Oodnadatta Track

The Oodnadatta Track runs 620 kilometres from Marree to Marla through some of the most sparsely populated country I’ve ever driven, following a route Aboriginal people used for millennia to move between permanent water sources, later adopted almost exactly by the old Ghan railway line before the floods and shifting sands finally forced the railway onto a more stable route further west in 1980. What’s left along the original line is a string of abandoned sidings and stone ruins — Curdimurka, William Creek, Strangways Springs — slowly being reclaimed by the desert, and I found myself stopping at nearly every one, unable to just drive past a hundred-year-old railway platform standing alone in absolute silence with nothing around it for a hundred kilometres.

William Creek itself is the track’s one genuine settlement, population usually cited as around ten, dominated entirely by a single pub that also functions as the town’s post office, fuel stop, and social centre. I had a beer there covered in the dollar bills and business cards that travellers have been pinning to the walls and ceiling for decades, a tradition nobody could explain to me with any confidence beyond “that’s just what you do here.” Anna Creek Station, the largest cattle station on earth at roughly the size of Belgium, surrounds the town on every side, which puts the emptiness in a scale I still find hard to process.

The mound springs near William Creek — natural artesian springs bubbling up from the Great Artesian Basin, the only permanent water for enormous distances in every direction — are where I understood why anyone crossed this country at all before cars. Standing at the Bubbler, watching water and gas bubble up through mud that’s been doing exactly this for thousands of years, made the whole abstract idea of an underground water basin the size of a small continent suddenly feel completely real.

When to go: April to October. The unsealed surface can become impassable after rain and closes without warning — check road conditions at Marree or William Creek before setting out, and carry two spare tyres, not one.