The Outback sun is boring holes in us, but the Martu people—whose ancestors roamed these desert lands for more than 50,000 years—seem unbothered. Together with six Martu Indigenous Australians and two Pew colleagues, I’m walking through brittle brush and wildflowers on an August day in Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara, a new national park some 70 miles north of the tiny town of Wiluna, Western Australia, which sits more than 500 miles northeast of Perth.
Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara is a conservation and cultural success story in the making, a park co-managed by the Martu people and the Western Australian State Government—in Australia, states and territories create and manage national parks. The Government created the park in 2023, thanks in part with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the co-management arrangement is a groundbreaking step toward restoring Martu stewardship of hundreds of thousands of square miles. This is but a fraction of the vast area the Martu people traditionally lived on and were forcibly removed from in the 1900s to make room for cattle ranching and mining.
The human toll of that removal, which concluded only in the 1970s when the last Martu walked out of the bush and saw “the whitefella” for the first time, persists to this day. For decades, Martu were rounded up and forcibly relocated, with families separated, children sent to reeducation schools, and cultural practices banned.
As the people suffered, so did the land. For millennia, Martu had managed their country to ensure it could continue to sustain them. They did this in many ways, including by shifting hunting grounds to allow prey populations to recover, protecting water sources, and setting small, controlled fires to remove the fuel that can feed much larger infernos. Such fire management also stimulates the new plant growth preferred by kangaroos and other creatures.
Once colonizers began sweeping across the Outback, ecological problems multiplied. Cattle trampled the landscape and fouled precious water sources. Camels, brought to Australia as transport in the mid-1800s, are similarly destructive and now number over a million. Invasive cats and foxes introduced by Europeans proliferated and decimated native species—particularly small mammals such as bilbies and bettongs. Ranchers planted invasive grasses that crowded out native flora.
And then there was mining. Australia is the world’s top producer of iron ore and bauxite and ranks in the top four for 19 other minerals, including zinc, nickel, lithium, gold, and diamonds (the broader region around the new park is known as the Goldfields).
The industry’s dominance is on display in Perth, where mining companies’ office towers glitter above the skyline. But the wealth comes at a cost: Flying over the Outback, one can spot pits, roads, and other evidence of the industry from miles away.
At the same time, the vast Outback—twice the size of India—has nature so resilient that, on foot within Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara, it’s hard to spot any major impact from human activity.
“This is what country should look like,” says Bradley Wongawol as we weave among knee-high tufts of spinifex grass, mauve wildflowers, and twisty Hakea trees that rise defiantly from the red, rocky ground. He’s dressed for outdoor work in rugged long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a knit tricolored beanie. Wongawol, a Wiluna Martu Ranger who lives in Wiluna, is a board member of the Tarlka Matuwa Piarku Aboriginal Corporation (TMPAC), the body that represents Martu interests. TMPAC works mainly with the Western Australian State Government’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation, and Attractions (DBCA) to manage Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara and the nearby Lake Carnegie Nature Reserve.
We’re not on a trail (very few exist out here) and fortunately aren’t going far. Wongawol and four other Wiluna Martu Rangers are leading us a few hundred yards from the dirt road where we’ve parked our vehicles to what they call a “men’s site,” a place where males of all ages would gather to tell stories and pass knowledge from the older generation to the younger ones. Women have similar sites throughout this country.
We arrive at a rising wall of sedimentary rock capped by 25 feet of coarse sandstone. With striking color contrasts in the morning sunshine, it feels like a rare oasis in the parched expanse. But in the coming days we’ll see spots like this throughout the desert, many with trees, shade, and flowers, and some even with reliable water.
Indigenous Australians believe this entire landscape was created in the “Dreamtime,” a period before humans arrived when spirit animals—kangaroo, snake, turtle, and others—swept across the continent.
