In Search of the Min Min by Julie Miller

There’s not much to see in the tiny Western Queensland town of Boulia. A higgledy-piggledy collection of old farm machinery, dinosaur bones and cobwebs serves as a labour-of-love museum; there’s only one pub and there are a couple of camels that plod around a dusty racetrack once a year. But for the 300 residents of this remote settlement halfway between Mt Isa and Winton, ‘nothing’ is where the tourist dollar is at. In fact, Boulia has very successfully made something out of nothing.

What Boulia does have is a mystery, and a darn good one at that. It’s the home of the infamous Min Min Lights – inexplicable glowing balls of light that, over the past 150 years or so, have “terrorised and terrified” locals and passers-by. Like any good mystery the intrigue is in the storytelling and to capitalise on the widespread interest in this outback phenomenon the good folk at Boulia have taken the yarns out of the pub and into its very own attraction – the Min Min Encounter.

Built at a cost of $1.8 million, this theatrical experience has attracted up to 200 visitors a day since it opened in April 2000, a considerable feat considering there’s really no other reason to visit the town. Incorporating animatronics, fibre optics and high tech wizardry, it’s a 45-minute tribute to the art of outback bullshit, introducing visitors to the story of the Min Min lights through waxwork characters who claim to have witnessed the mysterious hovering lights themselves.

Visitors move through darkened passageways from scenario to scenario, where the figurines (in themselves rather creepy and sure to scare the pants off little children) give their version of the spooky events. Each story is based on a “true” encounter and reflects characters from the town’s history. The show concludes with a “ride” through time, allowing the visitor to imagine their own Min Min sighting and whetting the appetite to further explore the phenomenon.

Of course, like any good tale of the unexplained, the Min Min lights do not appear on cue. As the Min Min Encounter concludes, “you don’t go looking for the Min Min – it comes looking for you.” The last recorded sighting was in March 2007, when Noel Anderson, a truck driver from Alice Springs, was driving towards Boulia after stopping for a cold one at the lonely Middleton Hotel.

“On my right at about 30 degrees, I saw a light at about the height of two trees,” Noel states. “It caught my attention because it was so much brighter than a star. The most observable fact was the pure white colour...

“It would appear for about two seconds then disappear for almost 10 minutes... The same white lights then appeared smaller and further away. This time at about 15 degrees to the right of my travelling direction and lower in the sky. It would appear for half a minute to one minute. This happened three of four times...

“I must say I was not scared when the light was coming towards me,” Noel admits. “However there was no way I was going to stop the truck.”

So what exactly are these strange lights? Some claim they are supernatural in origin, ghosts of the past tormented souls. Others swear they are extra-terrestrial in nature, precursors to alien probes. Sceptics and scientists alike claim the phenomenon is a natural occurrence, anything from torch light bouncing off dingoes’ eyes to the reflection of distant headlights caused by atmospheric inversion to emu feathers tainted with a bioluminescent fungi.

The local aborigines knew of these lights long before European settlement, believing they were “debil debil” – the souls of departed blackfellas, to be avoided at all cost. However, the legend of the Min Min began in earnest around the 1880s, around the time the town of Boulia was established.

While the lights have been experienced in a wide radius surrounding the town, the epicentre of activity is the old Min Min Hotel, a ruin located 73 kilometres east of Boulia, just off the road to Winton. Surrounded by hectares of dusty, flyblown nothingness, all that remains of the former pub is a bottle dump and a couple of decrepit graves, an eerie and spine-tingling sight, particularly when a chill wind whips over the flat plain.

Legend has it that the old Min Min pub was once a roaring shanty, a den of iniquity so notorious for its murders and rapes that it was burnt to the ground in righteous retribution. It was not long after this act of vengeance in 1918 that the strange lights began to mysteriously appear, terrorising unsuspecting passers-by who chanced upon the ruins.

The most famous of these tales recounts the story of an unfortunate stockman who, on passing one cloudy night, was set upon by a glowing ball the size of a small watermelon hovering over the graveyard. Terrified, the man galloped towards Boulia with the light in hot pursuit, arriving in a lather of sweat two hours later.

Considering the drive from the desolate site to Boulia in an air-conditioned four-wheel drive takes a good hour, this story does seem a little far-fetched – but since that encounter, many people have claimed to see strange lights rise up from the graveyard and go bounding through the air across the stony expanse.

Not surprisingly, alcohol has played a role in many of these encounters – in fact the town admits that most of the stories are fuelled by rum.

Personally, the next time that I visit Boulia I intend to stake out the site of the old Min Min Hotel at midnight, thermos of Bundy in hand and an infrared camera by my side. If nothing else, I will have experienced a quintessential night under a starry outback sky, an extraordinary event at any time ... in a place where anything is possible.