Dhimurru wraps around roughly 5,500 square kilometres of Yolngu land and sea country in north-east Arnhem Land, near the township of Nhulunbuy on the Gove Peninsula. It is managed by the Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation, set up by Yolngu landowners, and worked by around thirteen rangers. When it was declared on 1 December 2000, it became the first Indigenous Protected Area in the Northern Territory and one of the earliest in the country - and, importantly, the first anywhere in Australia to cover both land and sea. For Yolngu, that combination is not a bureaucratic detail. Land and saltwater are a single, indivisible Country, held together in kinship, song, and law, and managing one without the other would make no sense at all.

The gravest threat drifts in from far beyond Yolngu waters. Abandoned commercial fishing nets - 'ghost nets' - wash down from international waters to the north and snag along some 70 kilometres of beach, in a region carrying among the highest densities of plastic pollution on Earth. The nets keep killing long after they are lost, and turtles are their most frequent victims. Dhimurru's rangers patrol by helicopter through the dry season, cut entangled miyapunu free, and haul the nets from the sand. Since the work began, they have rescued around 300 turtles, more than half of which survived. They also tag and track turtles, building the kind of long-term knowledge that conservation depends on - science and ancestral custodianship pulling in the same direction.

The Country the rangers protect teems with life. Its beaches are nesting grounds for four species of marine turtle; its wetlands and bush shelter 54 kinds of migratory bird and at least 18 threatened species. The rangers manage feral animals and weeds, run controlled burns in the old seasonal pattern, monitor crocodiles, map seagrass beds, maintain cultural sites, and keep watch for biosecurity threats and illegal fishing. They also help Traditional Owners reach remote stretches of their own Sea Country, reconnecting families with places held in memory and law. In 2013 the Traditional Owners - Yolngu Wanga Watangu - chose to dedicate still more of their land and sea to the protected area, extending its reach. Every task, from a beach clean to a turtle tag, is an act of caring for Country in the most literal Yolngu sense of the phrase.

Dhimurru's land takes in places of deep cultural meaning alongside spots that draw visitors from Nhulunbuy - fishing beaches, surf breaks, camping grounds. Balancing the two is part of the rangers' daily work, and so the corporation runs a permit system: outsiders apply to Dhimurru before entering Yolngu-owned areas. It is a quiet but firm assertion. These are not empty wilds open to anyone; they are an inhabited, governed homeland whose owners decide who comes and where they may go. The same authority that pulls a turtle from a net also draws the line at a sacred site - the work of a people managing their Country on their own terms, as they always have.