The Alberga rises near Indulkana in the far north of South Australia, in the broader Musgrave Ranges region, and runs east by south for nearly 690 kilometres, dropping some 355 metres along the way, before its channel meets the Macumba River near the locality of Alberga, north of the Oodnadatta Track. The Macumba in turn carries any water onward toward the Warburton and, ultimately, the northern shore of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre. All of this belongs to the Lake Eyre Basin, one of the largest internally draining systems on Earth, where no water reaches the sea - it simply runs inland and, almost always, evaporates. The Alberga is one of a fan of such desert rivers, alongside the Stevenson and the Hamilton, that gather on these plains and feed the Macumba. In this country, a river is not defined by constant flow but by the memory of where the water goes when, at last, it comes.

When the Alberga does run, the transformation is sudden and brief. Channels that were dust become torrents; waterholes fill; and the surrounding plains flush green with feed that can sustain stock and wildlife for a season. The neighbouring stations have learned to live by this rhythm of feast and famine - the same floods that nourish the country can also destroy. In the severe floods of early 1939, the crossing at Alberga Creek was wrecked outright as water swept through the region, tearing away railway and telegraph alike. The river gives and the river takes, and out here both happen on the desert's own unhurried schedule.

Rivers like the Alberga drive one of the great pulses of the inland. The Lake Eyre Basin holds some of the least-altered desert river systems left in the world, and the creatures here have shaped their lives around their unpredictability. Hardy native fish ride the floodwaters to colonise newly filled holes, breeding fast before the water shrinks back. When enough rain reaches Lake Eyre downstream, it can fill into a shallow inland sea that draws waterbirds in their hundreds of thousands, some flying vast distances to nest while the feast lasts. The Alberga is one small artery of that system - dry and patient for years, then briefly a feeder of abundance. To understand it, you have to think not in days but in the long, uneven rhythm of the desert's rare wet years.

The Alberga earned a quiet place in Australian history as a surveyed junction on the Australian Overland Telegraph Line - the audacious 1870s project that strung a single wire some 3,200 kilometres from Adelaide to Darwin, across the dead heart of the continent. The southern section, running up from Port Augusta to Alberga Creek, was contracted to Edward Meade Bagot in 1870. When the whole line was finally joined in 1872 - linking, through an undersea cable from Darwin, to the wider world - news that had once taken months by ship to reach Europe could suddenly arrive in hours. Australia stopped being an island at the end of the earth. And one of the points on that world-changing line was this lonely desert creek.