Julia Creek, present day

DUNCAN Fysh is 200ft above the ground, pushing the Cessna 152 Aerobat musterer at 80 knots across a Flinders grass landscape dotted with prickly acacia. Feral pigs run for cover along the bore drains.

He is thinking about artesian water and what it has done — what it can still do — for the country, more than a century after it first gushed out of this arid western landscape.

Fysh has worked "Proa", a 12,000ha sheep and cattle property, for 40 years. But it is too small to be productive in a region hit by recurrent drought. Like others, he is struggling to survive.

In the past four years, six of Duncan Fysh's grazier neighbours have left the land, taking money while they could from northern cattle industry buyers looking for stock depots.

Fysh is hanging on in this Year of the Outback, clinging to his land like spinifex blown this way and that by the winds of fortune — this year drought and fires, next year flood and price collapse, the oldest tale told by Europeans since they took on and tried to tame the heart of the most cruel inhabited continent on earth.

Thermals push the Cessna's nose up into the hot sky. Fysh turns for home, leaving his land to the pigs and his thoughts in another time and place: Longreach, August 1919, where Fysh's uncle, W. Hudson Fysh, and Australian Flying Corps officer friend Paul McGinness are kicking the wheels on the Model-T Ford ute which will carry them across the outback's trackless mudrock and grass plains to their destiny.

The sky is blue and clear; a germ of an idea is in their heads. They are about to make history and change life in the remote inland forever.