The craters range from 7 meters to over 180 meters in diameter and reach depths of up to 15 meters. The meteor fragmented before striking the ground, which is why there are multiple craters rather than a single bowl. Several tonnes of iron-nickel fragments have been recovered from the site over the past century. Cosmogenic carbon-14 dating places the event at no more than 4,700 years ago, and fission track dating narrows it to approximately 4,200 years ago -- well within the span of human habitation. People were here when the sky broke open. They saw the fireball, heard the impact, and felt the ground shake. And they remembered.

The Henbury crater field sits at the crossroads of several Aboriginal language groups, including Arrernte, Luritja, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara. It is a sacred site. Older Aboriginal people would not camp within a couple of miles of the craters, and they refused to drink rainwater that collected in the bowls, fearing the "fire-devil" would fill them with a piece of iron. An elder who accompanied prospector J.M. Mitchell to the site explained that his paternal grandfather had seen the fire-devil, and that it came from the Sun. The claim of a grandfather's eyewitness memory, passed through oral tradition, aligns with the scientific dating in a way that underscores the reliability of Indigenous knowledge systems over millennia.

A second creation story, recorded by anthropologist Charles Mountford, attributes the largest crater to Mulumura, an anthropomorphic lizard woman who tossed soil out of the ground to form the bowl shape. The soil she discarded explained the piles of meteoritic iron scattered around the craters and the radiating patterns of ejecta -- features that are unique to terrestrial impacts. Those ejecta rays are now gone, destroyed by decades of prospecting and souvenir hunting, but the story preserves their existence in cultural memory. The account likely connects to broader Dreaming stories about ancestral lizard beings from the area of Henbury Station near the Finke River, just north of the crater field. The Arrernte name for the site is Tatyeye Kepmwere, or Tatjakapara.

The craters are named after Henbury Station, a nearby cattle station established in 1875 and named for its founders' family home in Henbury, Dorset, England. The station manager discovered the craters in 1899, but they went uninvestigated for three decades. It took the fall of the Karoonda meteorite on South Australia in 1930 to stir scientific interest. A.R. Alderman of the University of Adelaide conducted the first formal study, publishing his results in 1932 in a paper titled "The Meteorite Craters at Henbury Central Australia." Numerous investigations have followed, making Henbury one of the best-studied small crater fields on Earth.

The conservation reserve was listed on the Register of the National Estate in 1980 and added to the Northern Territory Heritage Register on 13 August 2003. Today the craters sit in quiet desert, their rims softened by thousands of years of wind erosion but still clearly defined against the flat red landscape. The iron-nickel fragments that once littered the surface have largely been collected by scientists and prospectors, but the craters themselves endure -- shallow bowls in the earth that mark the spot where deep space met the outback. For the Aboriginal people who have lived in this country since long before the impact, the craters are not geological curiosities but proof of a story their ancestors witnessed and passed down: the day a fiery devil fell from the Sun.