When the bright lights of Moree were behind you, things would get awful dark looking to the south. I was talking to a pilot (experienced NVFR) yesterday who had to land on 19 without aircraft landing lights once and explained that he ended up going around and coming in on 01 for the visual horizon that the town offered.
I didn't realise landing lights lit up the ground and runway so effectively from 500ft...if your friend was so experienced at NVFR a landing light failure would have made very little difference to his approach path. Might have affected his flare judgement a little, but the surrounding lights wouldn't have helped him with that anyway.
Moree isn't any more of a black hole approach than many other aerodromes around Australia. There are many that are far worse. Me thinks this bloke in Moree would have eventually ended up hitting the trees somewhere else anyway given his lack of recency and an obviously deficient night approach technique.