William Creek owes its existence to a line of rails that no longer runs. When the Great Northern Railway - the original Ghan - pushed north into the interior, it needed water stops and watering holes, and the William Creek Hotel was built in 1887 to serve the navvies, drovers and passengers passing through. The trains stopped coming long ago; the line was lifted, and the sidings now sit silent in the gibber. But the pub endured. You can still walk the old railway alignment as it strikes off arrow-straight into the outback, the embankment fading into a horizon that offers no trees to interrupt it. The hotel, meanwhile, became something close to legendary: the only watering hole on the Oodnadatta Track between Marree and Oodnadatta, its walls layered with the cards, hats and scrawled messages of travellers who made it this far.

Almost everyone who finds William Creek is driving the Oodnadatta Track, the unsealed road that traces the old telegraph and railway route across the western edge of the Lake Eyre basin. There is no paved road in. The track passes straight down the middle of town, kicking up dust that hangs in the dry air. This is country that rewards self-reliance and punishes carelessness. Fuel and supplies here are costly - far steeper than at Oodnadatta or Marree - a reflection of just how far everything must travel to arrive. Drivers are warned to carry water, spare tyres and patience. The desert beyond is indifferent to schedules and unforgiving of breakdowns, and the distances between certainties are measured not in minutes but in hours.

The reason many travellers detour to this tiny town hangs in the sky above the airstrip. William Creek is the launch point for scenic flights over Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, the immense salt lake that lies to the east. From the cabin of a light aircraft, the scale finally makes sense: the white blaze of the salt pan, the looping channels of incoming floodwater, and - when the lake fills - sheets of water that flush pink with algae and draw hundreds of thousands of birds. Local operators also fly over the Anna Creek Painted Hills, a corrugated landscape of ochre and rust hidden deep in the station and reachable only from the air. To drive to the lake's edge is possible with a four-wheel drive and great care; people have died attempting it after becoming bogged in the salt. From the air, the danger becomes beauty.

Few places distil remoteness as purely as William Creek. The town once ran its own low-power radio station, audible for barely a kilometre - a private broadcast for a settlement you could cross on foot in a minute. Power comes from a generator that goes quiet after dark, leaving the night sky to do what it does best out here, blazing with a clarity that city dwellers forget exists. In winter the population swells with travellers and the occasional event, then drains away again to the resident handful who keep the pub, the shop and the airstrip running. There is something defiant in that persistence: a community holding its ground at the bottom of the continent's emptiest quarter, where the nearest neighbour might be a hundred kilometres of dirt away.