[7] Beltana has important links with the overland telegraph, transcontinental railway, mining, outback services, Australian Inland Mission and also has "Afghan" sites relating to its past as a camel-based transport centre.

[8] Due to the flatness of the country, the town's proximity to the creeks and the area's usually unpredictable weather, heavy rainfall has often led to flooding.

[11] Saltbush, bluebush and other acacias are native plants that, with the reduction in stocking over the last decades of the 20th century, are beginning to return to the town area.

[6] During the early years of European settlement they kept a camp near Beltana Station but later moved closer to the town at Warrioota Creek.

As the town was gradually depopulated some Aboriginal people occupied the abandoned buildings so by the late 1960s they again formed the majority of the population.

[12] Beltana takes its name from that of a nearby sheep station, west of the current town, which provided a stopover point for travellers, missionaries, explorers, and miners.

[7] The town's first building was Martin's Eating House, which was built in 1870 to take advantage of the discovery of copper at Sliding Rock, 20 kilometres (12 mi) east of Beltana.

[16] The failure of Sliding Rock coupled with the 1881 arrival of the railway brought an influx of families and within five years there was a brewery, store and school.

The town supported a brewery, two hotels, post and telegraph office, school, police station, doctor, court-house, church, baker, butcher, blacksmith, hospital, railway station, cricket team, race meetings, a saddle maker, carriage maker, mining exchange, several shops and, at times, as many as 500 people.

[18]Mechanisation, mine closure, drought and the Great Depression led to the slow decline of Beltana as a service centre for the region from 1920 onwards.

[19] The town was, for some time, the starting point of many central Australian expeditions and explorations including those by Ernest Giles in 1872, Peter Warburton in 1873, Ross in 1874, Lewis in 1874–75, and Lawrence Wells in 1883.

There was a quadrille dance there in April 1879, the Local Court hired it for its sittings and Mrs Anna Doig conducted a Sunday School in it for many years.

The building has been kept in fair condition and with much local and other support was put in good order for the commemoration of the founding of the Australian Inland Mission held there 6/7 October 2012.

[citation needed] Due to concerns over the behaviour of workers on the railway line a mounted policeman was appointed in 1879 to manage the land from Parachilna to Kopperamanna.

A new single room stone building was completed in October 1893 and the original galvanised iron school was converted into a teachers residence.

The station received its first phone message in 1878, was moved in 1940 to a telephone switchboard at the local shop, and closed by 1956 as an automatic exchange had been installed.

[6] On 19 January 1878 Sir William Jervois symbolically turned the first sod on the new northern railway (called The Ghan) at Port Augusta.