The track was never built so much as worn. In the 1860s, drovers began walking cattle south from the stations of northern Queensland and the Northern Territory toward the nearest railhead, where the herds could be loaded and sent to market. The pioneering drover credited with opening the route was Percy Burt. For decades, only stock and the strings of Afghan-led camel trains travelled it. The land offered little: average annual rainfall here is under 100 millimetres, and the bores that made droving possible drew bitter, mineral-laden water from deep beneath the Great Artesian Basin. To move a mob of cattle down this corridor was to gamble against thirst, heat, and distance, with the railhead at Marree as the prize at the southern end.

Esmond Gerald Kruse, known to everyone as Tom, turned the Birdsville Track into something close to myth. From the 1930s, Kruse hauled mail, fuel, food, and medicine from Marree to Birdsville and back, nursing a battered 1936 Leyland Badger truck through bulldust, flooded crossings, and drifting sand. When the truck bogged, he dug; when it broke down, he improvised. His fortnightly run was a lifeline for the scattered stations along the route. In 1954, filmmaker John Heyer captured Kruse and the track in the documentary The Back of Beyond, made for the Shell Film Unit, and the mailman became a national folk hero. Kruse, later appointed MBE and named an Australian Geographic Outback Legend, made his last regular mail run in 1957. He died in 2011, aged 96.

The Birdsville Track is now a graded dirt road, and in a dry season a well-prepared traveller in a sturdy vehicle can drive its length in a day. Cattle trucks still rumble along it, and tourists chase the romance of the outback. But the desert has not been tamed. Flash floods can wash whole sections away, sand drifts across the surface, and after rain the clay turns to grease. Roughly halfway along, at Mungeranie, a roadhouse and hotel offer fuel, cold beer, and a hot spring-fed pool, 204 kilometres from Marree and 313 from Birdsville. It is the only reliable refuge on the route. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the track saw a surge of traffic from drivers avoiding New South Wales quarantine, earning it the nickname the 'COVID highway.'

What makes the Birdsville Track unforgettable is not scenery in the conventional sense. There are no peaks, no waterfalls. There is space, more of it than most people ever stand inside. The gibber plains of the Sturt Stony Desert stretch in every direction, a pavement of wind-polished stones glinting under a sky that swallows sound. At night the silence is total and the stars are merciless in their brilliance. The Page family memorial, marked at last by a headstone erected by relatives in 2010, sits beside the road as a quiet reminder. People come for the legend of Tom Kruse and the thrill of the crossing. They leave understanding why the old drovers spoke of this country with caution, and why those who know it never take a single bore, a single tank of fuel, for granted.