William Creek: The Smallest Town With the Best Location

William Creek has a permanent population of around twelve people. Some sources say fewer. It has one pub, one airstrip, and a surrounding cattle station the size of a small country. It also happens to sit right on the Oodnadatta Track, roughly 160 kilometres south of Lake Eyre, making it the primary departure point for scenic flights over the lake.

It’s one of those places that has no business being as good as it is.

The William Creek Hotel

The pub is the town. There’s no separating them. The William Creek Hotel has been operating for a long time and it shows — in the best possible way. The ceiling, the walls, the bar, every available surface is covered in notes, business cards, licence plates, flags, and assorted detritus from the people who’ve passed through. It’s a record of the Oodnadatta Track’s traffic going back decades.

The pub serves food and cold beer. On a day when you’ve driven a significant section of the Oodnadatta Track, cold beer at William Creek Hotel is one of life’s better simple pleasures. The food is honest outback pub food — nothing fancy, exactly what you need.

The Airstrip

The airstrip adjacent to the pub is where the Lake Eyre scenic flights depart. Small aircraft, typically carrying four to six passengers, fly from here over the lake and back. The combination of the tiny airstrip, the pub, and the vast empty landscape in every direction creates one of the more surreal environments you’ll encounter on a trip through outback Australia.

Waiting for a flight at William Creek — cold drink in hand, wind coming off the gibber plains, the pub’s collection of eccentricities at your back — is a specific experience that’s hard to replicate anywhere else.

The Surrounding Station

William Creek sits on Anna Creek Station, the largest cattle property in the world by area — roughly 24,000 square kilometres. That’s larger than Israel, or about the size of Wales. The scale of it is difficult to process from the pub car park, but it gives you a sense of what outback land use actually looks like when the numbers are genuine rather than approximate.

On Our Tours

We stop at William Creek on both the four and five day Lake Eyre tours. The scenic flight departs from here. It’s usually a highlight stop — people arrive wondering what a town of twelve people is going to offer and leave having genuinely enjoyed themselves. That’s the William Creek effect.