South Australia is famous for its outback, vast, remote and mysterious areas of desert, bushland and scrub, traversed and inhabited for 40,000 years by Australia's indigenous aboriginal peoples. Very few settlements exist in these wildernesses, out of which William Creek with its six inhabitants must surely be the smallest. Administered by the Outback Areas Community Development Trust, its few buildings mark the entry point to Lake Eyre, set in the Tirari Desert. Close by are the Anna Creek Station, the world's largest cattle ranch and the Woomera Prohibited Area, which is a former atomic weapons nuclear testing site. Set on the Oodnadatta Track, the tiny settlement holds the only petrol station for many hundreds of miles, the world's remotest pub and a handful of William Creek hotels. The massive, sparkling-white saltpan of Lake Eyre, best seen from the air, gives a clue to the courses of the ancient rivers still occasionally flowing into the lake, with sightseeing flights from the hamlet overflying the multi-coloured sandstone Painted Hills, the lake bed and its southern edges.

other spellings: william creekhotels, willaim creek hote, wiliam creek otel, villiam creek hotell