The Min Min Lights: The Outback Glow That Follows Travelers
On the road into Boulia — a small town in the Channel Country of far western Queensland, about as deep into the Australian outback as a road can take you — stands an official sign, erected by the shire itself, of a kind no other government on earth has thought necessary: it announces that you are entering Min Min Light country , and wishes you, in effect, an interesting night. The town means it. For a century and more, this stretch of Australia — flat as a dropped map, black at night beyond any European's understanding of the word, the horizon a perfect circle drawn at the edge of the world — has been the range of the world's most sociable ghost light. The Min Min is a glowing oval — white, sometimes greenish, sometimes warming to red — that appears low over the plains at night, hovering, quivering slightly, about the size of a watermelon or a headlamp; and what it does, and has always done, is the thing that has raised the hair on generations of drovers, mail-men, and motoris...