Boolardy now hosts the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, since 2022 known by its Wajarri name, Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, which means "sharing sky and stars." The site sits at the heart of a protected radio-quiet zone roughly 520 kilometres across, where governments restrict the everyday hum of modern devices so the telescopes can detect signals that crossed billions of light-years to get here. The flagship instrument, ASKAP, fans thirty-six dishes across the plain, each twelve metres wide, all swivelling in unison toward the same patch of sky. First light came in October 2012. Alongside it, the low-frequency tiles of the Square Kilometre Array are designed to detect radiation from the cosmic dawn, the moment the very first stars flickered into existence and lit a universe that until then had been entirely dark.

This is Wajarri Yamaji country, and the Wajarri have read this sky for far longer than any telescope has stood here. The 2022 land-use agreement that allowed the giant SKA-Low array to be built carries their name and their consent, and the observatory's title, "sharing sky and stars," was their gift. The land itself is ancient beyond easy reckoning. The bedrock belongs to the Yilgarn craton, some of the oldest crust on the planet, worn flat over billions of years into the low red country that now makes such a good floor for radio dishes. There is a fitting symmetry to it: one of the youngest sciences on Earth, peering at the oldest light in existence, set down on some of the oldest ground there is.

The pastoral history is not gentle. Explorers Robert Austin and Kenneth Brown crossed the area in 1854, noting good grass and the vital Ngatta water hole, but settlers did not take up the lease until the 1870s, when it passed through the pioneering Wittenoom and Lefroy families. By 1912 Boolardy expected to shear 25,000 sheep, and its wool once topped a Perth sale. But the station ran on Aboriginal labour, and in 1896 that history turned brutal. An Aboriginal worker named Wayinga, called Micky, was chained by the neck to a verandah post overnight and flogged; he died five days later. The manager and another man were tried for manslaughter and acquitted by a second jury, an outcome the town of Geraldton greeted with satisfaction. He was a man, not a footnote, and the land that now carries a name about sharing the sky also carries that.

The very things that made Boolardy a hard place to run cattle make it ideal for radio astronomy. Radio telescopes are exquisitely sensitive instruments, and the faint signals they chase, redshifted light from galaxies billions of years old, are easily drowned out by the electromagnetic noise of everyday life: phones, engines, transmitters, the casual chatter of a connected world. To listen properly you need somewhere that world has barely touched. Boolardy's isolation, 800 kilometres from Perth and far from any city, is its greatest scientific asset, which is why an entire radio-quiet zone hundreds of kilometres wide was drawn around it by law. The same emptiness that once stranded flood victims and starved cattle in drought now shields one of the most ambitious instruments humanity has ever built. The remoteness is not a problem to be overcome here. It is the entire point.

Drought is the default here. Little rain fell across 2012 and early 2013, raising dust storms and leaving stock with almost nothing green to eat. But the Murchison can flip without warning. In 1945 eight inches of rain fell in a single day and washed away more than a hundred miles of fencing. In 2010 the swollen Murchison and Gascoyne rivers spread out across the flats until parts of Boolardy went under, and a State Emergency Service helicopter had to fly in to check on the people stranded at the homestead. The same flatness that makes the country perfect for radio dishes makes it a shallow basin for floodwater, the plain briefly becoming an inland sea before the heat returns and the dust comes back.