John Flynn never accepted that distance should be a death sentence. As superintendent of the Presbyterian Church's Australian Inland Mission, he spent the 1910s and 1920s building a chain of bush nursing homes across the continent's emptiest reaches. Birdsville's came in 1923, set up in the old Royal Hotel - the first AIM hostel in Queensland and the seventh in Australia. Flynn's genius was to see the parts as one machine. A nurse in a remote hostel was good; a nurse with a pedal radio who could summon a flying doctor was revolutionary. The Aerial Medical Service he launched in 1928, based at Cloncurry, grew into the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Birdsville, with its hostel and its radio aerial, became one of the points where the whole improbable system proved it could work.

Fire took the original hospital in November 1951, and the replacement is a story in itself. The Mission ordered a prefabricated steel building from the Sidney Williams factory in Sydney, then hauled it overland by truck - through Broken Hill, up to Marree, and along the corrugations of the Birdsville Track - a journey of some 2,000 miles. The Reverend Les McKay spent a year on site helping piece it together. Everything about the design fought the desert. The ceilings sit low and heavily insulated, trapping a buffer of air beneath the iron roof; vents in the gables breathe out the heat; a cellar under the kitchen kept food cool, and underground tanks held rain water for drinking when the river or the bore ran foul. It opened in 1953, filmed by Fox Movietone for a newsreel called Diamantina Drama.

Behind the main building, near the south-east fence, stands a smaller iron structure: the former Aboriginal ward. Its presence is a quiet, uncomfortable record of how medicine was segregated in remote Queensland for much of the twentieth century, and it deserves to be read honestly. Aboriginal patients - including Wangkangurru and Yarluyandi people whose country this is - were treated apart from white patients, in a separate building with corrugated-iron shutters over the windows. The ward survives today as part of the heritage site, not as decoration but as evidence. The same hospital that extended a mantle of safety across the inland also drew lines through it. Both things are true, and the building keeps the memory of both.

From 1953 until 2005, the hospital did what it was built to do. After the churches merged in the 1970s, Frontier Services took over its operation; through floods and dust storms and the brutal arithmetic of a town where the nearest large hospital is a flight away, the nurses stayed. When it finally closed after fifty-two years, the Diamantina Shire Council took up the work in a modern clinic next door, and the old building reopened as a museum - the 'Old Birdsville Hospital' display. Walk its enclosed verandahs now and the design still makes sense: cool, low, deliberate. It is a monument to an idea that sounded impossible when Flynn first spoke it, and turned out to be one of the great humane inventions of the Australian outback.