Isa Lawson is one of the friendly faces you will see behind the bar at the White Cliffs Hotel.

At twenty-three, Isa has already lived more lives than most people twice her age.

Standing behind the bar at White Cliffs pub, wiping down glasses with the easy confidence of someone who's found their place, she tells her story with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who's learnt that life rarely goes to plan, and that's perfectly alright.

"I originally come from Tibooburra," she said, her hands never stopping their work.

The outback has a way of teaching you to keep moving, keep working, even when you're talking.

Her family stayed there until she was about six, then packed up for Broken Hill for a year, before heading out eighty kilometres to work managing a station.

For most kids, that kind of upheaval would be traumatic. For Isa, it was just the beginning of an education that no classroom could provide.

From age seven to sixteen, home was wherever the work was. Her parents managed stations, and Isa was homeschooled in the vastness of outback New South Wales.

"I didn't like it at the time, homeschooling," she admitted, "but now I look back and I go, thank God."

It taught her work ethic, resilience, and something you can't learn from textbooks, how to be comfortable with yourself when there's nothing but red dirt and blue sky for company.

But at sixteen, with that independence already coursing through her veins, Isa made a decision that would have terrified most teenagers.

She moved to Broken Hill, rented her own house, and enrolled in mainstream school for her final year.

"I lived by myself at sixteen," she says, and there's no boasting in her voice, just statement of fact. "I matured a lot quicker than all those monkeys in there."

The classroom felt foreign after years of learning at her own pace, but she stuck it out.

The station had taught her to finish what she started.

After school, the roads called again. South Australia first, then up to the Northern Territory, working cattle stations and learning the rhythm of stock work.

For a young woman barely out of her teens, the cattle stations of the Top End represented freedom; wide open spaces, honest work, and the kind of community that forms when you're relying on each other in the middle of nowhere.

"Absolutely loved Darwin," she said when asked about her favourite place. "And White Cliffs."

The two couldn't be more different, Darwin with its tropical intensity and White Cliffs with its understated outback charm, but both represent something essential about the Australian spirit.

These days, when she's not pulling beers at the pub, Isa works in mining, contracting alongside geologists.

Soil sampling, drilling, RC sampling, diamond sampling, technical work that takes her all over the country.

"You get to see the country at the same time," she explained. A couple of weeks ago, Kondobobul. Next contract's down near Yass.

The work suits someone who's never been able to sit still for long.

But it was heartbreak that brought her back to White Cliffs. After her engagement fell apart, she needed somewhere to heal, somewhere that felt like home.

Her uncle and aunt, Matt and Sarah, own the pub, keeping it in the family, as these things often go in small towns.

They offered her work, and she grabbed it with both hands.

"Matt and Sarah are the best people I've ever worked for," she said, and that's out of anywhere she's ever been.

In a life that's taken her from cattle stations to mining camps, that's saying something.

The pub has won Best Bush Pub two years running, and they're hoping for a third. During the rodeo in April, Anzac Day weekend, they get the mechanical bull out, bring in a live band, set up a dance floor, and somehow squeeze six hundred people into this tiny outback town.

"Bloody hectic, but love it at the same time," Isa grinned.

These days, Isa's learning new skills, tiling, plastering, painting.

"I just learned this week," she says about the tiling, and there's something beautifully Australian about that, the willingness to have a go, to figure it out as you go along. The pub's undergoing renovations, and she's right in the thick of it. In the afternoons, she rides her auntie's horses, takes her two dogs out for runs.

"You make your own fun," she says about life in White Cliffs.

"Some of my best mates here are in their sixties."

It's a truth about small towns that city people often miss, age becomes irrelevant when there are only a handful of people for hundreds of kilometres.

Her family's scattered now. Cooper, her older brother, is in Darwin working criminology and psychology in the middle of the jail system.

Her younger brother, just sixteen, has already been accepted into university in Sydney. "That's homeschooling for you," she says proudly.

"You learn resilience, and to not be scared to get out and try new things."

The Kerr family has been part of this community for generations, doing "magnificent things," as one local puts it.

Isa's part of that legacy now, serving beers and laying tiles and making sure that when travellers stop in White Cliffs, they get the kind of welcome that makes them want to come back.

She's got no plans to settle down anytime soon.

"I'm not really tied down at the moment," she said, and there's contentment in that freedom. Between mining contracts and pub work, between the horses and the dogs and the community that's embraced her, she's found something that works.

Standing in the pub as the afternoon light slants through the windows, Isa represents something quintessentially Australian, the ability to adapt, to move, to find home wherever you happen to land.

She's part of a generation that's learnt to be comfortable with uncertainty, to see change not as disruption but as opportunity.

The outback shaped her, but she's shaping it right back. Whether she's sampling soil in some remote mining camp or serving cold beers to mates who've known her since she was a kid, she's writing her own story across the vast canvas of rural Australia.

"There's no place like home," she said, and she's talking about White Cliffs, but she could be talking about any of the places that have marked her journey.

For someone who's moved as much as Isa, home isn't a place on a map; it's the people who welcome you, the work that challenges you, and the country that never stops surprising you. In White Cliffs, population barely in the hundreds, Isa Lawson has found all three.