Kurt Fearnley’s guest episode of Heather Ewart’s bush culture series Back Roads opens with a striking overhead shot of the Paralympian gold medallist and broadcaster. He appears completely alone on a seemingly endless red dirt road on his way towards the Northern Territory town of Tennant Creek.

“I’m trying to remember how many times my front wheel was dug into the dust and I come a cropper!” Fearnley says, laughing. “That ochre dirt, it’s such a lasting tangible experience. It stays in your clothes. It stays in your chair. But the sparse nature is so beautiful, especially at dawn or at dusk. If anything was an issue, it was the functioning of the wheels on what is a beautiful, dusty, ochry place.”

It’s not Fearnley’s first visit to the largely Indigenous community, about 500 kilometres north of Alice Springs. He acted as an independent advisor for the NDIS rollout during the first couple of years of the scheme, “talking to people with disabilities on the ground about what life looks like, and about how we can make changes over the next decade”.

The episode was filmed over 10 days, about 10 months before the crisis gripping Alice Springs. While the troubled reputation of Tennant Creek is acknowledged in Back Roads, what emerges is a tight-knit community working together, from night-time neighbourhood patrols to school initiatives and the Tennant Creek Brio artist’s collective.

“Tennant Creek is its own unique experience,” says Fearnley. “It’s got its own story to tell outside of [the Alice Springs crisis]. Of course, when you land in a place that is complicated, you try and keep everything in context. But I think when people watch this episode, they’ll see the character and the kindness and the hope of the community there. It’s a community that is really investing in themselves.”

Fearnley insists it’s not a stipulation of the format that each episode of Back Roads must feature the most eccentric local character in town, but he certainly encountered this archetype in gold fossicker and bush poet Jimmy Hooker, who lives in a makeshift home he calls “Gum Tree 69”.

“He’s a legend!” says Fearnley. “But every town’s got a Jimmy Hooker. Jimmy is an extraordinary old-school gentleman. That’s why it’s not a show that’s shot in a day. It’s a show that spends time in the community to learn who’s there and to see who they are. Who is it that’s creating the culture? Who is it that’s fighting for the community?”

Upon meeting Hooker’s 10-year-old son, Duqarn, Fearnley challenges the boy to a race. The prize is a turn holding Fearnley’s 2018 Commonwealth Games gold medal, or, if Fearnley wins, the sizeable gold nugget Duqarn has found.