Betoota was surveyed in 1887, on the lands of the Karuwali people, whose Country takes in this corner of far western Queensland. The Betoota Hotel went up in the late 1880s and proved more durable than the settlement around it. In 1895 police were stationed here, drawn not by a crime wave so much as by the rough characters that construction of a regional rabbit-proof fence had pulled into the district. The other buildings faded one by one until only the pub remained, run for decades by a single proprietor before it finally closed its doors in 1997. For more than twenty years the hotel stood shut, and Betoota became, officially, a town of nobody.

The pub's revival reads like outback folklore. In 2017 Robert Haken, a panel beater from Logan on Brisbane's southern fringe, bought the long-defunct hotel and set about restoring it. The plan was to reopen in time for the Betoota Races in August 2018, but the deadline slipped, the delay blamed cheerfully on paperwork. The Betoota Hotel finally reopened on 20 July 2020. Today it is again the heart of the place, a low building on an empty plain where travellers stop for a cold drink and the novelty of standing in Australia's smallest town. The pub even celebrated a hundredth birthday, a century of weathering dust, heat and isolation.

Once a year, briefly, the population is anything but zero. At the end of August the Betoota Races bring crowds streaming in from neighbouring towns and far beyond. Visitors raise food stalls, live music plays, and the desert racetrack hosts a meeting that is as much social institution as sporting event. The Betoota Horse and Motorbike Gymkhana, held over the Easter long weekend, draws another outback gathering. Nearby, the land holds older history too: among Betoota's heritage-listed sites is a protected area linked to the doomed Burke and Wills expedition, a reminder of how dangerous this country has always been to those unprepared for it.

Betoota's strangest legacy travels far from the gibber plains. The town lent its name to The Betoota Advocate, the wildly popular Australian satirical news outlet that styles itself the country's oldest newspaper. There is a deadpan joke buried in the choice. The real Betoota has never had a newspaper, or much of anything, and the masthead is actually produced in Sydney. Still, a town with no people now has a national voice of sorts, and a name far better known than its single pub on a desert road would ever suggest. It is the kind of contradiction the Channel Country seems to specialise in.