The name Innamincka comes from local Aboriginal language and is generally taken to mean something like "your waterhole" or "shelter on the water" - a fitting name for a place defined by Cooper Creek. This is Yandruwandha and Yawarrawarrka country, and it has never stopped being so; the modern town sits within a landscape of sacred sites profoundly significant to its traditional owners. When the explorer Charles Sturt arrived in 1845, he tried to rename the place Hopetoun after the Governor of Victoria. The name did not stick. The country kept the older word, the one that knew it best.

In 1861 the Burke and Wills expedition, the first to cross Australia from south to north, staggered back to its depot on Cooper Creek. They arrived in the evening of 21 April, roughly nine hours after the support party had given them up for dead and departed. Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills both died here within weeks, in late June, weakened by starvation. They had been eating nardoo, a fern seed the local people ground and carefully leached to remove its toxins. The explorers ate it raw and unprocessed, and it poisoned rather than fed them. The supply tree where the depot party left rations, marked with carved instructions, is remembered today as the Dig Tree.

Only one of the men who crossed the continent survived: John King. He lived because the Yandruwandha took him in. For roughly three months they fed him fish and properly prepared nardoo, sheltered him, and treated him, in his own words, as one of their own. When the rescuer Alfred Howitt finally reached Cooper Creek on 15 September 1861, he found King alive only because of that care. The story is usually told as a European tragedy, but its single thread of survival was Aboriginal generosity, extended to strangers who had no way to repay it. The Burke, Wills, King and Yandruwandha story is now recognised as a National Heritage Place, naming the people whose kindness the original accounts so often left out.

By the 1950s the European settlement was finished. Severe drought and brutal isolation emptied it; the nursing home closed in 1951 once the Royal Flying Doctor Service made it redundant, and the police station, hotel and store soon followed. For two decades Innamincka was a true ghost town, ruins on the creek. What revived it was hidden underground. The surrounding Cooper Basin holds vast reserves of oil and gas, and the refinery at nearby Moomba, about sixty-six kilometres to the southwest, became one of the country's great energy hubs, helping supply a large share of eastern Australia's gas. A new store and hotel rose by the old nursing home ruins in the early 1970s, and tourists began arriving to follow the Burke and Wills trail and reach the wetlands beyond.

Most travellers come to Innamincka to leave it. The real wonder lies in the surrounding country: an undulating tangle of channels, waterholes, gorges and floodplains running uninterrupted for hundreds of kilometres. Just upstream, the Cullyamurra Waterhole is reckoned the largest billabong in the country, around seven kilometres long and twenty-seven metres deep where Cooper Creek squeezes through a narrow rock passage known as the Innamincka Choke. It has never been known to run dry. Northwest lie the Coongie Lakes, a Ramsar-listed oasis of freshwater in the desert. Innamincka is one of only two places in Australia where you can ride an airboat across inland water, with the bonus, unlike the tropical north, of no saltwater crocodiles waiting in the shallows.