The Burke rises in the Standish Range, in the hills north of Boulia, and runs south past the town toward the fringes of the Simpson Desert. It belongs to the Lake Eyre Basin, an immense inland drainage system that, instead of reaching the sea, pours its water toward the lowest, driest heart of the continent. The Burke spills into Eyre Creek, which feeds the Georgina River, one of the great braided channels of the outback. Downstream, the Hamilton River joins the Georgina too. In a good flood year this whole web of channels brims and connects; in a dry one, it is a memory written in sand and the lines of coolibah trees that mark where water once ran.

Water dictates everything out here, and it arrives on its own schedule. When the Burke and its sister channels flood, the Channel Country becomes some of the most fertile cattle land in Australia, the plains thick with feed almost overnight. When the rains fail, the same country bakes to dust and the waterholes shrink to muddy remnants that every living thing in the district depends upon. The town of Boulia itself grew up on the river's bank in the 1870s, drawn to a reliable waterhole, and the Burke has shaped the rhythm of pastoral life ever since: years of plenty and years of drought, never quite in the proportions anyone would choose.

Long before a surveyor wrote an explorer's name across the map, this was Aboriginal country, and the languages of the region knew these waters intimately. The Yulluna language, also recorded as Yalarnga and by several other names, belongs to country reaching toward the Gulf of Carpentaria and takes in the area around the Burke. Closer to Boulia, the Pitta Pitta people are the traditional custodians, and the town's own name comes from their word for a nearby waterhole. For tens of thousands of years, survival here meant reading the channels: knowing which holes held water through the dry, and where the next flood would spread its life. That knowledge predates Burke by an order of magnitude.