28 people rescued in six weeks: inside the outback’s growing Lake Eyre tourism risk

Twenty-eight people have been rescued from South Australia’s outback over the past six weeks, according to local resident Trevor Wright, as unusually heavy rain turns a popular sightseeing trip into a serious hazard for unprepared visitors.

Among the latest were Bill Kosky and his son, from Middle Park in Melbourne, who had set out to see Lake Eyre fill with water — a rare spectacle that draws travellers whenever the inland lake floods. A sudden storm on Halligan Bay Road turned the unsealed track into deep mud, leaving their Toyota stuck for 12 hours with almost no phone signal.

The pair sent brief emergency messages before losing signal completely, then spent the night alone in the flooded desert with no certainty about when help would arrive.

Their rescue came through a chance stop at the William Creek Hotel on the Oodnadatta Track, where Perth billionaire and experienced pilot Tim Roberts had landed his private helicopter to stay overnight. On hearing that emergency services were searching for the missing pair, Roberts abandoned his own plans and teamed up with Wright to search from the air.

The huge expanse of mud and water made the vehicle difficult to spot, but the two eventually located it and landed nearby, ending the ordeal. “I thought you were in the army or something,” Kosky told Roberts.

Halligan Bay Road is already considered challenging even in dry conditions, and the area’s limited communication coverage makes emergencies harder to manage — a combination that officials say is putting growing numbers of Lake Eyre-bound tourists at risk this season.

[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]