The first payable gold turned up in October 1880, when John Thompson and a companion found it near Mount Poole - the very landmark Sturt's stranded men had built a stone cairn upon decades earlier. About five months later James Evans picked up roughly fourteen ounces of alluvial gold at Mount Browne, and the rush truly began. As prospectors fanned out, strike followed strike with names that read like a calendar of hope: Easter Monday, Good Friday, Nuggety Hill, The Granites. In a remarkably short time an auriferous belt some fifty miles long and ten wide had been opened across this remote tract of the far north-west, the country locals would come to call the Corner.

Everything here turned on water, and there was almost none. Miners clustered wherever a creek held even a trickle, and drained it fast. The settlement that became the goldfield's heart took the name Milparinka - an Aboriginal word meaning, with grim local accuracy, 'water can be found here'. There was none at Mount Browne, so diggers carted excavated soil twenty miles to Milparinka just to wash it. When the bullock and horse teams could not get through at all, men went days without flour, living on mutton and the 'wild spinach' that grew along the creeks. Camel trains were brought overland from Beltana in South Australia to keep supplies moving. Even so, illness cut deep: in 1882 temporary hospitals went up at Milparinka and Tibooburra as scurvy and the eye disease the diggers called Barcoo Rot ran rife, and men died of dysentery and fevers like typhoid.

Out of that hardship came genuine innovation. With no water to wash the gold from the dirt, the miners of the Albert Goldfield perfected a technique called dry-blowing - separating gold from crushed earth by air alone, first by simply tossing and winnowing it in a dish, then with purpose-built machines. It was the oldest Australian example of mining adapted to true desert conditions, and it worked. Along Warratta Creek the reefs were chased by trenching the visible quartz seams and cutting cross-trenches to catch the buried ones. The field's first year produced an impressive 11,900 ounces, and for a brief moment Albert Town and its neighbours rivalled the silver settlement of Silverton as a centre of the far west.

The boom could not hold against the country itself. The high cost of hauling timber, firewood, and equipment into such isolation ate into every claim, exactly as the Mining Warden had warned. Gold output collapsed - from those 11,900 ounces in 1881 to a mere 387 ounces by 1906 - as the droughts and the depression of the 1890s pressed down on the whole region. The diggings settled into a hard pattern: Milparinka and Tibooburra survived as the main centres, Mount Browne struggled along with sporadic bursts of digging, and Albert Town, established in 1882 between two arms of Warratta Creek, was abandoned before the turn of the century. The desert reclaimed it almost as fast as the rush had raised it.

What survives at Albert Town today is spare and evocative. About nine stone structures still stand above ground, with three more low masonry remnants nearby - mostly fireplaces and wall alignments built from angular chunks of local slate, spread across a patch of arid ground roughly 50 metres by 150. Listed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register in 1999, the ruins are valued less for their architecture than for what they record: the start of a whole family of arid-country mining methods that would later be used to enormous effect in Queensland, the Northern Territory, and above all Western Australia. The Albert Goldfield was the springboard for the desert gold rushes of Australia. Standing among its broken hearths in the saltbush silence, you are looking at the place where the country learned to mine the dry.