This is old country, long held by Aboriginal people whose presence along these waterless ranges shifted with the seasons and the scarce water - until disease and the pressure of European settlement drove them from their lands, as it did across so much of the continent. The first European to pass through was the surveyor Thomas Mitchell in 1841. Three years later Charles Sturt, hunting for a fabled inland sea, named the Barrier Range - so called because it barred his way north. Burke and Wills crossed this country on their doomed 1860-61 expedition, basing themselves at nearby Menindee. Then, in the 1870s, prospectors struck rich silver, and a town erupted from the saltbush. Silverton was proclaimed in 1880, and within a decade it boomed.

At its height Silverton had a municipal council, formed in October 1886, and grand civic ambitions to match a population approaching 3,000. To shift the ore concentrates more efficiently than horse and dray could manage, the Silverton Tramway opened in 1888, a railway running to the South Australian border where government trains hauled the ore on to Port Pirie for smelting. But the high-grade silver around Silverton ran thin fast - and just down the road, at Broken Hill, miners had hit a silver-lead-zinc ore body of staggering richness. The Broken Hill lode would become one of the great mineral deposits on Earth. Silverton could not compete. The population collapsed, the portable houses rolled away, and by 1901 fewer than 300 people remained where thousands had lived.

Even diminished, Silverton stayed close to Broken Hill's heart as a place for outings and recreation, and that link runs through one of the strangest events in Australian history. On New Year's Day 1915, a picnic train packed with Broken Hill families was steaming toward Silverton when two men opened fire on it from beside the line - an attack that left several dead and shocked the nation in the early months of the First World War. For decades afterward, Penrose Park outside town served as the district's great picnic ground; mining companies poured money into its sporting fields in the 1930s and 40s, and a single employees' picnic in 1941 drew a fifth of Broken Hill's entire population. The road out to it became one of the first sealed roads in the region, worn smooth by convoys of family cars.

Silverton's second life began behind a camera. The clear desert light, the weathered colonial stone and the cinematic emptiness proved irresistible to filmmakers, and by 2007 the town had appeared in more than 140 films and commercials. The roll call is remarkable for a place of 50 people: the nightmarish Wake in Fright, the wartime drama A Town Like Alice, the horror film Razorback, and most famously Mad Max 2, whose battered interceptor still sits outside the Silverton Hotel. That pub, its walls layered with memorabilia, is the town's beating heart. Artists settled too, drawn by the same light the film crews loved, opening galleries like John Dynon's among the ruins. Most of old Silverton has crumbled to rubble, but the Hotel, the former gaol and the old stone school - where the poet Dame Mary Gilmore once taught - still stand. Each August the town swells again, when campers fill Penrose Park for the Mundi Mundi Bash out on the nearby plains. A ghost town, perhaps - but a remarkably lively one.