Before it had its current name, this place was simply called The Granites, and you only need to stand in the main street to understand why. The weathered tors that erupt among the buildings are the town's defining feature, a landscape so distinctive that artists made the long pilgrimage here to paint it. Tibooburra is the transliteration of an Aboriginal word for a heap of boulders, and the streets, named after European explorers by the surveyor who laid them out, run between rocks that long predate any of those names. The heat is the other constant. Summer temperatures climb above 40 degrees with grinding regularity, frosts bite on winter nights, and rain is so scarce that in 1919 the town saw barely 48 millimetres for the entire year. When the rare deluge does come, it can drop nearly twice the annual average in a single month.

In 1844, Charles Sturt and his men came through this country dragging a whaleboat across the desert, so certain of an inland sea that they had brought a vessel to sail it. Drought trapped them for six months at Depot Glen, south of here, before the land defeated their push northwest. Modern travellers who reach Tibooburra get the clearest sense of what that effort cost; it is hard country to cross even now, on sealed roads. The town later became a waypoint in the search for Burke and Wills, who had passed through in 1860, and it was those doomed rescue expeditions of 1861 that finally opened the region to the pastoral industry. Sturt's name is everywhere here still, on the national park, on the memorials, written across a landscape that very nearly killed him.

In 1880, gold was found around Tibooburra, riding the wave of a rush to the nearby Albert Goldfields at Milparinka. It was said that after heavy rain, gold lay exposed in the streets. By 1887 nineteen gold-puddling machines were grinding away, and roughly 250 people had gathered at and around the diggings. The boom did not last. By 1900 the gold had mostly given out, and sheep stations, vast by necessity in such dry country, took over as the mainstay of local life. For more than a century rough unsealed roads kept Tibooburra isolated from the world; only with four-wheel-drive tourism and, finally, a sealed road completed in 2020 did the town come within comfortable reach. The drive-in theatre still stands on the main street, an unlikely relic of the outback.

The Family Hotel opened in 1882, and its walls hold the town's most surprising treasure. The painter Clifton Pugh, drawn like other artists to this remote corner, often stayed at the pub and covered an inside wall with murals, drawings and sketches that still draw visitors in for a drink and a look. Down the street, the more substantial two-storey Tibooburra Hotel offers its own welcome. But the town's deeper story is harder. This is Wangkumara Country, and in 1938 almost the entire remaining Aboriginal population of Tibooburra and the surrounding region was forcibly removed by the Aborigines Protection Board, scattered to places like Brewarrina, Menindee and Kempsey, hundreds of kilometres from home. The granite and the murals are easy to celebrate. The removals are part of this place too, and remembering them honours the people who were taken from a Country they had held for generations.