“Our people traveled this desert on foot, following Songlines”—melodic stories that connected water holes—Wongawol says as he crouches in the shade. The Martu were originally nomadic, and not by accident. As the author Bruce Chatwin explains in his book, The Songlines: “Most of Outback Australia [is] arid scrub where rainfall was always patchy and one year of plenty might be followed by seven years of lean. To move in such landscape was survival: to stay in the same place suicide.”
Like roads on a map, every Songline has a beginning and an end, and Indigenous Australians use them to navigate, Wongawol says. “We still pass these on to our young ones to make sure our culture and practices survive.”
For much of the 20th century, that survival was in jeopardy. Assimilation not only took Martu off their Country, reform schools also quashed the children’s use of native language and other connections to their culture.
“We regained some rights in the 1960s and 1970s,” Wongawol tells me, “but it was pretty much the right to drink and live in town. They still had the cattle stations fenced off and we weren’t allowed to go out here—to our own land.”
Even as Indigenous Australians nationwide have regained native title to their lands, the Martu guard their cultural stories and practices fiercely. During our time in the park, we visit three or four sites where our hosts prohibit me from taking photos or even notes.
“You can’t write about these places, John,” says Robbie Wongawol (no blood relation to Bradley). “These stories are ‘under the blanket,’ for our people only.”
Pew has been working to advance conservation across Australia’s unique and richly biodiverse lands since 2008. The effort has spanned the continent, which is home to some of the world’s most unique plants and animals, and helped to safeguard vast swaths of the Outback, many coastal and marine areas off the mainland, and even a few remote islands. Throughout it all, Pew has sought to support the work of Indigenous communities, scientists, conservation organizations, and more in ensuring that these unique and important landscapes, rivers, and seas remain in good shape and able to support healthy ecosystems and the communities that rely on them. Pew works in ways that help create sustainable opportunities for local people and communities, particularly for Traditional Owners, and often this work is happening in far-flung locales.
I had traveled from Pew’s Washington, D.C., offices to witness these efforts firsthand, which is why on the next morning I awake in a tent at first light to the cries of bright pink galah cockatoos at the former Lorna Glen cattle station, a stamp of lush grass and massive gum trees in the middle of the vast national park. After coffee and a spartan breakfast, we roll into an eternal, lonely landscape save for a network of dirt tracks, some barely navigable in burly four-wheel-drive vehicles.
There’s wildlife here but most of it eludes our notice, for good reason: The Martu rarely pass up an opportunity to secure a meal. On one drive, Robbie spots movement in the bush and we abruptly pull over. Richard Narrier slides out of the back seat, loads a small rock into a slingshot, and casually dispatches a 3-foot goanna lizard with a single shot. He folds the reptile into a cooler and we move on.
The next day, from the driver’s seat, Bradley drops a kangaroo that’s 100 feet away with a single bullet from an old Winchester .22. The Martu swing into action, cutting vertical slits in two of the animal’s legs, weaving the other appendages through them, and binding the ’roo to our Landcruiser’s front grate for the drive back to Lorna Glen.
Like all Indigenous people in Australia, the Martu have thrived for millennia by following their custom, which dictates everything from whom they could marry, to where Songlines start and end, to how to divvy up kangaroo meat among the community.
We drive to the small town of Bondini, a few kilometers outside of Wiluna where we meet up with Lena Long and her three sisters—Jennifer, Karen, and Caroline—in the side yard of a small, modest house.
The Martu women, all in their 60s, had just returned from a two-week, women-only camping trip “to correct family stories,” Lena says. To the Martu, it’s vital that their history is passed along—verbally, per tradition—and is accurate.
“I learned from my parents, and I’ve been teaching my grandson,” Lena continues. “He’s 9 now and he tells his teacher how to live in the desert. He knows.”
This is the spirit of what the Martu and the Government call two-way science—the exchange of knowledge to find the best ways forward to manage the land and wildlife.
In addition to advising DBCA scientists on park decisions, the Martu take school kids, some from as far away as Perth, out to the national park to show them how to track animals and hunt, what plants are in season, and the importance of “managing Country.” For example, by eradicating invasive plants and animals.
