All major ephemeral rivers of Australia lie in the Lake Eyre basin. Dry for years, on occasions they carry enormous floods, with annual volumes of 40 km3 and instantaneous discharges of the order of 30,000 m3 s-1. Mean annual runoff of the basin is 4 km3 or 3.5 mm, significantly less than the 57 mm for the whole of Australia. This paper examines Lake Eyre and its drainage basin, describing the historical hydrology of the catchment, both in terms of instrument records and inflows hindcast using a model based on the technique of coral fluorescence palaeohydrological reconstruction. Coral fluorescence is a function of nearby-river discharge, and can be used to reconstruct annual river outputs beyond the instrument period. The Burdekin River catchment runoff history is strongly paralleled by the volumes of Lake Eyre inflows during the period of common reliable instrument gaugings. The Burdekin runoff data have been extended back to 1735 A.D. using the correlation between river discharge and annual growth-band fluorescence in an old coral from Pandora Reef, off the North Queensland coast. For the instrument period 1952 to 1980, 73% of the variance between coral fluoresence and Burdekin discharge is common. During the period 1949-1980, 41% of the variance between coral fluorescence and Lake Eyre inflow data is common. Modelled inflows to Lake Eyre for the period 1885-1948 are based on the latter data set.
