Abandoned NT roadhouse faces difficult path forward
It was once considered Australia's most likely place to encounter an Alien or UFO, but now, the Northern Territory's roadside stop at Wycliffe Well is more of a ghost town. The demise of the unique and successful tourist hotspot on the Stuart Highway tells a grim tale of roadhouses in outback Australia, and the challenges they face to stay open.
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00:00It's obviously very sad and the circumstances behind it is sad as well.
00:10It's a very eerie place now.
00:12It's completely abandoned.
00:14It's just a ghost town.
00:18Welcome to Wycliffe Well, Population Zero, a once thriving roadhouse that claimed to
00:24be the UFO capital of Australia.
00:27It was so different to anything that I'd really been experiencing before, being in the middle
00:34of the NT and a desert.
00:37Its former owner devastated at its current state, deserted and ransacked.
00:43To have it destroyed is just heartbreaking.
00:47The scenes here at Wycliffe Well, for some operators, serve as a cautionary tale about
00:52how a business can go from great to a failure and left in ruin in just a matter of years.
00:59There's not as much share to go around, so if you can take two, three percent off the
01:03boat down the road, that's a big change.
01:06When Wycliffe Well flooded in 2022, its owners, franchisees of United Petroleum, evacuated
01:13to the Devil's Marbles Hotel just up the road.
01:17The damage was so significant, they have since been unable to restore Wycliffe.
01:23It's great for us, but you know, it's such an asset that the territory is lost.
01:29Tourism Central Australia says it's unlikely the intergalactic roadhouse will regain its
01:35halcyon days any time soon.
01:38The dollars out there for investment are not like they were, and so, you know, I would
01:43be hopeful, but you know, at this stage, you know, it is a difficult environment.
01:51So for now, it remains a hollowed out husk in the outback, languishing in disrepair.