Read the sweeping body of poetry and prose on the Darling River town of Bourke, from Lawson to Breaker Morant and Will Ogilvy, and you'd swear it was inhabited almost exclusively by rough men: shearers and tough fellows of the bush and the riverboats.
Anyone who has been there in recent years, however, knows it is women who hold together much of that dusty little old place, where drought and unemployment and welfare have robbed a lot of the romance lent it a century ago by the bards of the bush.
And so, as Australia's first female Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, set out to place her stamp on the national heart, her first stop was Bourke.
Soon, she found herself surrounded by the women. Indigenous women with children rushing around their feet, women of Bourke's Catholic parish carrying great trays of sandwiches and home-cooked cake, and a tiny knot of quiet little women who looked for all the world as if they had stepped out of India's slums with Mother Teresa herself.
Indeed, the Missionaries of Charity in their distinctive blue and white robes and sandals, hosts to the Governor-General at the town's presbytery, are known as Mother Teresa's Little Sisters.
They have been helping the people of Bourke and its region since 1969, when Mother Teresa came out and established her first Australian mission on the banks of the Darling.
Governor-General Bryce is simply the latest of a seemingly endless line of Australian dignitaries - prime ministers, vice-regal types, premiers and even the Queen - who have been drawn to this outpost at the edge of the Australian outback.
She may be the first who seemed at home: she was, after all, raised in the tiny central-west Queensland settlement of Ilfracombe, not far from that other quintessential Australian outback town Longreach.
It showed a little as she was handed posies of flowers by two young schoolgirls and, intent on breaking the ice, she pointed out flowers to them in the garden of the town presbytery.
"These," she said, "are marigolds. We used to call them stinking roses. I don't know who made up that name, but we didn't like the smell."
Within seconds, she and the two little girls were giggling like … well … schoolgirls.
Ms Bryce, however, in an apricot suit and wide straw hat, was an island of elegance in that hot, humid town, which was recovering from a mini-tornado that swept through on Saturday, bringing down trees, unroofing houses and flooding drought-dried streets.
Her first stop was at Fred Hollows' grave. Ms Bryce knew the eye surgeon in his latter years and worked with his wife, Gabi, on human rights issues, and she laid a wreath beneath the big stone carved in an Aboriginal motif that is the most visited site at Bourke's cemetery, where bush legends lie side by side with Afghan cameleers, whose graves point to Mecca and whose mosque is a bush hut.
The new Governor-General and her husband, Adjunct Professor Michael Bryce, are on the first leg of a week-long journey down the Murray-Darling Basin, which will end at Goolwa, South Australia, on Friday.
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