The land that is now the Charnley River–Artesian Range Wildlife Sanctuary spent most of the 20th century as a pastoral lease. The Nixon family bought it in 1969 when it was run-down, rebuilt it, and made it the first property along the Gibb River Road to offer tourist accommodation. Marion Nixon wrote a memoir about raising five children here — Children in the Sun — before the Barrett family took it on in 1981. After another change of hands in 2010, the property was sold to the Australian Wildlife Conservancy in February 2011. The AWC renamed it not as a cattle station but as a sanctuary: 3,000 square kilometres of Kimberley terrain, protected and managed for the wildlife that had always lived there. A wilderness camp and interpretation centre now welcome visitors who come to hike gorges and swim in the clear pools of the Charnley River.

The numbers tell part of the story: 11 threatened animal species, and another 29 endemic or isolated-population species found only in the Kimberley. The monjon, a tiny rock-wallaby barely larger than a rabbit, picks its way through the boulder-strewn escarpments. The Wyulda — the scaly-tailed possum — emerges at night to forage in the rocky terrain where few predators can follow. The Kimberley rock rat, the black grasswren, the Kimberley honeyeater, and the rough-scaled python all call this sanctuary home. Some species on the property, including the golden-backed tree-rat and the golden bandicoot, have vanished from vast areas of their former range. The sanctuary is one of the few places where populations persist — fragile, monitored, and defended.

Keeping 3,000 square kilometres of Kimberley country in good health is not passive. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy conducts ongoing research into fire management — controlled burns that mimic the land management practices of Aboriginal Australians for tens of thousands of years, preventing the catastrophic wildfires that devastate the savannah. Feral animals are the other constant battle: pigs root up riparian areas, donkeys strip vegetation, brumbies compete with native species, and escaped cattle return to trample the creek banks. Particularly in the lower-lying savannah areas to the south and east of the property, the pressure is relentless. Conservation here is less a state of grace than an ongoing negotiation with the land.

Before it was a cattle station or a wildlife sanctuary, this country belonged to the Aboriginal peoples of the Kimberley. Just to the east of Walcott Inlet, within the Artesian Range, lies land associated with the Munja Aboriginal Reserve — known also as the Avon Valley Cattle Station — where around 700 Aboriginal people were based in 1927. The reserve passed from government management to the Presbyterian Church in 1940, though negotiations stretched to 1949 because of World War II. The sanctuary today overlaps with the Wilinggin Indigenous Protected Area, and the traditional owners remain connected to this country. The landscape that conservationists work to protect is country that Aboriginal people have cared for, in their own ways, for longer than most nations have existed.