The Wilson rises on the slopes of the Grey Range and runs generally northwest, gathering two minor tributaries before it joins Cooper Creek. By the measures of the world's great rivers it is barely a river at all: it descends only eight metres over its twenty-eight-kilometre course, a gradient so gentle that the water barely seems to move. That flatness is the whole secret of the Channel Country. With nowhere to rush, floodwater fans out across the floodplain in a braid of shallow channels, soaking the cracked earth and waking a landscape that spends most of its life waiting. When the river runs, it does not roar. It spreads.

At the heart of the Wilson sits the Noccundra waterhole, a long, permanent pool that holds water even when the surrounding country bakes. The old Noccundra Hotel stands beside it, sandstone walls facing a sheet of water that seems impossible out here. For travellers crossing the far south-west, the waterhole is a destination in its own right. Pelicans wheel overhead. Brolgas pick along the margins, and the rare grey grasswren shelters in the lignum. Anglers cast for golden perch, the fish locals call yellowbelly, along with catfish and silver perch. In a region defined by its dryness, this stretch of the Wilson is a green seam of life.

In November 1860, the Burke and Wills expedition came through this country on its doomed push toward the Gulf of Carpentaria. On 11 November the party made camp on what they took to be Cooper Creek. They were mistaken. The watercourse they had reached was the Wilson River, and only later, after establishing their depot at Camp 63 on 20 November, did they settle on the Cooper itself. It is a small error on a map and an easy one to make, given how the channels here braid and blur into one another. But it belongs to one of the most famous tragedies in Australian exploration, and it happened on the banks of this quiet, waiting river.

To understand the Wilson is to understand a place that runs on patience. Rain that falls in the Queensland tropics may take weeks to arrive here, creeping south through a maze of interlinked channels toward the great inland sink of Lake Eyre, which itself fills completely only a few times a century. Between floods, the river is a memory written in sand. The cattle stations that line its banks, Nockatunga and Mount Margaret among them, built their fortunes on these unreliable waters, prizing the permanent waterholes that survive the worst droughts. The Wilson is not a river that gives steadily. It gives all at once, and then it makes you wait.