THE BACK OF BEYOND

The Birdsville Track is over three hundred miles long. It joins Maree in South Australia to Birdsville in Queensland, and is the main stock route for cattle moving south from the stations of Western Queensland and the east of the Northern Territory. It crosses deserts of sand and stones and endless gibber plains, and passes through the notorious Channel country, which can turn from a dry maze of wide bare channels to an inland sea forty miles wide.