CREDITS THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT, 1994 dir: Stephan Elliott Terence Stamp Hugo Weaving Guy Pearce

"That's just what this country needs: a cock in a frock on a rock."

The Abba-inspired three-pack of drag queens in this feelgood Aussie road movie take a journey through the outback in a silver-painted bus, christened ‘Priscilla’, to a booking in Alice Springs.

The trip starts out from Sydney – oohs and aahs for the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge – before striking out across the inhospitable desert of New South Wales.

The first major stop-off is Broken Hill, an outback mining town about 750 miles west of Sydney, where Mitzi, Felicia and Bernadette raise eyebrows when they go shopping on Argent Street, the main drag (pun definitely intended).

The eccentric hotel the girls check into, with the extravagant murals, is Mario’s Palace, 227 Argent Street at Sulphide Street (yes, all the street names – Bromide, Chloride, Oxide, reading like a chemistry textbook – reflect the town’s mining history) (tel: 80.88.1699). Mario, who appears as himself in the movie, used to preside over the hotel himself.

If you’re in the area, a few miles northwest of Broken Hill is the ghost town of Silverton, one of the most used Australian locations (see Mad Max 2), and a few miles further on from here you’ll find the next stop, the Mundi Mundi Plain Lookout, where the dragsters find themselves stranded after Priscilla breaks down.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert location: the underground motel: White Cliffs Underground Motel, Coober Pedy Photograph courtesy White Cliffs Underground Motel

Help appears in the shape of good-hearted Bob and his strange wife, Cynthia, who give the three a lift to Coober Pedy, a further 500 miles west in central South Australia.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert location: the underground motel: White Cliffs Underground Motel, Coober Pedy Photograph courtesy White Cliffs Underground Motel

Another mining town, Coober Pedy is tougher, rougher and even hotter than Broken Hill. The terrain is so inhospitable, in fact, that most dwellings are built underground (the name means “white man in a hole”). The strange mining-scarred landscape is another favourite location, providing the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World. If you want to try out the subterranean accommodation, the stopover here is the three-star White Cliffs Underground Motel, Catacomb Road (tel: 86.72.5324), to the north of town.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert location: the underground motel: White Cliffs Underground Motel, Coober Pedy Photograph courtesy White Cliffs Underground Motel

From here the journey heads north a few hundred miles into Northern Territory, finally arriving at the ostensible destination, Alice Springs, where it’s best bib and tucker for the dressy nightspot they perform at – Lasseters Hotel Casino on Barrett Drive.

King’s Canyon is the site of Felicia’s triumphant climb. The spectacular gorge, a cousin of the USA’s Grand Canyon, is in the Watarrka National Park at the western end of Ernest Giles Road, a couple of hundred miles west of Alice Springs.

The original script specified the much more iconic Ayers Rock – and what an image that would have been – but Ayers (Uluru) is a significant feature of Aboriginal culture, and the idea of three drag queens traipsing over it was a complete no-no.