The junction is named not for a roadbuilder but for a flyer. In 1935, long before any track reached this spot, Commander Frank Neale flew a General Aircraft Monospar over this country as part of the Mackay Aerial Reconnaissance Survey Expedition, an effort to map the blank interior of Western and South Australia from the air. From the cockpit, the desert below would have unrolled as an endless field of parallel sand dunes and spinifex, broken only by the shadows of clouds. Neale's name was later fixed to the place where the two highways would eventually meet - a quiet tribute to the era when the only way to know this land at all was to fly over it and look down.

The two tracks that cross here both came from one remarkable man. Len Beadell was a surveyor and roadbuilder who, in the 1950s and 1960s, pushed thousands of kilometres of access tracks through the deserts of central Australia, often as the first European to travel the country he was grading. He named his roads after the people he loved. The Anne Beadell Highway, running roughly east to west between Coober Pedy and Laverton, carries his wife's name. The Connie Sue Highway, running north to south, carries his daughter's - and the story of that naming is unexpectedly tender. Just north of this very junction, the infant Connie Sue stood up for the first time in her makeshift bassinet, a packing crate riding in the survey truck. On the spot, Beadell decided the road would bear her name.

Travellers who make it here look for one thing above all: the marker. Len Beadell left distinctive aluminium plaques along his roads, stamped with the name of the place, the date, and his own initials, and Neale Junction has one of these famous markers. For the handful of four-wheel-drivers who cross the desert each year, finding a Beadell plate is a small pilgrimage - proof of arrival in a place with no other sign of welcome. There is a visitors book here too, where those who pass record their names; the original was retired and deposited in the State Library of Western Australia's Battye collection in 2002, its pages a roll call of the very few who have ever stood at this crossroads.

Neale Junction is not only a meeting of roads but the heart of a protected wilderness. It gives its name to the Neale Junction Nature Reserve, which sits beside the even larger Great Victoria Desert Nature Reserve - together preserving a vast tract of red dune fields, spinifex grasslands, and the hardy mulga and marble gum that cling to life out here. There is no settlement, no fuel, no water, no phone signal - only the desert in every direction, the silence broken by wind and the occasional engine of a passing expedition. Some maps mark the junction as suitable for camping, which is to say: you may stop here, under a sky thick with stars, in one of the emptiest places a road will ever take you.