Water is the whole story here, and it is never the same twice. Kinchega holds a long stretch of the Darling River and half of the Menindee Lakes, a string of shallow overflow basins that the river fills in flood and abandons in drought. When the lakes are full, they become vast mirrors throwing back the outback sky; as the water recedes, the beds turn brilliant green, then fade to cracked clay. River red gums line the channels, their roots gripping banks that have known a century and a half of flood and failure. This is country defined by feast and famine - water in abundance one year, dust the next - and the landscape is shaped by waiting for the river to return.

Before it was a park, this was Kinchega Station, and its scale is hard to overstate. The run began as an early West Darling property called Menindel, held by the explorer John McKinlay in the 1850s and taken up under the Kinchega name by 1860. At its height the station sprawled across the arid plains in the way outback holdings did - measured not in paddocks but in horizons. The Old Kinchega Homestead and the surviving woolshed still stand as monuments to that era, when wool was wealth and a single property could swallow a small country whole. The shearers, station hands and their families who worked this land left their mark on every weathered building and fence line. Walking the homestead site today, you can still read the outline of a self-contained world that had to make its own water, food and company hundreds of kilometres from anywhere.

In the riverboat age, the Darling carried the district's wool to market, and Kinchega's reach extended onto the water. One of the more dramatic relics in the park marks the wreck of the paddle-steamer Providence, which exploded on the riverbank here - a reminder that the Darling's commerce came with real danger. The boilers that drove these vessels were temperamental, and the river that carried them was unpredictable. The age of the paddle-steamer faded as roads and rail took over, but along this stretch of the Darling its ghosts remain, written into the banks where the boats once tied up to load.

Take away the sheep, add the water, and Kinchega becomes one of the great bird places of inland Australia. When the Menindee Lakes fill, they draw enormous congregations of waterbirds - flocks of pelicans, black swans, ducks and egrets gather along the shallows, and the air fills with their noise. Pink and black cockatoos screech through the river gums; lace monitors patrol the banks; Peron's tree frogs call after rain. For visitors, the park is a place of quiet pleasures: fishing, paddling at Morton Boolka, camping beside the river, and watching the light change over water in a land where water is precious. It is also rich in Aboriginal heritage, the river having sustained people here for thousands of years before the first sheep arrived.