Mungerannie stands where the Sturt Stony, Tirari, Simpson and Strzelecki deserts almost touch, beside the channel locally known as Derwent Creek on the upper Warburton system. The annual rainfall here is a mere 130.6 millimetres, barely enough to dampen the dust. Yet a permanent waterhole thrives, fed by an artesian bore tapping the Great Artesian Basin, that vast underground reservoir of ancient water lying beneath much of inland Australia. The bore-fed wetland has become a genuine ecological hotspot, supporting some 110 species of birds in a place where, without it, almost nothing would gather. For travellers, the hotel's warm artesian pool offers a surreal pleasure: soaking in geothermal water with the desert stretching away on every side.

The name Mungeranie is Aboriginal, and it translates, with disarming bluntness, as "big ugly face." It is the kind of name that sticks in the memory and says something about the unsentimental humour of this country. There is little soft about life on the Track, and the name fits a landscape that asks a great deal of anyone who crosses it. Two spellings persist side by side, Mungeranie and Mungerannie, the latter usually attached to the hotel and the pastoral station, a small reminder that out here even the maps have not entirely made up their minds.

Richard Forbes Sullivan opened a depot and hotel on this spot in 1886 to supply the shepherds, drovers and travellers pushing along the Birdsville Track. Others built on the foothold: in 1888 William Crombie took up a nearby block to rest horses and water cattle, and by 1889 Robert Rowe had taken over the store. In 1901 the government sank a bore to guarantee permanent water, the act that truly made the place viable. A cattle station and police station followed in 1903, and a school opened in 1915. The settlement grew into a genuine waypoint, its survival owed to that single, reliable source of water in a country that offered almost none.

Mungerannie has one improbable footnote in Australian political history. In 1920 it served as the head office of the Great Northern League, a movement that campaigned to carve a brand-new state out of the South Australian outback, to be called Brachina. The plan never came to anything, the desert keeping its borders as they were. Today Mungerannie's importance is more practical than political: the hotel is the only fuel and supplies depot on the entire Birdsville Track, sitting roughly 204 kilometres north of Marree and 313 kilometres south of Birdsville. For anyone making the crossing, it is not a luxury but a necessity, the one green dot on a very long red line.