The backpackers set out from Cable Beach, Broome, on a road trip that is intended to take them to the Wolfe Creek meteorite and from there over the Top End and across to Queensland.

Broome has been an important location for the pearling industry since the 1880s. Cable Beach gets its name from the telegraph cable laid under the sea to Singapore in 1889. The 22km stretch of beach is a popular tourist destination with incredibly clear, warm blue water, white sand, and camel rides.

The story plays out in an unnamed location in the Australian outback, somewhere near Wolfe Creek meteorite crater in the Kimberley. The film was shot in South Australia, in the Flinders Ranges.

The sign at the entrance of the old mine site where Mick Taylor takes his victims an anagram of the name of backpacker murderer Ivan Milat: Navitalim Mining Co. The film was partly based on the infamous backpacker murders, and partly on the murder of Peter Falconio, a British tourist who disappeared in the Northern Territory outback in 2001.

At 300,000 years of age, 50m deep and 850 metres in diametre, the Wolfe Creek meteorite crater is the second largest in the world. In 1947 geologists located the survey during an aerial survey. According to information provided by the Halls Creek Visitor Centre, which is the closest town to the crater, Jaru and Walmajarri Aboriginal people call the crater Gandimalal. A Jaru story tells of two rainbow snakes moving across the land to form Jurabalarn (Sturt Creek) and Ngurriny (Wolfe Creek). Gandimalal is the place where one of the snakes came out of the ground.

Visitors can do a 400 metre return walk to the top of the crater and you can alsoclimb down and walk into the centre of the crater where there is a circular patch of vegetation.

Directions: Approximately two and a half hours drive from Halls Creek (100 kilometres south of Halls Creek). Follow the Great Northern Hwy 18 kilometres west of Halls Creek and turn onto the Tanami Road. Drive 130 km south on the unsealed Tanami Rd until you reach the turn-off to Wolfe Creek. Dive another 22 kilometres along a corrugated dirt track from the Tanami Road to the crater.