Eucla is roughly the midpoint of the Eyre Highway, the marathon drive between Port Augusta and Norseman that has become a rite of passage for anyone crossing the bottom of Australia. Out here, distances are measured between fuel pumps: the nearest barely-inhabited neighbours are Nullarbor Roadhouse, 190 kilometres east, and Madura Roadhouse, 180 kilometres west. The petrol costs more than it would in Perth or Adelaide, the pub food is honest rather than refined, and the cold beer on tap tastes like a reward. Calling Eucla a town is generous. It is a lifeline with a motel attached, and after hours of empty plain it feels like a small miracle.

That odd time setting is real and worth savouring. Eucla, along with Mundrabilla, Madura, and Border Village across the state line, runs on Central Western Time, three-quarters of an hour ahead of the rest of Western Australia and forty-five minutes behind South Australia. It was adopted informally to soften the jarring time gap between communities on either side of the border, and it has no official sanction at all. Yet it puts Eucla in rare company: only a tiny handful of inhabited places anywhere in the world, among them Nepal and the Chatham Islands, keep a time zone offset by forty-five minutes. You will not find this clock in many other places on the planet.

It is easy to forget, mid-desert, that Eucla is a coastal town. The reminder is spectacular. South of the modern roadhouse, out among the pale Delisser Sandhills, stand the ruins of the old Eucla telegraph station, a stone shell being steadily swallowed and uncovered by the moving dunes. From the ruins a short walk over low sand leads to the Southern Ocean, where the bleached timbers of an old jetty run out across a white beach toward water the colour of glass. Once, supplies came ashore here and travelled inland on a tram line; now the whole scene belongs to the wind and the sand, and it is the single most memorable stop between the two coasts.

Near the present town stands the Travellers Cross, and its name plays a quiet trick. You might expect a memorial to passing motorists lost to the brutal road, but it commemorates the locals, the people who lived and died in this remote place rather than merely driving through it. It is a fitting emblem for Eucla, a settlement that has only ever held a few dozen souls but has always held them firmly. Down at the modern roadhouse you will find a hotel, a restaurant, a police station, a museum dedicated to the old telegraph days, and even a golf club a few kilometres up the highway, the improbable furniture of community at the edge of the void.

Twelve kilometres east lies Border Village, Eucla's even tinier twin on the South Australian side, little more than a roadhouse and a checkpoint. Drive between them and you cross a hard agricultural border: heading into Western Australia, every plant, fruit, and vegetable must be declared and surrendered at an inspection point, a defence against pests carried across the continent. The basic Eucla airstrip handles only the occasional medical evacuation, and connectivity is patchy, though travellers report that the roadhouse Starlink wifi is surprisingly quick. Then the highway resumes, and the choice is the only one the Nullarbor ever offers: west, or east.