Outback highway still closed by the record rains of March

A key outback highway from Western Australia to the Northern Territory is still closed from the floods and is expected to stay that way for weeks yet.

The largely unsealed Great Central Road from Laverton in WA's remote Goldfields region to Yulara (near Uluru) in the NT runs for 1126km was closed by the rains in early March and will likely stay that way until late May.

The continuing impact of floods on the road link had mostly gone unnoticed once the Eyre Highway and Trans-Australia Railway were re-opened to east-west traffic across the Nullarbor Plain.

It took days to re-open the highway, weeks for the railway.

Australia was cut in two after a year's rain fell in a few days in March in some of the more remote stretches of the Nullarbor from Kalgoorlie to Cocklebiddy.

Laverton is located at the western edge of the Great Victorian Desert, almost 1000km north-east of Perth.

Laverton recorded 143mm in March, about half its annual rainfall.

The closure impacts local Indigenous communities and remote mines.

According to ABC News, the closure has affected production at the fly-in fly-out Gruyere gold mine, 200km north-east of Laverton, forcing truck drivers to make a 9200km round trip to deliver essential supplies to the remote site.

The Great Central Road is part of a key nation-building exercise to seal the 2700km Outback Way between Laverton to Winton in Queensland.

Many say the construction of an all-weather road east-west across the centre of Australia is as important as the transcontinental railway line built more than a century ago.

Successive governments have already poured more than $330 million over the past decade into sealing the route - work which is just about half done.

The idea of spray sealing a road across the centre is to aid freight operators and various industries including agriculture, mining and tourism.

The Outback Way will also be a boon for remote communities to connect to the outside world.

The route includes the Great Central Road, Tjukaruru Road and the Lasseter, Stuart and Plenty highways in the NT and the Donohue Highway, Kennedy Developmental Road and Diamantina Developmental Road in Queensland.

More than 90 per cent of the Outback Way in Queensland is now fully sealed.

According to the latest information the Outback Way has about 1150km left to seal with the project due for completion in 2032.

A lot of that remaining work includes 736km of the Great Central Road.

The Federal government has provided disaster recovery assistance funding to communities in WA's Goldfields (including Laverton), Southern Interior and Eucla impacted by the flooding.

"Shires will be provided with support to undertake emergency recovery and repair works to bring essential public assets like bridges and roads back to usable condition," Federal Minister for Emergency Management, Murray Watt said.