To many city dwellers, becoming trapped for weeks where you live would be a terrifying prospect. Not so for the remote outback towns of Birdsville and Bedourie on the edge of the Munga-Thirri Simpson desert. Five weeks after flooding cut off roads into the towns, the residents’ biggest complaint is that the local store is down to two flavours of chips.
Since early February, the rural Queensland communities which border both the Northern Territory and South Australia, have only been accessible by plane. Flooding has turned the orange outback green-blue and, with further heavy rainfall and flooding forecast in the coming days, the dirt roads aren’t expected to open for another month.
Luckily the towns – which have a combined population of about 260 – are pretty used to isolation.
In 1974, locals were cut off for about four months after flooding severed the Birdsville Track and required locals to transport goods by boat. They were shut off for six weeks last year by flooding in excess of 1974 levels, with prolonged rainfall filling Lake Eyre – something that only happens a handful of times in a generation.
But both towns have avoided flood damage – Bedourie is protected by a levee bank, which stands 1.2 metres above the 1974 flood levels – and there are plenty of supplies.
Jenna Brook, who operates Birdsville’s service station, post office and grocery store, says the town typically has a “good stockpile” of non-perishable groceries in anticipation of road closures. She has been coordinating with the government to fly in essential supplies – but that doesn’t include things such as soft drinks, cigarettes, snacks or bottled water.
“These resupply flights are great, but … no one would ask people in Brisbane to go four weeks without being able to resupply chocolate and soft drinks,” she says.
‘We just adjust’
Station owner David Brook was born in Birdsville in 1947 and has never lived anywhere else. His cattle haven’t been impacted by the recent flooding – in fact, it’s likely to be the “best season” he’s had due to the high rainfall.
“It’s hard to believe these falls,” says Brook, who is Jenna’s father. “It’s not unusual for these rivers to flood very big, but it’s very unusual to get it all the way down halfway through South Australia as well.”
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailBrook says it doesn’t take much for the dirt roads to shut.
“You get 30mm of rain and it’s all over. Well, we’ve had a couple of hundred,” he says.
“It’s going to be a testing time, because lifestyles are a bit different today. You get used to being able to get the food you want. People want to get fresh milk, and then you have to tell them it’s only long-life.”
During periods of isolation, Queensland government guidelines only allow communities to resupply essential items by air, which means fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and bread, basic groceries, pet food and medical supplies. Last Friday, Bedourie received its first delivery of mail in five weeks, with 519kg arriving by air.
Jenna Brook says her store – the only one in Birdsville – is down to just two flavours of chips at the moment.
“And they’re not selling very well, so I’m going to guess they’re not people’s favourite flavours. But we just adjust and try to lengthen out how long our supplies will last.”
Brook says it can be stressful for the community to deal with travel disruptions – flying is extremely expensive to get to and from remote towns. But at the same time, “if we ran out of Tim Tams and chocolate, that’s a big problem”.
“A double standard here is that we are asked to be resilient more often and for longer periods of time than places where there’s more votes and where there’s more people.”
Desert is transformed
Bedourie is home to 150 people, while Birdsville is home to about 110 although that swells to more than 7,000 during its annual races in September. Birdsville also forms a popular tourist destination for travellers visiting the nearby Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre and starting the famous 517km Birdsville Track to Marree.
While Francis Murray, the mayor of the Diamantina shire, which encompasses Birdsville and Bedourie, says he’s used to isolation, both communities have a “pretty transient” population.
“There’s plenty of people in the community that [being cut off] is new to,” Murray says. “But there’s enough old hands here, too, to guide the new ones through.”
Ben Fullagar, the general manager of the Birdsville hotel and local plane service Birdsville Aviation, has been in Birdsville for 13 years, and says everyone remembers their first flood and road closures.
“Then, over time, you realise that it’s quite a normal part of life in channel country, and then you start to look at people who live on the coast and think that they don’t live such normal life,” he says.
“They look at us and think we’ve got all these challenges with weather, whereas we look at the coast and go, well, they’ve got all these challenges with social pressures and traffic. It’s just a different lifestyle, you know?”
The pub has been “poking along”, he says.
“I mean, there’s only a limited amount of people in town,” Fullagar says.
“We’ve been having big Friday theme nights to entertain the locals while the roads are closed. This Friday we’re doing American prom night, we’ve had disco nights … They’re not feeling like ‘oh we’re stuck in Birdsville’.”
Similar situations may happen more often in the future. Australia experienced its fourth-warmest year on record in 2025, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. Global heating, driven mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, has increased the frequency and severity of extreme weather events.
Once the rain recedes, Fullagar says there is a profound beauty to the changed landscape. Parts of the Simpson desert are turning from red to green and proliferating with bright purple, red and yellow wildflowers that bring a backdrop of white pelicans.
Lake Eyre is also filling to a level “not seen since the 1970s”.
“It brings the channel country to life like you’ve never experienced,” Fullagar says.
“It’s amazing to see because it just becomes this oasis of health and growth. There’s never going to be a year like this to see the outback.”
Murray saw it for himself helping to resupply to properties this week in a chopper, and says “what was once brown is now green, and what’s green is like glass”.
“Obviously our tourism season is going to start late because nobody can get here at the moment,” he says. “But the desert has been completely transformed.”
• This story was updated on 20 March 2026 to remove a line about the Big Bash festival, which incorrectly said it had been cancelled.
