Outback Australian roadhouse - food and respite for weary travellers 🏜️🚛 | Landline | ABC Australia

Hello you slack a lot of shits. How are you going?

It can be a desolate and even dangerous landscape.

Help is often far away and hard to reach.

It's where Roadside Inns in the Northern Territory play a very different role to your average fuel stop.

As it often goes, the surrounds also tend to attract some larger-than-life characters.

Unique in a myriad of personality traits and skill set.

Laughter is the best medicine. Some people haven't got it in them but that's all right.

Greg Dick better known as 'Dickie'

has been here for 40 years.

There's few who don't know of this straight-talking

character who has a penchant for all things outlandish.

Love or loathe him, he doesn't really care either way.

I have a top time with tourists, yeah, really good.

Some don't know how to take me on what and it doesn't matter.

73 year old Dickie runs the Aileron Roadhouse,

which is roughly 200 kilometres north of Alice Springs.

It's an infatuation with this unique landscape that lured him north in the 60's.

Well, in the early parts, when I went to school, the Woman's Weekly was a very big paper.

It used to always have two pictures of Namatjira's paintings.

My mother used to show them to me and I'd say I'm going there one day, I'm going to go.

I love the country, just from those paintings.

It's an enduring love.

His tribute taking on a shrine like form.

He's collected more than 300 paintings from the famous Namatjira family.

I've been offered big money for them and things, but I won't, no way.