Like so much of inland Western Australia, Meekatharra owes its existence to gold and its survival to a second strike. The first settlement took root around 1894, and in May 1896 the prospectors Meehan, Porter and Soich found gold, drawing miners in from the other East Murchison fields. The rush was real but brief; the first field faltered fast. Only a fresh discovery in 1899 kept the place alive. The Meekatharra State Battery began crushing ore in 1901, and on Christmas Day 1903 the township was officially gazetted - a settlement that had nearly died twice before it was even legally a town. Gold has come and gone since, in booms through the 1980s and brief revivals that ended in administration, but that early double-or-nothing set the pattern.

In 1906, surveyor Alfred Canning was sent to carve a stock route from the East Kimberley down to the Murchison - the famous Canning Stock Route, a chain of 51 wells punched through some of the harshest desert in Australia, finished in 1910. When the railway reached Meekatharra in 1910, the town became the railhead at the route's southern end, the point where cattle driven for hundreds of waterless kilometres could finally be loaded onto trains. That same year the first wool shipment rolled out. The railway, more than the gold, is what truly kept Meekatharra alive, serving the pastoral stations until it closed in 1978. Today the cattle and sheep still come, but by road train now - those vast multi-trailer trucks that are the outback's lifeline.

In a place this remote, distance is the deadliest condition of all, and Meekatharra answered it from the air. The town became a regional base for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the legendary outback medical network that turns a light aircraft into an ambulance and a clinic, reaching stations and communities that no road could serve in time. Alongside it runs the School of the Air, which once taught children scattered across thousands of square kilometres by two-way radio. Both are quietly extraordinary institutions, born of the same hard arithmetic: when the nearest help is hundreds of kilometres away, you bring it on wings, or down a wire, or you do without.

Meekatharra's airport began as a wartime project: Americans built its 2,181-metre runway during World War II, and the strip went on to find an unlikely modern role as an ETOPS diversion airport for transcontinental flights crossing into Australia - a desert bolt-hole for airliners that may never need it but must know it is there. The town has sent more than cattle and ore into the world, too. David Ngoombujarra, the acclaimed Indigenous actor of the Yamatji people, was born here in 1967 as David Starr; spotted busking in Sydney, he went on to win three Australian Film Institute Awards and roles in films such as Rabbit-Proof Fence before his death in 2011. From a place of little water, a great deal has gone out into the wider world.