It was one of our country’s most ambitious engineering projects, a jumbled mix of narrow and broad-gauged tracks laid over an arid, unforgiving landscape, a visible symbol of an emerging can-do spirit.

Construction of the Old Ghan Railway started in Port Augusta in 1878 but didn’t reach Alice Springs until 1929. But the gruelling toil did not end there. The project was notorious for long delays of a week or more caused by rains that would submerge its flood-prone tracks, stories were rife about staff having to shoot game to feed their stranded passengers.

Come to this part of South Australia and you will see haunting remnants of the Old Ghan everywhere – sidings over old creek crossings, ageing locomotives, rail lines disappearing to vanishing points on some of the flattest plains in the country. In the dusty red fields around the abandoned town of Farina I souvenired a rusted 100-year-old railway spike. You just can’t escape it. Its legacy is everywhere.

To the northeast of so-called Ghantowns, outposts like Farina and Marree and Coward Springs, is Kati Thanda. Lake Eyre. At more than 9500sq km, when full it’s Australia’s largest salt lake and at 15m below sea level our continent’s lowest point.

I was on a six-day journey north from Adelaide to William Creek along the Oodnadatta Track with Outback Spirit, a premium small-group tour company that specialises in accessing our most famous and remote destinations: Arnhem Land, the Kimberley and Pilbara regions, Cape York Peninsula and more.

Travelling in an immaculate five-star Mercedes-Benz 4WD coach, complete with leather reclining seats, legroom to spare, on-board bathroom and great suspension for comfort on any road, our destination was one of Australia’s truly gobsmacking natural events. This vast low-lying basin was now filled via a network of otherwise dry river channels by ex-Tropical Cyclone Kirrily, which had made landfall in Townville before crossing Queensland into the Northern Territory six months earlier.

There’s only one way to see and appreciate the size, scope, and soft ephemeral palettes of muted blues, greens and greys that Kati Thanda hypnotically reflects, and that is from the air.

From the air you see the pale blues of its shallows, the pink of the pigments that live in its salt-loving algae, the white of its salt crust, the green of its flora and the purple-black of the dead vegetation in its creek beds.

Swans, cormorants, and various wading birds had all somehow found their way here, but what dominated was the pelican. More than 100,000 were here in the 1990 flood, a third of all the pelicans in Australia. From the air we saw thousands, flock after flock taking flight as we flew above them.

Begun in 1992 by Trevor Wright, Wrightsair offers flights over the lake out of William Creek – where Wright also runs the William Creek Hotel – and operates a number of high-wing, single-engine Cessnas with pilots who have been flying over the outback for years. It’s a must-do journey and included in the price of the tour.

Seeing Kati Thanda from the air it’s easy to forgive the early pioneers for believing somewhere in our vast interior was an inland sea. Explorer Edward John Eyre came looking for it in 1840 only to find, in his words, a “dreary waste”. Charles Sturt set out in 1844 and was turned back by a waterless Simpson Desert.

In early 2024 the Diamantina River was 7m deep as it passed south through Birdsville before emptying into other waterways and eventually the Warburton River, which drains into the Lake Eyre Basin. It was hard to believe that in a few short months of unrelenting evaporation, the sea we were looking down on would no longer be there. To the north and west of the lake is the Simpson Desert. A daunting prospect if on the ground, from above it becomes an abstract wonderland containing the world’s longest parallel sand dunes and veins of green – vegetation which, like the water, spreads like tendrils across a dry land.

We were meant to “follow the flood” north to Birdsville for lunch, but incoming bad weather had other ideas. Don’t come here thinking it never rains. It does, and because the land is so mercilessly flat the water spreads out like a sheet, turning dirt roads – and old railways – into unnavigable quagmires.

The Birdsville Big Red Bash, an annual three-day music festival, was hit hard. The Birdsville Track northeast from Marree was closed and police had set up barricades. Roads were impassable. The Marree Hotel overflowed with frustrated Bash-goers.

For most of its life the lake is a flat, waterless, salt-encrusted basin. Flooding events are rare, just a handful in the last 100 years. This isn’t Uluru or the Great Barrier Reef. It is fleeting, ethereal. An outback legend. Which means one thing: you’ll never take Kati Thanda for granted.

Back on the Oodnadatta Track there was another watery phenomenon: mound springs. Natural outlets for the underground waters of the Great Artesian Basin, the great subterranean ocean that never evaporates, these life-giving springs – lush oasis of sedges, rushes and reeds – have been used by the Indigenous Arabana people for thousands of years.

The Overland Telegraph is out here, too. Completed in 1872 it stretched from Adelaide to Darwin, linking Australia to the rest of the world, its route in part determined by a line of mound springs. Early pastoralists also relied on mound springs to water their sheep and cattle.

I’ll admit it was a thrill to see one of the last remaining Overland Telegraph posts still standing, lonely and defiant, battered and weathered by 150 years of wind, rain and sun in its position on Anna Creek Station (seen above), 160km east of Coober Pedy and at over 23,600sq km the world’s largest working cattle station.

I’ll remember the meals, too. A spicy goat curry at the William Creek Hotel (above), finger buns and Danish pastries at the Farina Underground Bakery, and braised camel neck in a mushroom and red wine velouté at the Prairie Hotel (below) outside Parachilna in the Flinders Ranges washed down with an in-house beer straight from the tank.

Accommodation was as top shelf as the outback can provide and included the classic two-storey Marree Hotel built in 1883 with a galvanised iron roof and delicate iron balcony, and the William Creek Hotel (below) with its air-conditioned rooms just a dusty two-minute walk from its historic pub.

No one knows when the creeks and rivers of Queensland’s Channel Country will fill again, or how much water they will bring. Just know that one day they will.

So do what I do: keep an eye on the Diamantina River if you don’t want to miss the next miraculous appearance of Eyre and Sturt’s age-old myth. The promise of a mirage made real.

The writer was a guest of Outback Spirit Tours.

Photos courtesy of Steve Strike / Journey Beyond, South Australian Tourism Commission, National Parks and Wildlife Service.

How to see Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre)

Outback Spirit offers multi-day adventure tours and luxury short stays, traversing remote and spectacular lands across Australia.

The 11-day Outback South Australia itinerary (round-trip from Adelaide) featuring destinations such as Marree and the Oodnadatta Track, along with Wilpena Pound and Coober Pedy, has departures in April, May, September and October in 2025.

See also:

8 things you never knew about William Creek

Australia's 50 best natural wonders

These bizarre lakes will blow you away