There is a quiet irony in how this country got its name. Hart's boundaries were only formally drawn and gazetted in 2007, stitching together a patchwork of vast pastoral leases - Delny, McDonald Downs, Mount Riddock, Dneiper, Jinka - around the parks and ranges of the region. The locality's name traces back through the Harts Range to John Hart, who governed South Australia for three terms between 1865 and 1871, in the era when the Northern Territory was administered from faraway Adelaide. He gave his name to a mountain range and, eventually, to this enormous tract of land, an administrative honour bestowed from over a thousand kilometres away. The people who actually lived here had their own names for every gorge, soak and ridge, long before any colonial gazette existed.

Wrapped entirely inside Hart's boundaries is the community of Atitjere, also known as Harts Range, and this is where the locality's real life is concentrated. The numbers tell the story plainly: in the 2016 census Hart recorded a population of 169, and 107 of them - nearly sixty-two percent - identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Atitjere sits on the Plenty Highway, sealed this far out from Alice Springs, a genuine outback waypoint with a health clinic and a store selling fuel and takeaway food. For travellers crossing the Plenty toward Queensland, it is a vital point of contact in a landscape where the next services can be hundreds of kilometres away. For the people who live there, it is simply home, on country their families have held for hundreds of generations.

The Harts Range has long given up treasures from its rocks. Mica mining began here in the late 1880s and carried on, in fits and starts, until the 1960s - a hard, dusty industry chasing the glittering mineral that once insulated the world's electrical gear. The country is famous among gem collectors, too, scattered with garnets, zircons and feldspars of fine quality, and fossickers still trek cross-country to declared fields hoping to fill a bag. As recently as 2016, a venture began mining a major alluvial garnet deposit in the floodplains of the Plenty River near Atitjere, billed as one of the largest in the world, before it closed a few years later. Those garnets are a fitting central Australian echo: the same red stones that, a century earlier and a little to the west, were mistaken for rubies and sparked the region's first mining rush.

Strip away the leases and the gazette dates and Hart is, at heart, deep Arrernte and Alyawarre country. The ranges here are dotted with sites of profound cultural significance - quarries where stone was worked into tools, scatters of artefacts, sacred places marked with art and engravings - the physical record of more than thirty thousand years of unbroken occupation. The locality reaches out to fold in the dramatic gorges of Trephina Gorge Nature Park and shares an edge with the remote sandstone of Dulcie Range. It is country defined less by the lines on a planner's map than by the relationships of the people who belong to it. Hart may be one of the largest and most thinly populated places you will ever pass through, but it is anything but empty - and its truest name was never John Hart's at all.