Almost nobody goes to Collier Range. There is no visitor centre, no marked trail, no campground with a ranger waving you in. The park sits where the Pilbara begins to give way to the Gascoyne, a tangle of low red hills and high stony ridges around 880 kilometres northeast of Perth, and for most of its life it has been left largely to itself. That neglect is, in a strange way, part of its character. This is one of those Australian places that exists more as a line on a map than a destination, and the creatures that live there are mostly small, secretive and easy to miss.
The ranges that give the park its name rise between the upper reaches of two great Western Australian rivers, the Ashburton and the Gascoyne, near the headwaters that feed water hundreds of kilometres west toward the coast. The country here varies from low hills to high ridges broken by cliffs. Spinifex and mulga cover most of it, with eucalypts tracing the lines of the creeks and mulla mulla colouring the scrub. The nearest town of any size is Newman, around 166 kilometres north near the tiny roadhouse settlement of Kumarina on the Great Northern Highway. Established in 1978, Collier Range is one of many parks scattered through this vast, thinly travelled region.
What makes Collier Range matter is not its scenery but its survivors. The park is home to the threatened Pilbara pebble-mound mouse, a remarkable little rodent that builds elaborate mounds of small stones around its burrows, the work of generations of mice piling pebble upon pebble. Its mulga woodlands also shelter critical-weight-range mammals that have been wiped out across much of the continent: the greater bilby, with its long ears and powerful digging claws, and the mulgara, a fierce little marsupial predator. In a country that has lost more native mammals than any other on Earth, a refuge for these animals is worth more than any lookout.
Surviving in Collier Range has never been easy, and not only because of the climate. For years the park was visited only occasionally by wildlife staff from distant Karratha, baited against wild dogs but otherwise left exposed. Feral donkeys and wandering cattle trampled and grazed the fragile habitat, and there was little active fire management to keep the country healthy. It is the quiet, unglamorous reality of conservation across remote Australia: enormous protected areas, tiny budgets, and threats that arrive on four hooves. The animals that endure here do so on a knife's edge, in habitat that needs more help than it has historically received.
The story is beginning to change, and the change comes from the people whose Country this has always been. The Jidi Jidi people are recognised as the traditional owners of Collier Range, and through an Indigenous Land Use Agreement the Jidi Jidi Aboriginal Corporation now jointly manages the park with the state's conservation department. It is the same shift unfolding across the Western Australian interior, where parks once run from afar are returning to the care of those who know the land best. For a place long defined by absence and neglect, that partnership may be the most hopeful thing about it.
Collier Range National Park is centred near 24.62°S, 119.27°E, straddling the divide between the Pilbara and Gascoyne regions of Western Australia at the head of the Gascoyne and Ashburton river systems. From the air it stands out as a band of rugged red ridges and cliffs rising from surrounding mulga and spinifex plains, with ephemeral creeklines, marked by ribbons of darker eucalypts, threading between the hills. The relief here is a welcome contrast to the flat desert further east. Nearest major aerodrome is Newman Airport (YNWN) about 166 km to the north; Meekatharra (YMEK) lies to the south and Paraburdoo further northwest. The Great Northern Highway and the Kumarina roadhouse pass to the north of the ranges. Visibility is generally excellent, with summer heat haze and dust the main reducers. Recommended viewing altitude 6,500-9,000 ft AGL to take in the ridgelines and creek systems.