The Burdekin gathers water from roughly 130,000 square kilometres of inland Queensland, a drainage basin larger than England. It begins on the northern slopes of Boulder Mountain in the Seaview Range and runs 886 kilometres to the Coral Sea at Upstart Bay, dropping some 620 metres along the way. Tributaries feed it from every direction: the Clarke, the Basalt and the Dry from the parched interior, the Cape, Suttor and Belyando from the black-soil grasslands of central Queensland. The Belyando alone flows north for over a thousand kilometres before it joins. Most of this country is too unpredictable to farm. The rainfall swings so wildly that, year to year, a crop is as likely to drown as to wither, which is why so much of the basin is given over to low-density cattle grazing instead.

When the wet sets in, the Burdekin becomes a force that reshapes the coast. In 1875, the river rose as much as sixty feet in a matter of hours, sweeping away fences, livestock and homes. In 1917, floodwaters buried the rail bridge at Inkerman under eleven feet of water and tore away nearly a third of it. The engineers eventually answered with the Silver Link, a high dual-level bridge near Home Hill begun in 1947 and not finished until 1957, built tall enough to outlast the floods that had defeated everything before it. During the 1974 deluge that followed Cyclone Wanda, the river's discharge peaked at an estimated 25,000 tonnes of water every second, pushing a vast brown plume far out across the Coral Sea.

South of Charters Towers, the river now slows into Lake Dalrymple, the reservoir behind the Burdekin Falls Dam. Completed in 1987, it is Queensland's largest dam, holding around 1.86 million megalitres at capacity, roughly four times the volume of Sydney Harbour. Its wall stretches 876 metres across the valley. The dam tamed enough of the river's temper to make the lower Burdekin one of northern Australia's great agricultural engines. Below the wall lies an irrigation area of some 80,000 hectares, most of it sugarcane. In the delta around Ayr and Home Hill, growers draw on groundwater that the river itself recharges during the big floods, a natural cycle that local managers guard carefully against saltwater creeping inland.

Europeans came late and confused. In 1839, John Clements Wickham charted the river's mouth and named it the Wickham River. Six years later, the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt crossed it far inland and, with no idea it was the same watercourse, named it after Thomas Burdekin, a Sydney merchant who had helped fund his expedition. Leichhardt's name stuck. Long before either man arrived, this was Yuru country, and the Yuru language is still spoken across the land around Home Hill. The river carries its own endemic life too, including a species of eeltail catfish found nowhere else, alongside barramundi, mangrove jack and the freshwater turtles that haunt its lagoons.