On 10 October 1892, at Alice Downs station just outside town, a broad-shouldered shearer named Jackie Howe bent over the boards and did not straighten until he had shorn 321 sheep. It took him seven hours and forty minutes, blade shears in hand - no machine, no motor, just steel, sweat, and a rhythm that has never been equalled by hand. The record still stands. It was not beaten until 1950, and only then by a man using a powered handpiece. Howe was born on Canning Downs near Warwick and died at Blackall in 1920; he lies in the town cemetery. The navy singlet that working Australians still pull on every morning carries his name, after the cut-down shirt he is said to have worn the day he made history.

In 1885, Blackall did something audacious for a frontier town: it drilled for water it could not see. The bore struck the Great Artesian Basin, that immense sea of ancient water trapped beneath two-thirds of Queensland, and what came up was hot - 58 degrees Celsius, straight from the rock. Blackall was one of the very first towns in the colony to tap it, and the gamble paid off in a way no one could have planned. Today that same scalding artesian water fills the spa and pools of the Blackall Aquatic Centre, where you can soak in mineral heat under an outback sky. Locals even bottle it into soft drinks. In a place that averages barely 500 millimetres of rain a year, water that rises on its own from the deep earth feels close to miraculous.

The grazing country around Blackall ran on the labour of shearers, and in the 1880s those men began to organise. In December 1886, one of the first shearers' union meetings was held in Blackall - part of the ferment of bush unionism that would eventually help give rise to the Australian Labor Party. Four years later, in December 1890, the executive of the Australian Labour Federation met here to sketch out a proper structure for the movement. A memorial at the corner of Shamrock and Short Streets marks the spot. It is easy to forget, driving through a quiet town of fewer than fifteen hundred people, that some of the foundations of Australian political life were laid on these dusty corners by men who shore sheep for a living.

Long before surveyors and shearers, this was country spoken for in languages that mapped it far more intimately than any transit instrument could. The region sits within the bounds of several Aboriginal language groups, among them the Kuungkari, whose country falls within the Longreach and Blackall-Tambo regions, and the Bidjara further south. When the explorer Augustus Gregory passed through in 1856, he saw only a treeless plain and judged the land harshly - missing entirely the deep, lived knowledge of the people who had thrived on these plains for thousands of years, reading water, season, and game in a landscape that looked barren only to the unfamiliar eye. The town that grew here took its name from a colonial governor. The country itself answers to far older words.

Everything in Blackall comes back to sheep. The dominant industry is still grazing, with dozens of homesteads scattered across the locality, and the town's grandest heritage site is industrial: the Blackall Woolscour, four kilometres northeast, the last steam-driven wool-washing works left in Australia. The Barcoo River curls past the town, dry for much of the year and capable of bursting its banks when the rains finally come - in March 1881, seven inches of rain sent it through the town embankment and into the main street. Blackall endures these extremes the way outback towns do: with bores, with memorials, and with stories. It is 960 kilometres from Brisbane and a very long way past the black stump, which is precisely how the people here like it.