The plains around Mossgiel are flat to the point of disorientation, and the great problem was never space but water. In about 1864 the Desailly brothers, Francis and George, took up the Mossgiel and Booligal runs as "back block" stations, and the effort to keep stock alive was enormous. They put a small army of men to fencing, digging tanks, and sinking wells, and reportedly imported the first centrifugal pump and steam engine in the entire Riverina. Water hauled up by horse-driven whims and by that hissing steam pump ran into iron troughs at every well. Out here, an engine that lifted water was not a luxury. It was the difference between a sheep station and bare dirt.

When a coach service began running from Booligal toward the Darling River around 1868, a township sprouted along the route almost overnight. Robert Riordan opened the Mossgiel Hotel in 1869; William Carter followed with the Wool-pack Hotel that December. A post office, a store, a blacksmith, and a saddler appeared in quick succession. The growth was so disorderly that in 1873 the Hay Police Court rejected yet another publican's license, on the wonderful grounds that "there are two hotels already there and no town whatever, only the Mossgiel station." The court added a dry verdict on the local culture: "The drinking there is said to be fearful." A school finally opened in 1886, lending a little permanence.

The plains gave, and then they took. The Federation Drought of 1895 to 1903 emptied the district; stations closed to caretaker staff, the supply routes collapsed, and flour and fodder had to come by camel train from Wilcannia down to Ivanhoe and on to Mossgiel by coach. By early 1903 the government water tank ran dry, and water was carted eleven miles from Lignum Park station. Then, in February 1904, barely after the rains returned, a sandstorm howled out of the southwest at "hurricane speed for sixty hours without intermission," the worst the oldest residents had seen. It buried the town in dunes. Galland's store could only be entered from one end of the verandah, where sheets of galvanised iron held back "a perfect mountain of sand."

A town can survive drought and even burial, but not irrelevance. The blow that finished Mossgiel was quiet and bureaucratic: the railway, when it came, ran through Ivanhoe, thirty-five miles away, and not through Mossgiel at all. By 1936 the town had dwindled so far that the cottage hospital and the last hotel both closed. The plain, however, keeps one small secret of its own. The threatened Mossgiel daisy, a perennial with mauve petals around a yellow eye, takes its name from this region, flowering quietly in the clay among the bladder saltbush and bluebush, in a place where almost nothing else of the human town remains.