Extract from ABC News
Behind the bar of the Betoota Hotel, Robert "Robbo" Haken is this year fielding a common question from tourists passing through on their way to Birdsville.
"They're all just [asking], 'Where's the desert?'," he said.
"They can't see the desert because all the green is growing over the sand."
Famously "red dirt country", Queensland's far west is instead a blanket of vivid green, the result of months-long flooding through the desert.
The dusty single-lane highway into Birdsville, 1,500 kilometres west of Brisbane, is lined with lush grass, dotted with yellow and purple wildflowers.
For Mr Haken, it's a special sight.
" I don't think you're ever gonna see it quite as pretty as what it is at the moment," he said.
"It's just something totally different from what we're used to seeing."
Earlier this year, ex-tropical cyclone Kirrily drenched the state's north, with water travelling hundreds of kilometres south to the Channel Country towards the Kati-Thanda Lake Eyre basin in South Australia.
Birdsville, a town of 110 in the Channel Country — where the Northern Territory, Queensland and New South Wales borders meet — became an inland sea.
And when the water receded, the landscape bloomed.
Tourists 'flabbergasted'
Behind Birdsville's iconic red sand dunes, the horizon slowly changes into a wetland.
Big Red Tours owner Alex Oswald said tourists were "flabbergasted."
"I've never seen so many pelicans," he said.
"It doesn't go hand in hand with [the desert] that we've got pelicans flying over the top and having a good feed on the Diamantina Crossing that's usually dry.
"If you fly over the area, it's just a massive carpet of green."
Tourist Brie Dickson said it was a different picture to the one she had imagined.
"It's a bit of mixture between red and green, which is really cool to see, two contrasting colours like that," she said.
"It definitely would have been less green in my mind."
Pilot Jonathon Rae has the best view in Birdsville as he flies tourists over the flourishing country.
"All the dormant seedlings that lay underneath that cracked claypan just explode to life, so you get this abundance of colours, greenery, wildflowers shooting through."
From the air, the meandering pathways of floodwaters glisten in the rising sun.
"You wouldn't believe that it was in the middle of the desert," Mr Rae said.
"You really have to see it from above to believe it."
A change of fate for graziers
While the sights are not always this pretty, seasonal flooding in the outback is not out of the ordinary, with tourism and agriculture depending on the annual inflows.
Despite the flooding, Diamantina remains one of the only two drought-declared shires in the state.
Before the flood, fifth-generation grazier Kerry Morton was in the process of destocking his cattle on Roseberth Station from 8,000 to 5,000.
"Now I'm sitting sweet," he said.
"I'm hoping [the feed] will hold me for maybe eight months."
Mr Morton has seen floods and droughts in the outback, but said it was still "nerve-wracking" to watch water fill the distant horizon.
"It behaved a bit like 2019 where it came through as a wall," he said.
"I thought it was going to come through quick but it actually travelled forward and slow."
Roads damaged but tourists welcome
While the floodwaters are a blessing for tourism and agriculture, they have been a headache for the local council.
Diamantina Shire mayor Francis Murray said the water damage to the roads was "in the millions".
He was aware there was a ticking clock on these repairs with the tourist season commencing this month.
"It's important that we get those roads sorted before the influx of caravans," he said.
But according to the mayor, the region looks "as good as you'll see".
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