Before it was a view, Mundi Mundi was a sheep run. It was one of the four original stations carved out of the Barrier Range in the early 1870s, alongside Mount Gipps, Corona and Alberta. The Whitting family were the first Europeans to settle the range, and their daughter Tryphena was the first European child born in the district. By 1930 the property was carrying 12,000 sheep across the saltbush plains. The land was demanding - a 1943 drought forced the manager to sell off thousands of head - but Mundi Mundi was, by the accounts of the day, well run, its pastures carefully rotated where neighbouring stations were exhausted and overgrazed.

Then came one of the quiet ironies of outback history. In the late 1970s the Crown lease came up for review, and the government compared aerial photographs of the district. Mundi Mundi's careful stewardship showed plainly against the worn-out land around it. But rather than reward that, officials reasoned the struggling neighbours needed the good grazing more - and so prime, well-managed country was compulsorily acquired and broken up, parcelled out to the very properties that had run their own land into the ground. Mundi Mundi was dismembered around 1978-79, its acres absorbed into the present-day Eldee, Purnamoota and Belmont Stations. The owner at the time, Colin McLeod, was an heir of the M.S. McLeod tyre and rubber family of Adelaide; his wife Innes ran the famous Silverton Hotel until she sold it in 2021.

It was the screen that made these plains famous. The clear desert light and the endless flat horizon were exactly what film crews wanted, and they have been coming since the 1980s. Beer commercials, McCain Foods ads, music videos and fashion shoots have all used the country. So did the 1984 horror film Razorback and Alex Proyas's 1989 cult oddity Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds. But the immortal sequence belongs to Mad Max 2: the film's final scenes were shot at the lookout, and that long straight road plunging down onto the plain is instantly recognisable to anyone who has seen the movie. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert filmed here too. Somewhere in the collective memory, this anonymous patch of saltbush became one of the most cinematic roads on Earth.

These days the emptiness fills up once a year. Since 2022, Belmont Station has hosted the Mundi Mundi Bash, an outback music festival that pulls thousands of campers and big-name Australian acts into the middle of nowhere - part concert, part pilgrimage, part agritourism lifeline for graziers in a hard country. To the east, on land that was once part of the old run, the turbines of the Silverton Wind Farm now turn above the Barrier Ranges, a 21st-century crop rising where the sheep once grazed. The plains themselves haven't changed: the same flat immensity, the same theatrical sunsets and rolling dust storms, the same vertiginous sense of seeing the curve of the world. People still pull up at the lookout, kill the engine, and just watch the horizon bend.