Queen of the Desert
After enduring fires and floods, one of the most iconic vehicles in Australian cinematic history is being brought back to life for a new audience and trip.
WORDS Che-Marie Trigg
When a team of curators from the History Trust of South Australia (HTSA) arrived at a farm in Ewingar, in remote New South Wales, what they found didn’t look like much: a run-down and rusted 1976 Hino Freighter bus, encircled by burnt-out bushland and cars destroyed by recent bushfires. But some nifty detective work soon told them what they’d been hoping – they’d finally tracked down Priscilla, the eponymous bus from the legendary Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Priscilla was part of a new wave of idiosyncratic Australian films garnering acclaim internationally in the early 1990s, along with contemporaries including Muriel’s Wedding and Strictly Ballroom. But the film – starring Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp as two drag queens and a transsexual – was also a boundary-pushing standard-bearer of LGBTQIA+ positivity and pride, humanising a community that had long faced prejudice and was typically only seen on screen about the AIDS crisis. As the trio traversed the spectacular landscapes of Australia in Priscilla, their trusty silver bus and the film’s fourth main character, they encountered (and defanged) homophobic bigotry and violence.
Along the way, the dramatic beauty of Australia was given plenty of screen time, as the bus rattled along endless highways, backdropped by the ochre-tinted outback. Scenes of the drag queens ascending the phenomenal Kings Canyon (Watarrka) in all their finery and getting into strife in the underground town of Coober Pedy (Umoona) became embedded in the cultural consciousness and revealed a side of the country even many Australians hadn’t seen before.
Meanwhile, Priscilla – the bus – became an emblem of Australiana. But until recently the original bus had been MIA for decades. “There have been all these rumours about where the bus is, and lots of people thought they had found it at various points. But it never materialised again,” says Dr Kristy Kokegei, head of audience and experience at the HTSA. “It just disappeared.”
As the HTSA discovered, Priscilla was actually languishing in rural NSW. It had undergone a bumpy journey: the bus was leased to the film production company in 1994, and later to Sydney (Warrane) band The Whitlams as a tour bus. Between then and when the owner of the Ewingar property contacted the HTSA in 2018, not much is known – but it sat in the bush, exposed to the elements, for more than 15 years. Even after the HTSA started investigating the bus’s legitimacy, its survival was precarious: Priscilla only just made it through the 2019–2020 bushfires, saved by a well-aimed water balloon, then experienced the floods that swept through the area not long afterwards.
By the time HTSA arrived to verify her, Priscilla wasn’t in great shape. But the organisation’s curators were certain it was indeed the old girl – and contacted Priscilla director Stephan Elliott to corroborate their find. “We were 98 per cent confident [it was Priscilla],” says Sophie Tooth, HTSA’s manager of marketing and communications. “And [Stephan] was like, ‘Yeah, everyone says that. Send me some images. Prove it to me’.” When Elliott saw the bus’s carpet and a camera mounting rail, both of which Elliott had installed for the shoot: “He immediately rang back and said, ‘You’ve got it. That’s it’.”
“We were 98 per cent confident it was Priscilla.”
Now, Elliott’s involved in the campaign to restore Priscilla to her former fabulous glory – and the timing happens to coincide with the recently announced sequel to the 1994 film, which has the original stars on board. The endgame for HTSA is to set up the bus in the National Motor Museum in Birdwood, South Australia, which is also home to Bigfoot, aka the Andamooka Buggy, from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Kokegei plans to create an immersive, educational exhibition in collaboration with an LGBTQIA+ reference group.
“This will be a big, immersive exhibition on a cinematic scale,” says Kokegei. “We want to tell some of the stories and the history around the movie, and how it came about, how it changed the actors’ lives, and how it changed the gay community and other communities in Australia.”
A lot of work has to happen before the exhibition bursts to life. The HTSA is in the process of raising $2.2 million for the bus’s restoration along with the exhibition itself.
“We’re still a long way to go in terms of inclusivity and people feeling seen, whether it’s in museums or the community,” says Kokegei. “So we want to link the exhibition to the current day challenges people are still facing. We hope to create an exhibition experience that moves people to think and act differently when they walk out the doors.”
THE DETAILS
TOUR
To follow in Priscilla’s footsteps and experience iconic parts of the country like Broken Hill, Kings Canyon, Coober Pedy, and of course, Alice Springs, join an Outback Spirit tour. Outback Spirit offers multiple Central Australia tours ranging from 6 to 15 days, with tours running from April through to October 2025.