Birdsville is a threshold town. To the west, the Simpson Desert begins in earnest, eleven hundred and forty parallel dunes of rust-red sand running roughly north to south for hundreds of kilometres. Travellers treat Birdsville as the place to top up: fuel, water, tyres, nerve. The famous warning is no joke, because heavy rain can close the surrounding roads and isolate the town for days, and it can fall in any month, though summer is the likeliest. Locals will tell you April to October is the sensible window. Summer maximums sit near forty degrees and push higher; winter days are warm, the nights genuinely cold. People do not exaggerate the distances out here. Driving from Brisbane to Birdsville takes longer than driving from Brisbane to Melbourne or to Cairns.

The Birdsville Bakery has built a national reputation on a single item: the curried camel pie. Feral camels, descendants of the animals imported to open up the interior, now roam the deserts in their thousands, and someone, inevitably, turned that into lunch. The pie is rich, spiced, and genuinely good, and it has been drawing travellers for well over fifteen years. There is a kangaroo pie too, for the curious. The bakery makes its pies on site for most of the year, but during the big events the demand is so enormous that one baker simply cannot keep up, and the operation calls in help. People plan whole road trips around eating here. In a town this size, that is no small thing.

About thirty-five kilometres west of town stands Big Red, properly named Nappanerica. Rising roughly forty metres, it is the tallest dune in the Simpson Desert and the symbolic gateway to the crossing. The name Nappanerica is said to mean something close to 'water that takes a long time to dry up', a reference to a nearby lake bed. Four-wheel-drivers come from across the country to test themselves against its soft, steep face, often dropping their tyre pressures and taking several runs before they crest it. At sunset the sand glows, lit from within by the rusted iron that gives the desert its colour, and the whole western horizon turns to fire. You do not need to cross the Simpson to understand it. You just need to stand on Big Red as the light goes.

On the first weekend of September, the Birdsville Races transform the town. First run in 1882, they are the most remote thoroughbred meeting in the world, and they fill the airstrip with general-aviation traffic and the campgrounds with thousands of people. Proceeds go to the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the airborne lifeline of the outback. In July, the Big Red Bash, a music festival staged in the dunes, packs the town again. During these weeks you camp, unless you booked the pub far ahead, and the single hotel pours both canned and bottled beer to a crowd many times the size of the resident population. Even the mobile network, run by Telstra and Optus, strains under the load. Then the visitors leave, the dust settles, and Birdsville goes back to being itself: small, sun-struck, and waiting at the edge of the sand.