John Haimes first ran stock on this country in 1854, and the explorer John McDouall Stuart surveyed it the following year. But it was Thomas Elder, taking over the lease in 1862, who turned Beltana into something more than a sheep run. Elder understood a hard truth about the Australian inland: horses and bullocks died out there, but camels thrived. In 1866 he established a camel breeding stud at Beltana that would operate for roughly fifty years, supplying high-quality animals for exploration, for hauling supplies, and above all for the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line that would soon stitch Adelaide to Darwin and, through it, Australia to the world.

The animals were only half the equation. The cameleers - lumped together by white Australians under the catch-all name "Afghans," though they came from across present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond - were the ones whose skill made the camels useful. Elder gave them living quarters at Beltana, which was unusual; many cameleers elsewhere were pushed to live apart, in camps and "Ghan towns" on the edges of settlements. From Beltana these men and their camels became the lifeline of inland expeditions. William Gosse rode out with them and, with his Afghan companion, became among the first outsiders to climb the great rock at the continent's centre. Ernest Giles set off from here in 1875 to cross the Great Victoria Desert. The history of opening up inland Australia is, in large part, their history - and it deserves to be remembered as theirs.

A short way from the station stands Beltana township, and its story is the quieter, sadder counterpoint. Once a real town of nearly four hundred people, it lived off the telegraph, the railway, and the nearby mines. One by one those reasons disappeared. The railway moved its line; the telegraph fell silent; the mining faded; and the rise of Leigh Creek up the road drew away what was left. It was at Beltana's Smith of Dunesk Mission that the Reverend John Flynn was based - the man who went on to found the Royal Flying Doctor Service in 1928. Today the township survives as a "living ghost town," a State Heritage Area with a permanent population of around thirty-five and a stone hotel that, after pouring its last drink in 1958, reopened its doors only recently.

Beltana Station itself never died. It still sprawls across roughly 1,574 square kilometres and runs thousands of head of livestock. In 2017 it sold at auction for 8.4 million dollars. The historic homestead is listed on the South Australian Heritage Register, and the camel connection has come full circle: a camel trekking operation now works out of the property, taking travellers across the same country Elder's stud once supplied. People of Aboriginal, Afghan and European descent all hold Beltana as part of their heritage - three threads of history braided into one stretch of red earth.