu Lima calling Foxtrot Charlie Delta, come in, over!", crackle-crackle-pop, "This is Foxtrot, loud and clear, over"...

This bulky High Frequency radio with its 10ft aerial is a necessity in the Outback. You use it to call a telephone operator to place a landline call, and - worse case scenario - the Royal Flying Doctor Service if you meet up with the wrong end of a King Brown snake. The Flying Doctors will fly out to retrieve you in their King Air plane or a chopper within two hours of the call. I hope never to have to test their reliability.

Most remote stations (ranches) in Australia rely on this service for emergencies (many are 5 hours or even days from the nearest hospital). Each station is kitted out with a green metal trunk full of medicines and first-aid gear supplied free of charge by the Flying Doctors. When a rancher calls in with a toothache, for instance, the doctor tells him to take No. 105 twice a day...he rummages around in the trunk and pulls out the box labeled 105 and pops a pill. If the injury is serious the patient can be airlifted out or a specialist flown in to treat him at home. It works better than my HMO!

Last year we had a state-of-the-art satellite telephone, an expensive investment, but now it is useless as Iridium's 30 satellites are falling out of the heavens along with the assets of the now defunct company. So Victor Zulu Lima it is.

We have just returned from Tibooburra, a wonderful town in the Four Corners area of Australia, so called because that is where four states meet (New South Wales, South Australia, Northern Territories and Queensland). We were hoping to head further north into the red dune Simpson desert country but rain washed out the dirt tracks. Now rain falls here almost never - 6-8 inches a year, max - we are talking arid, dry, a desert.

Once in a hundred years nearby Lake Eyre, a vast rock-hard salt bed used for setting land speed records floods and becomes a lake again. Bingo! This is the year where Lake Eyre hosts thousands of nesting waterfowl and herons. Upstream the Cooper and Diamentina rivers have flooded into inland delta proportions, 10 meters (30 feet) above their normal levels, dumping it all into Lake Eyre. Roads may be opened again by September we are told. Maybe.

We were stranded by another mega rainstorm in Tibooburra, and all the roads out were closed for four days. So we met the locals in this town of 150 residents; relaxed, fun, uncomplicated folk who are happy to welcome fly-bys (tourists.) Australians have a great sense of humor - witty and dry like the British, bawdy like the Americans. They tease one and all unmercifully and you soon are caught up in the game with them. Under all that is a rock solid persona - after all they count on each other daily, survivors in a harsh land. It was a heart-warming lesson in what small town life can be. We left Tibooburra with new friends and blessed the 1 in a100-year floods which spoiled our plans.

Now we are headed south to the Nullarbor plains, a 250,000 sq. km limestone desert (the world's largest) bordered by 100 m (300-ft) cliffs above the pounding surf of the Southern Ocean. John Forrest, an early explorer wrote in 1870, "We reached the cliffs which fell perpendicular into the sea and, although grand in the extreme, were terrible to gaze from - we all rang back, quite terror stricken by the terrible view." We hope that this spectacular coastal vista does not provoke a similar response. We'll be looking for camels, rare hairy-nosed wombats and southern right whales if we're lucky.