These programs are working. In 2024, the independently run Australian Education Awards recognized the Wiluna Remote Community School as one of the best First Nations education programs in the country.
For its part, the Government is leveraging resources to help native animals recover from decimation by feral cats and foxes.
Early one morning, we join a team of scientists in an area of the park, some 4 square miles, surrounded by a predator-proof electric fence. The team is tagging and releasing bettongs—rabbit-sized marsupials—that they had trapped overnight. Known colloquially as “boodies,” these marsupials once ranged throughout the continent and play a key role in the desert ecosystem, digging extensive burrows that not only help aerate the soil and encourage new plant growth but also serve as homes for other native species, including brushtail possums and snakes.
“They’re very big ecosystem engineers,” says Cheryl Lohr, a DBCA research scientist, as she kneels in the dirt measuring and tagging a boodie.
The population had been so diminished here that, to reintroduce them, researchers imported boodies from an island off the west coast that feral cats had yet to inhabit. The animals are now thriving within the fence, Lohr says, so much so that she and her team have devised PVC tunnels to release some, in hopes that they can reestablish the species throughout the desert. This is occurring in concert with programs that poison feral cats.
“We’ve had 28 mammals go extinct in Australia over the past 100 years, with the highest rates of extinction in the arid zone,” Lohr says. “The cats are a major problem because they can get almost all of their water by eating prey and barely need to drink at all to survive.”
The fence, which has stood since 2010, has helped bring back other species, including bilbies and golden bandicoots. As Lohr explains this, another Martu Ranger, Dennis Richards, carries boodies in cloth sacks to the edge of a massive warren. As soon as the animals see daylight, they bolt, often bypassing numerous holes en route to the specific burrow from which they last emerged—a risky instinct with wedgetail eagles wheeling in the brilliant blue sky above.
“Conservation requires people,” Lohr tells me. “There’s been enough change with invasive species that the land can’t just heal itself anymore.” And with Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara’s large size, she says there are plenty of opportunities for Martu Rangers.
TMPAC is the funnel to that employment, and the Aboriginal Rangers embrace and value the work. After releasing boodies, Richards and Narrier help two other DBCA scientists set monitoring lines in a grid, which they’ll use to gather data on the animals’ burrows. Robbie notes that the scientific exchange in this area started before the first fence post pierced the ground.
“The Martu told the Government where to do this, with the high trees here and the different types of land,” he said. “We knew the boodies would thrive. The Elders approved this.”
Those Elders take their responsibilities seriously. While the immensity of the Outback makes it hard to fathom scientists or tourists wrecking the place, it doesn’t take much to desecrate a sensitive site. We visited one where a column of red rock covered in Aboriginal petroglyphs had been scarred with graffiti. In other places, the Martu have arranged items in a particular way for ceremonial visits, an order that a single tourist visit could disrupt, potentially angering an animal spirit.
Martu and DBCA representatives expressed confidence that they could balance conservation, tourism, and science in Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara.
“It’s important to know what’s important to them, but we don’t need to know the details of why,” said Simon Choo, senior policy and planning officer at DBCA. “We owe them that respect.” Choo explained that the co-management represents “a huge opportunity for partnerships in managing country.”
“Indigenous groups now approach the Government asking for a national park,” Choo said. “That’s a total flip from 10 years ago.”
Ultimately, the Martu would like to expand Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara and are working to raise funds to purchase more land nearby to make it happen.
On our final day in the park, we’re driving through Sydney Head Pass and burnt-red hills carpeted with wildflowers. “This national park is a very good thing, a big step for our people,” Bradley says, one hand on the wheel and the other holding a hunk of cooked goanna, which he is eating like an apple. He’s in his element, out on Country, alert, animated, and at peace.
“I can’t forgive the whitefella for everything in the past,” he says. “It’s too much. But we need to move on, you know? This is the way forward.”
John Briley is a Trust staff writer.
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