It is hard to overstate the scale. At its largest Innamincka covered more than fifteen thousand square kilometres, making it the second-biggest station in South Australia after the legendary Anna Creek. When Bostock sold up in 1881, the run carried a herd of eight thousand cattle and changed hands for sixty thousand pounds. In 1908 it came into the empire of Sidney Kidman, the self-made cattle baron who would eventually control a chain of stations stretching across the continent. Kidman wasted no time, immediately selling two hundred and fifty bullocks in the Adelaide yards, where buyers admired their breeding and quality. He sold Innamincka in 1918 after a brutal drought, then later bought it back, the kind of long game that built his name.

Life here is governed by water that comes in violent extremes. The record reads like a litany. Cooper Creek inundated the station in 1891. Severe drought struck in 1902. The homestead was simply washed away in the floods of 1906. Between 1914 and 1916, drought killed roughly ten thousand head of cattle. The most astonishing entry is March 1949, when more than twenty-one inches of rain fell in four weeks, as much as the country would normally receive in four years, and the Cooper spread out more than fifteen miles wide. Witnesses described a vast inland sea. Five years later, in 1954, the property received an inch and a half of rain for the entire year. To run cattle here is to gamble against a sky that keeps no promises.

In the late 1950s and 1960s the surface story was joined by a deeper one. The energy company Santos began drilling for oil and gas in the Cooper Basin, the ancient sedimentary basin that lies beneath the station and far beyond it. The first commercial gas was struck in 1963, and what followed transformed inland Australia's economy: in time, some 145 gas fields and 76 oil fields came into production, piped to processing facilities at Moomba, seventy kilometres to the southwest. The country that had nearly killed Burke and Wills, that drowned and starved generations of cattle, turned out to be floating on one of the nation's great reserves of energy.

For all its severity, the country can be suddenly, almost unbearably beautiful. After a good wet, the gibber plains and channels erupt into colour. In the excellent season of 1981, observers reported the land carpeted with masses of yellow and white wildflowers, the desert briefly behaving like a meadow. This is the paradox of the Cooper: the same floods that wash away homesteads are the floods that bring the country to life, and the same isolation that makes survival precarious is what keeps the place feeling ancient and untouched. The little township of Innamincka, four kilometres southwest of the homestead, remains a stopping point for travellers on the Strzelecki Track, drawn by the creek, the history, and the sheer scale of the silence.