Drop in to Wycliffe Well

When a universe is of infinite proportions it can be a long haul between major galaxies.
Wycliffe Well has become a famous spacemark and a favourite meeting place for interstellar travellers to rest their weary whatevers
Terrestrial travel writer Gemma Buxton beamed down

Leu Farkas has spent almost 3 million dollars renovating and expanding Wycliffe Well to make it much more than just a roadhouse, more like a family leisure park.
For instance; there is the Barramundi pond, a train track complete with a train that resembles Puffing Billy, a lookout tower for spotting UFOs, an Incredible Hulk style letter box which won the Burke's Backyard letter box competition, the Phantom to show you the way to the toilet and an open air auditorium designed to fit 300 people.
There are kangaroos, emus, peacocks, murals on every wall you can see, over 30 caravan sites, furnished rooms and a lake which when finished will be used for canoeing and boating and of course, the UFO sightings - who said living on a roadhouse was boring!
I spoke to Leu Farkas about the history of the place and his plans for the future. It seems that not all his ideas are down to earth.

What is the history of Wycliffe Well?

Wycliffe Well was established in this Central Australia region in 1862 as a main 'watering hole' along the stock route in the old days and for the telegraph line. Then in the war years it was a cooling down stop, a refreshment stop. Later it was a market garden and in the early sixties it was converted into a roadhouse and it's expanded from there.
Nowadays the facilities here encompass a roadhouse, motel, caravan park and then we've put in leisure activities like the lake, the auditorium with bar and restaurant facilities and the idea is to have performances happening there for people going past and for people who are staying.
We originally built the auditorium for the Royal Flying Doctor Service conference that was held here and the Variety Club Bashers when they came through. We'll also be getting people from Ali Curung to perform corroborees here for guests, which will be a permanent arrangement between us and the people at Ali Curung.
The lake, once we get it finalised, will be for canoeing and paddle boating, fishing and crabbing.
The facilities are here for guests of the park, it's just something extra for them to do and more of a reason for them to stay longer. The main aim is to have more things for our guests to do rather it just being for an overnight stop.
The idea of the barramundi pond is to pull out your nights meal and with barramundi being a good touristy type of fish, the idea is to have the barramundi in there when we're ready for it, but at the moment we've just got catfish, silverperch, rainbow fish and red claw crabs in there. The lake covers 10 acres with 150 million litres of water when it's full, we've had it half full a couple of times. It's big enough to change the weather pattern here and it's going to be a real drawcard for the birds and the wildlife. The fish live on whatever it is in the water, the slime and we occasionally feed them chicken pellets or throw in some bread, it's quite a fish frenzy when that happens, thousands of fish will leap out the water to grab this stuff. So that will be another attraction when it's ready.
We bought the fish from Darwin and had them trucked down and we've been growing them ever since, the biggest one is probably about 2 foot long, they're doing well.

What are the best or worst things about living at a Roadhouse?

I've been here for thirteen years and this was my first experience at it and it was just something I was going to do for a few years and then go back to the boat building business. The five years that I initially came up here for has turned into thirteen.
People say you're isolated living on a Roadhouse, but in some cases you're more isolated in town. I mean that many people have turned up here and bumped into their next door neighbour and the next minute they'll be talking their heads off at the petrol bowser.
City life is completely different to bush life, here people think you're lonely but in actual fact you're looking for time which you can have for yourself. You've continually got people coming and going on a Roadhouse and so you don't have much time to yourself. People who live in townships go to work, come home, lock themselves indoors and half of them won't see their neighbours except for a little wave.
We have all the modcons here, we've got T.V. and all the electricity and whatever you need, the only thing you miss here I suppose are burglars and traffic lights!

What about the UFO sightings around the area. When did it all begin?

