Borroloola

Remote town on the McArthur River, Northern Territory; in Life on Air a near-ghost town of three eccentrics.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Life on Air	David Attenborough	subject	A near-ghost town of three eccentrics.

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Life on Air — David Attenborough (2002)

Source: Original · Readwise highlight

Aborigines are not the only people living in the remote parts of the Australian outback. A few Europeans also choose to do so. We heard of three who had settled in the derelict town of Borroloola, two hundred and fifty miles south of Maningrida where the MacArthur River flows into the Gulf of Carpentaria.

• Role: subject
• In the book: Borroloola, a once-busy cattlemen’s watering place on the MacArthur River, died when artesian wells and roads made it redundant. Attenborough meets three eccentrics who stayed on: Roger Jose the self-appointed librarian living in an upturned water tank, Jack ‘Mull’ Mulholland the hotel-keeper with his patchwork car, and Jack Kitson the violinist in a cabin by a billabong. The termite-eaten book and the ‘hatters’ remark dramatise what the ghost town does to people.
• Why it matters: One of the book’s most extended and vivid portraits of place, a ghost town whose emptiness and isolation is the subject of the whole episode.