Sir Norman Brearley's West Australian Airways had won the Commonwealth contract to fly mail, passengers and freight between Perth and Adelaide, and the company ordered four de Havilland DH.66 Hercules trimotors from England to do it. Hangars went up at Maylands in Perth, at Parafield in Adelaide, and here at Forrest in the middle. The first scheduled passenger service across the continent began in May 1929, routed via Kalgoorlie and Ceduna, with Forrest as the overnight stop. Travellers climbing stiffly down from the Hercules found a proper hostel waiting - dining room, kitchen, beds - an unlikely outpost of comfort built precisely because there was nothing else for hundreds of kilometres. In the 1930s the Douglas airliner Bungana, known to everyone simply as the mail plane, became a regular caller.

Forrest sits beside the Trans-Australian Railway, whose track here runs dead straight for 478 kilometres - the longest stretch of straight railway on Earth. Passengers on the Indian Pacific still glance up from the window as the airfield slides past, a sudden geometry of runway and rooftops in a landscape that otherwise refuses to hold a single landmark. The hamlet was never large: a cluster of cottages for the civil aviation staff and, later, for the people who ran the Bureau of Meteorology weather station. Out here, weather observations matter enormously, because Forrest is one of the few places on the plain where anyone is watching the sky at all. The settlement's whole reason for existing was to be a fixed point in a place designed to have none.

When the Second World War came, the Royal Australian Air Force took the field over as a transit stop, a refuelling point, and a communications base on the vulnerable east-west corridor. Aircraft crossing the continent leaned on Forrest the way ships once leaned on a lighthouse. After the war the scheduled airliners moved on to faster routes and bigger machines, and the crowds thinned to almost nothing. The hostel emptied. The cottages, one by one, fell quiet. What had been a bustling overnight stop on the nation's premier air route slipped into the strange half-life of an outback ghost settlement - too useful to abandon entirely, too remote to ever fill again.

Forrest never quite closed. The runway is still graded, the historic hangar still stands ready to shelter a light aircraft from the desert sun, and fuel is still here for those who need it. The Royal Flying Doctor Service uses Forrest as a lifeline waypoint - in country this empty, a refuelling stop can be the difference between reaching a patient and not. The Australian Defence Force calls in too, and a steady trickle of private pilots crossing the Nullarbor break their journey here, as crews have for nearly a century. The town has only the loosest grip on permanence; residents come and go, sometimes numbering just a handful. But the green-and-amber runway lights still come on when a plane is expected, exactly as they did when the Hercules first droned in from the east.