Before roads and railways, the Darling was the road. From the late 1800s until the mid-1920s, shallow-draught paddle-steamers churned down from the sheep stations of northern NSW and southern Queensland, their decks stacked with bales bound for the markets of South Australia. Pooncarie was built for them. Sitting on a series of sand hills, the village had a natural two-tier wharf that could meet a steamer whether the temperamental Darling ran high or low. Wool made the town. Great pastoral runs took shape nearby - Polia, Cuthero, Tarcoola, Tolarno - and their clip passed through Pooncarie's port on its long journey south. When the steamers stopped coming, the river fell quiet, but the old wharf site survives, and a cafe now sits above it where the bales once stacked.

In late September 1860, the Victorian Exploring Expedition reached the Darling near Tarcoola Station, just south of present-day Pooncarie. Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills were pushing north toward the Gulf of Carpentaria, hauling a famously overloaded column of camels, horses and supplies across a continent. They made their thirtieth camp since leaving Melbourne at a spot now called Bilbarka Park and lingered nearly two weeks before striking out for Menindee on 11 October. Most of the party would never come home; Burke and Wills died of starvation at Cooper Creek the following year. Pooncarie was an early, hopeful waypoint on a journey that became a national tragedy - and the town has never let the names go.

Pooncarie endures the way outback towns do, by being useful. Gazetted in 1863 under the spelling "Pooncaira," it became a service hub for the surrounding stations and never entirely stopped being one. Today there is a store with fuel, a hotel, a school, a cafe and a racecourse where the Pooncarie Cup - run each Labour Day - draws crowds of well over a thousand to a village that empties out the rest of the year. The climate is unforgiving: a hot desert classification, blazing dry summers, cool nights, and barely 268 millimetres of rain in an average year. People here have always lived with that scarcity, and with the long horizons that come with it. The former police station now houses the post office and a Centrelink desk, and the school keeps a handful of children on the roll - the small institutions a remote village needs to keep its grip on the map.

For most travellers today, Pooncarie is a beginning rather than a destination. It is the closest village to Mungo National Park, 88 kilometres east across the dust, and the last reliable place to fill a tank and a water bottle before the unsealed road runs out into the dry lakebeds of the Willandra. There is something fitting in that. The expedition that named these streets was chasing the far side of the continent; the people who pass through now are chasing the deep past, the 40,000-plus years of human story written into the lunettes beyond town. Pooncarie sits at the hinge between the two - a quiet river village that has always been on the way to somewhere larger than itself.