Reconstructions of Australia’s hydro-climate will greatly enhance our understanding of long-term hydro-climatic variability, its influence on ecosystems and risks this variability may pose to existing infrastructure. Currently the best available instrumental streamflow records in the Australian interior are only 40-60 years long, seriously limiting our understanding of the range of variability in water resource availability, and its impact on ecological processes. To date, most hydrological reconstructions for parts of semi-arid to arid interior rely upon considerable spatial extrapolation from remote proxies. While tree species in other regions of Australia (e.g. tropical north or the temperature south) have provided annually resolved records of hydroclimatic variability, those growing in the arid interior experience difficult and variable growing conditions, resulting in irregular growth. These adaptive responses to a demanding environment make species like Eucalyptus coolabah challenging to use for annually resolved climate reconstructions. However, reconstructing palaeo-flood/drought sequences requires only that the record shows a reliable response in tree ring width and/or other characteristics (e.g. density, colour, vessel size) to large flood and drought events. Here we examine the potential to identify wet and dry periods from wood property characteristics of E. coolabah in the Lake Eyre Basin. We found that the species can be long-lived, that specific characteristics can be matched across samples, and that ¹⁴C dating provides the required dating control. This work lays the foundation for the use of this species in the reconstruction of hydroclimatic sequences in arid and semi-arid regions. It also highlights the importance of looking beyond ring widths and considering how tree-ring records that may not be annual can still provide valuable information about past climatic variability in Australia.