Lake Dunn sits in the locality of Upland, north-east of the small town of Aramac and south of the larger, saltier Lake Galilee. What you see today is only a remnant: the present shoreline traces a fraction of the original lakebed, the lake having shrunk over the ages to its current modest size. Its waters are muddy rather than blue, which keeps the swimmers and sailors at bay but does nothing to deter its real admirers. Around the foreshore stand good stands of River Red Gum and Coolibah, the classic trees of the Australian inland, their pale trunks leaning over the water. For a district defined by drought, a lake that never quite disappears is a small kind of miracle, and the locals have long treated it as one.

Because Lake Dunn is the only wetland for a vast surrounding area, it concentrates birdlife the way a single lit window draws moths on a dark night. Waterfowl gather here in large numbers, and where the birds go, the birdwatchers follow. The local council has worked to make the place welcoming, tidying the shores and laying out picnic facilities, and over recent years it has become a genuinely popular spot for locals to camp, fish and simply sit by the water at the end of a long, hot day. The lake's appeal is quiet rather than dramatic, the pleasure of shade, water, birdsong and the company of red gums, but in this country that is no small thing.

Lake Dunn has lately become the anchor of one of outback Queensland's most charming surprises: the Lake Dunn Sculpture Trail. Strung along roughly two hundred kilometres of road looping between Aramac, Lake Dunn and Jericho, the trail features around forty sculptures, the work of local artist Milynda Rogers, who fashions them from scrap and steel. Each one depicts an animal or some piece of outback life, appearing without warning at the roadside, a giant cane toad here, a stockman there, scattered through paddocks and scrub. Visitors drive the circuit hunting for them like a treasure trail, and the lake itself, with its camping and its birds, makes the natural place to break the journey and stay the night under an enormous outback sky.

The district that surrounds Lake Dunn trades on one of the great yarns of the Australian outback. Nearby Aramac, whose odd name comes from the initials "R. R. Mac" of the early Queensland figure Robert Ramsay Mackenzie, is famous as the country of Harry Redford, the cattle duffer immortalised as Captain Starlight in the bushranging novel Robbery Under Arms. In 1870 Redford and his men spirited around a thousand head of cattle on an audacious two-thousand-kilometre drive south into South Australia. His undoing was a magnificent white bull he could not shake from the herd; sold along the way, the unmistakable beast gave the whole scheme away, and in 1873 Redford stood trial at Roma with the bull as the star exhibit. Aramac celebrates the legend to this day with a sculpture of that white bull, and travellers tracing the lakes and the sculpture trail are, whether they know it or not, crossing the rangeland where one of the colony's boldest thefts was hatched.