UFO sightings have become very common ever since I put a camp site in for the staff quarters at the back of the park, which meant they had to go out at night to the west side. Up until then I had the caravan park and we never had many sightings.
When I put a telephone out the back, that's when we started seeing or observing these things up in the sky and that's when they started doing things rather than just sitting up in the sky. I have seen them since the first day I've been here.
Of course, talking to people from the war years, soldiers who used to be here say they were around then too, it's not something that's new here. It's just that for some reason, this area has an attraction for them, whether it's the Marbles or something in the desert.
We had them landing here for a month at one stage, you could actually watch them go up and down every night, like they were taking something out of the ground, so obviously there's something here that's of use to them or an attraction to them.
When we put the phone up out the back people would spend half an hour or forty five minutes on the phone and they had nothing else to look at except star gazing and all of sudden they'd see these things zipping around. That's when you start noticing things. But at the same time, we also started noticing that whenever these things came close to the park, we'd lose our telephone and Eftpos machine.
In those days we were on radio signals but now we're on fibre-optic and it doesn't interfere with us anymore like it used to. That's how we used to know that these things were about, for after experimenting for a while, we noticed that whenever we'd lose a line in here we would rush outside and sure enough there'd be a sighting out there.
Obviously their electrical impulses must cut straight through the signals down here and when they'd shoot off we'd be back on line again.
Most common sightings are coloured lights zipping around the sky, normally a big pulsating orange light and green and red lights flashing around it. Then other times we'd see objects, hat shaped or cigar shaped and sometimes they'd change shape three or four times in front of your eyes.
It would look like a star type of thing and the next minute it's a triangle. Also, from nothing you'd see a beam of light just come shooting down into the park. They'd have to be the three main types of sightings.
In most cases, we haven't been able to get any good pictures. Traditionally they've been too bright or they just give you a black screen. But there has been video footage, Channel 10 in Queensland bought footage off someone here and he got $150,000 for that which was shown all over Australia. That film has now disappeared, it doesn't exist anymore and in fact Channel 10 denies that they even showed it, even though half the country saw it!
It's the same sort of thing with the RAAF, we've had them out here chasing them with jets and yet they'll report on the T.V that there were no jets here.
We've had quite good sightings recently, the last one that my staff saw must have been about a week and a half ago. We've been told that they're fluorescent birds and hot air gases and balloons and all this but I mean when you see these things shooting around the sky. They'd shoot from one side of the sky to the other and without stopping, they'd being going in different directions, well you know we don't have things that can do that sort of stuff.

Are you a firm believer of UFOs?

Well, you only believe what you see and especially so with that time when you could watch them land out here.
There have been two times when it has been a bit hairy. One bloke had his vehicle stopped on the way back from Tennant Creek when he went to the hospital one day. All the power was cut off in his car and he lost an hour from his day. He arrived here an hour later than what he should have done.
He was at the Devils Marbles and saw this big light coming towards him and everything just stopped and he must have just been in a daze or something because by the time he got going it was an hour later. He doesn't remember anything about in between.
The other time was one night when we had a very close encounter. It was actually the night that the footage was taken and sold to the T.V. channels. It was a very large unit and had little ones shooting in and out of it and with this guy's video it was unusual because normally videos haven't been able to pick anything up because of the brightness.
But this particular video was such that he absorbed the lights, it was like a big high beam and what was happening was that as this thing was coming down all the people in the park started panicking. They all started running back to their caravans because it had that 'draw in' feeling to it. This guy's video camera, which was a very commercial type of thing absorbed the light but it also showed behind it and showed this big round shape and little space craft things shooting in and out of it and that was why he got so much money for the tape.
But when he took that film, he disappeared into the night because originally he was going to give me a copy of whatever he got, if he got something. Obviously he didn't want to share the film with me!

What effect has the UFO saga had on you and Wycliffe Well?

We've been put on the world map by it and I regularly get calls from UFO interests from all over the world. Whenever they have the UFO conventions on around the world, they always call me up to see what the latest is.
They send people down here, the latest was from New York to get the latest updates and they'll come and take measurements with instruments that can pick up impulses in the sky.
It's also made us a centre for UFO type of information and whenever there's something going on, they'll always refer back to Wycliffe Well which is a good thing.
But we don't do any promotion whatsoever. We let the tourists or witnesses do the promotion for us and that gives it complete authenticity - people can't just say I'm doing it all for promotional purposes.
Some people probably think that it's all just a publicity stunt, but at the same time the only people who mention anything about it are people who are believers or who have had their own experiences and who want to talk about it. They quite openly tell their experiences here and that's why I had to start a book out the front there so people can put their names and addresses in there. We get so many and it enables them to just get it off their chest.
We get a couple of jokers who come but then they'll read some of the articles we've got pinned up and then they change their tune so it's not really a problem. I think most people believe that there's something around and it's just that they haven't actually seen it themselves.

And your plans for the future?

At the moment, we're building some more units and a toilet block and as soon as we've finished that, we'll start on another hotel complex. We're booked out most nights and we just don't have enough rooms, so to fit the buses in I need to have more rooms.
We get a lot of people from the mines who come here for the weekend and also weekenders from Alice Springs.
People from Pine Creek who watch movements in the sky on their radars, come here to see if they can actually see anything in the flesh.
Once the fish pond is up and running, it will be even more of a reason for people to come here and have a look. We'll specialise with the fish in our restaurant and it's for people staying in the park to pull their nights meal out.