Drive northwest from Sydney long enough and the green gives way to grey-green, the hills flatten, and the horizon pulls back until it is nothing but a thin line between red earth and pale sky. By the time you reach Bourke you understand why "Back of Bourke" became the national shorthand for the middle of nowhere. Yet the town is no ghost. Around 1,700 people live here, and Bourke remains the service centre for a region larger than some European countries - a place where mustering, shearing, and the price of wool still shape conversations. The country belongs to the Ngemba people, custodians of this stretch of the river, whose lands sit at a meeting point of several nations. Barkandji Country, named for the Baaka - their word for the Darling - runs almost the length of the river itself.

It is hard, standing on the dusty riverbank today, to picture Bourke as a port. But in the 1880s and 1890s it was exactly that - one of the largest inland wool ports in the world. Paddle-steamers churned up the Darling from South Australia, loaded bales by the thousand, and hauled the clip downriver toward the sea. At the peak, tens of thousands of bales left Bourke each year. A three-tiered wharf was built, a crane installed, and the river became a working highway. The trade was always a gamble: snags, droughts, and falling water levels stranded boats for months. When the railway from Byrock reached town on 3 September 1885, the river's days were numbered. Steel rails were faster and surer than a fickle river, and slowly the wharves fell quiet.

Henry Lawson arrived in Bourke in 1892, dispatched by Bulletin editor J. F. Archibald partly to curb the young writer's drinking and partly to give him real bush experience. It worked, after a fashion. Lawson shore sheep, painted a station, humped a swag, and over the summer of 1892-93 walked the brutal track north to Hungerford on the Queensland border and back. He hated the heat and the hardship - he wrote that he was "finished with the bush" - but the trip gave him some of his finest stories. The man who declared he knew Australia through Bourke is remembered here still. So is another adopted son: Fred Hollows, the eye surgeon who restored sight to thousands and worked among Aboriginal communities around Bourke in the 1970s. He asked to be buried here, and he is, beneath a coolabah tree.

Modern Bourke wears its history lightly but proudly. The PV Jandra, a replica of an 1894 paddle-steamer, still carries visitors down the Darling and slips beneath the old North Bourke bridge - opened in 1883, it is the oldest moveable-span lift bridge in the country, built so that steamers could pass through its raised deck. The reconstructed wharf at the end of Sturt Street recalls the boom years. The Back O' Bourke Exhibition Centre tells the layered story of the place, from the river people to the riverboats to the writers who made the town a legend. A few minutes east lies Brewarrina, where ancient stone fish traps in the Barwon River count among the oldest surviving human-built structures on Earth - a reminder that people thrived in this country for many thousands of years before the first bale of wool was ever loaded.