The Spinifex People - Pila Nguru, the people of the spinifex grass - have belonged to this stretch of the Great Victoria Desert for thousands of years, among the longest continuous human connections to any landscape on Earth. They are a desert people in the fullest sense, with knowledge of water and country tuned to one of the harshest environments on the planet. Ilkurlka takes its name from a large U-shaped rockhole nearby, a feature so significant it was painted into the works that would later hang in the British Museum. For the Pila Nguru, the desert was never empty space to be crossed. It was home, mapped in memory and song long before any surveyor came to draw a line across it.

In the 1950s, the Spinifex People were forced from their lands. The British nuclear tests at Maralinga and Emu Field, on the desert's southern edge, made parts of the country dangerous and the authorities moved people away - many to Cundeelee Mission, far to the west. It was a displacement they had not chosen, from a homeland they had never relinquished. Among the last to leave were people who walked out of the desert as late as the 1980s, some of the final Aboriginal Australians to make first contact with the settled world. But they did not forget the way back. Beginning in the 1980s, Spinifex families turned around and went home, establishing outstations, sinking bores for water, and re-rooting themselves at Tjuntjuntjara - now one of the remotest communities in the country - and here at Ilkurlka.

The painted canvases did their work. The Spinifex People lodged a native title claim in 1995, and on 28 November 2000, at Tjuntjuntjara in the heart of their own country, the Federal Court recognised their rights over roughly 55,000 square kilometres of the Great Victoria Desert - an area larger than many nations. The two collaborative paintings were woven into the formal land agreement itself, a rare moment in which a people's art became, quite literally, the legal record of their belonging. Ilkurlka sits near the centre of those recognised lands. The roadhouse you can drive to today is built on country that the law now affirms was never anything but Spinifex - a recognition that arrived late, but arrived.

The Spinifex People built the Ilkurlka roadhouse in 2003, planting an outpost of fuel, water and welcome on the lonely Anne Beadell Highway - the rough desert track surveyed in the 1950s and 60s by Len Beadell and named for his wife. Run by the Ilkurlka Aboriginal Corporation on behalf of the traditional owners, the roadhouse exists chiefly to serve the Aboriginal communities to the north and south, Tjuntjuntjara among them, though the occasional dusty traveller crossing the desert is glad of it too. There is a studio for visitors built on a hilltop, a campsite with a hot shower and a covered barbecue, an airstrip, and a small gallery. On its wall hangs a photograph of the Spinifex artist Simon Hogan shaking hands with King Charles - then a prince - a quiet emblem of how far this desert people's art has travelled, and how firmly they have come home.