Strzelecki Creek is a distributary, a rare kind of waterway that carries water away from a main channel rather than gathering it in. It peels off Cooper Creek near Innamincka and runs roughly 200 kilometres south through the Strzelecki Desert toward Lake Blanche. For much of its course it is fed by the Cooper, but it also has a catchment of its own and can flow independently after heavy local storms. Only on exceptional occasions does enough water arrive to push all the way to the great salt sinks of Lakes Blanche, Callabonna, Frome, and Gregory. The channel is lined with trees and waterholes and hemmed in by long parallel sand ridges, the dunefields that give the surrounding desert its corrugated, wind-combed character.

The creek carries the name of a man who never saw it dry or full. On 18 August 1845 the British explorer Charles Sturt named it for Paul Edmund de Strzelecki, the Polish scientist and explorer who had made his own mark on the Australian continent. Sturt was deep in his punishing search for an inland sea he believed lay at the heart of the continent, a sea that did not exist, and the names he scattered across this country endure long after his theory collapsed. From that single act of christening, the name spread outward across the map, fixing itself to the desert and to the track that would follow.

The creek's greater fame comes from what runs beside it. Later travellers found that following the line of Strzelecki Creek offered one of the best routes through this forbidding interior. The explorer Augustus Charles Gregory and his party discovered it made a viable path across the continent, and the route eventually became the Strzelecki Track, one of Australia's iconic outback roads, a lonely ribbon of dirt linking the Flinders Ranges country to Innamincka and the Cooper. The creek and its trees mark the way through a landscape that otherwise offers little reassurance. Where there is a watercourse, there is shade, the chance of water in a hole, and the thread of a route that humans have followed across this desert for far longer than any map records.

An ephemeral creek is not a lesser thing than a permanent one; in the desert it may be the most important thing of all. When the Cooper finally spills its floodwater south down the Strzelecki, the change is sudden and total. Dry channels become flowing water, dormant seeds erupt into green, fish appear as if from nowhere in the filling waterholes, and waterbirds arrive in their thousands to breed while the abundance lasts. Then the water sinks and evaporates, the creek pulls back into its scattered pools, and the country waits again, sometimes for years. This boom-and-bust pulse is the rhythm of the whole Lake Eyre basin, of which Strzelecki Creek is one strand. The waterholes that persist along its bed are lifelines, sustaining wildlife, stock, and travellers through the long dry, anchoring a desert that would otherwise be impassable to a slender, reliable chain of shade and water.