The roadhouse is the beating heart of the town and the unofficial capital of the whole Oodnadatta Track. Its story begins in 1975, when Adam and Lynnie Plate - self-described hippies trekking the old Ghan route with camels, donkeys and horses - rolled into the small Aboriginal community and decided to stay. Lynnie started selling cups of tea because travellers couldn't get one anywhere else. By 1983 the enterprise had a shopfront on the main street, and when Lynnie's father gave her an old Dodge, Adam had it sprayed bright pink and parked it out front. They painted the whole store to match, called it the Pink Roadhouse, and an icon was born. Today it dispenses fuel, supplies, advice, hand-drawn maps of the back roads, and the famous Oodnaburger to dusty, grateful travellers. Adam died in a rally accident in 2012, but the pink endures - a beacon visible long before the rest of the town.

Long before any roadhouse, this was a place of water, and in this country water is everything. For tens of thousands of years Aboriginal people travelled through here along trade routes that linked reliable soaks and springs across the desert. The land belongs to the Arabana people, whose country covers much of the western side of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, with the Lower Southern Arrernte to the north - peoples who read this seemingly empty landscape as a map of water, food and law written across the saltbush. The very name Oodnadatta is thought to come from an Arrernte word, utnadata, meaning the blossom of the mulga. When Europeans pushed north, they followed the same logic of water the first peoples always had, threading the Overland Telegraph Line - completed in 1872 - through the chain of mound springs that rise along the western edge of the Great Artesian Basin.

Oodnadatta exists because the railway stopped here. Proclaimed a township in 1890, it became the northern railhead of the Great Northern Railway - the line that would grow into the Ghan - and for nearly four decades it was the end of the line, a roaring frontier depot where goods and passengers transferred to camel trains for the long haul to Alice Springs. That ended in 1929 when the rails finally reached Alice. The harder blow came in 1980, when the Ghan was rerouted onto a new western alignment and the old tracks through Oodnadatta were closed. Many assumed the town would simply die. It didn't. The old stone railway station still stands, and the abandoned line became the spine of the Oodnadatta Track, reborn the same year as one of Australia's great outback drives - the railway's loss becoming the traveller's gain.

Make no mistake about the climate. Oodnadatta holds a fearsome reputation as one of the hottest, driest towns in the country - the place where, on 2 January 1960, the thermometer reached 50.7 degrees Celsius, long cited as the highest reliably recorded temperature in Australia. Summer here is not a season so much as a siege. The town is small enough to walk in minutes, and parking, as the locals dryly note, is never a problem. You can get a meal of pub or roadhouse food, a cold beer, a patch of ground to camp on or a basic motel room. The nightlife will not keep you dancing, but that is not why you came. From here the track runs on - south past the dry southern lakes toward William Creek and Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, or north to the Stuart Highway at Marla and on to Alice Springs. Fill the tank, fill the water cans, check with the roadhouse on conditions, and go. Out here the desert sets the terms, and the pink dot on the horizon is the last sure thing for a long, long way.