Surf’s Up, Allegedly
Eromanga is an oil-and-opal town in the Queensland outback, clinging to the edge of the Eromanga Inland Sea – which is bone dry.
Plenty of bones in fact – of the dinosaur kind. And no end of irony too, since this waterless sea marks Australia’s furthest point from the sea in any direction.
Proof of the claim resides in the signpost standing in Eromanga, where the distance to any of the nation’s coastal burgs is tallied in four figures. (The nearest is Brisbane, at 1057 kilometres.)
With a population of 80, most of them oilers or noodlers (opal hopefuls), you won’t find much to do in Eromanga, aside from drinking at the Royal Hotel, an ex-Cobb & Co coach house.
For all you etymologists out there, Eromanga owes its name to the Aboriginal phrase ‘a hot windy plain’, and not the Japanese coincidence, where ‘ero-manga’ is a hot erotic comic book.