Beadell worked for the Weapons Research Establishment at Woomera, and his job was peculiar: open up the empty interior so that rockets and bombs could be fired across it. From 1955 he led the Gunbarrel Road Construction Party - a name he coined for his small team and their love of straight lines - and together they laid down the road network that made the Woomera rocket range and the nuclear-testing sites usable. The Vokes Hill to Cook track was one piece of that larger web. It is strange to think that a Cold War weapons program is the reason these tracks exist at all, but that is the paradox of Beadell's roads: built for the machinery of destruction, they opened a vast, beautiful country that almost no one would otherwise ever see.

The track takes its northern anchor from Vokes Hill, a rise named long before Beadell ever reached it. The explorer Richard Maurice recorded the name during an expedition across this desert in July 1901 - one of a thin handful of Europeans to cross this country in the years before the railway and the rocket range, travelling by camel and horse through a landscape that gives up nothing easily. When Beadell came surveying through six decades later, he put real effort into rediscovering the hill, because he was testing a new instrument called a Tellurometer that measured distance by radio waves and needed elevated points to work. The old explorer's modest hill became a fixed corner in the new geometry of the desert.

The track's southern end is Cook, and Cook is a story of its own. Founded by the Commonwealth Railways in 1917 and named for a former prime minister, Joseph Cook, it sat on the longest dead-straight stretch of railway in the world and once bustled with more than fifty workers, a school, a hospital, a store, even a swimming pool and a golf course in the middle of the treeless plain. A weathered sign there still grins at passing travellers: 'If you're crook, come to Cook.' Then in 1997 the railways were privatised, the new owners had no need of a support town, and Cook emptied almost overnight. Its population fell from around fifty to a mere handful. To drive Beadell's road all the way south is to arrive at a place that is barely there - a near-ghost town shimmering on the Nullarbor.