The borders that converge here were not negotiated on the ground. They were dictated by London. When Queen Victoria's letters patent separated the new Colony of Queensland from New South Wales in 1859, the boundary was defined in the abstract language of geography: follow the watershed inland from Point Danger to the Dumaresq River, run along a chain of rivers to the 29th parallel of south latitude, then strike due west along that parallel to the 141st meridian of east longitude, which was already the eastern edge of South Australia. Where the parallel met the meridian, three colonies would touch. The trouble with a border made of imaginary lines is that someone, eventually, has to find them in the real world.

That someone was John Brewer Cameron, a Scottish-born surveyor who had chased gold in Victoria and New Zealand before turning to the exacting science of geodesy. In September 1879 he set out west from the Warrego River alongside George Watson, representing Queensland, the two men dividing the labour between chain measurement and astronomical observation. By March 1880, Watson had withdrawn, leaving Cameron to push the remaining survey across roughly 285 miles of harsh inland country largely on his own, fixing his position by the stars night after night. In September 1880 he reached the meridian and drove in a post to mark the corner. The place has carried his name ever since, a rare honour for the patient, unglamorous work of measuring the empty middle of a continent.

A short walk from the marker stands the Corner Store, a single outpost that lives a delightfully confused life across three jurisdictions. It pours drinks under a Queensland liquor licence, receives mail through a New South Wales postcode, and dials out on a South Australian phone number. Because Queensland refuses daylight saving, the corner can host three different clock times at once in summer, and locals make a tradition of celebrating New Year's Eve three times over, stepping a few metres between states to ring in each one. There is even a desert golf course laid out across the borders, where a single round can carry you through all three states. It is the kind of bureaucratic absurdity that only the outback could make charming.

Cameron Corner was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on the ninth of November 2012, recognised not for grandeur but for what it represents: the western limit of the Queensland-New South Wales border and a genuine surveying feat of its era. The Dingo Fence threads straight through it, the meeting of the colossal barriers that guard the southeastern sheep country, and that line of wire mesh gives the place its scale. To reach the corner at all is an achievement; it sits hundreds of kilometres from any town, deep in the gibber and dune country of the far northwest. Most who make the journey do exactly what visitors have always done here: walk around the post, stand in three states at once, and marvel that anyone ever found this exact spot in the first place.