The next milestone arrived with wires. The Australian Overland Telegraph Line reached Daly Waters from the north in June 1872, and for two months a pony express carried messages the 421 kilometres south to Tennant Creek via Renner Springs while the line was completed. The telegraph station transformed the springs from a campsite into a waypoint on what was becoming a nervous system stretched across a continent. Then came flight. The Daly Waters Airfield served as a refuelling stop on the 1919 England-to-Australia air race — one of the earliest long-distance aviation contests — and went on to anchor Qantas's pioneering Singapore service through the 1930s. International air routes ran through this desert crossroads because there was simply no other practical place to stop. The growth of commercial aviation turned a lonely outback town into a busy, if still very rudimentary, transit point.

The Japanese attacks of 1941 remade Daly Waters again. The RAAF requisitioned the airfield and turned it into an active military base, including a field hospital. American and Australian squadrons launched combat missions from here against Japanese positions in the Dutch East Indies and across the island chains to Australia's north. The war proceeded northward through 1943, the base wound down, and commercial flights resumed. They continued, barely, until 1970 — one Ansett flight north each week, one TAA flight south — until both airlines quietly ended their services a week apart in April. The original Qantas hangar survived the handovers; it still stands, housing photographs and equipment from the area's aviation past, a corrugated-iron monument to improbable distances.

The Daly Waters Pub is licensed since 1938, when it began serving passengers and crew from the adjacent airfield. Today it is the main reason most travellers stop. The walls, ceiling, and every available surface are covered with banknotes, bras, business cards, licence plates, and other memorabilia deposited by visitors from every country imaginable — a sort of accidental archive of the kinds of people who pass through a crossroads at the edge of the outback. The pub has outlasted the airlines, the telegraph, and several eras of government. It remains the social heart of a town whose permanent population numbers around 55.

The traditional owners of the area — whose connection to these springs, this scrub, and the waterways running through it predates Stuart's visit by thousands of years — became the fourth Indigenous group in the Northern Territory to gain native title over their lands. The ruling covered both the townsite and ten surrounding pastoral leases, an area of 30,000 square kilometres. The Federal Court held a special ceremonial sitting at nearby Newcastle Waters Station to mark the occasion. It was a recognition of continuity: that the history accumulating at Daly Waters since the 1860s sits atop a much deeper and longer story.