There is no single Aboriginal culture, and saying so matters. Before British colonisation in 1788, more than 250 language groups lived across the continent, and the people of one Country were as distinct from another as nations of Europe. The deserts of northern South Australia alone are home to several: the Arabana of the Lake Eyre country, the Wangkangurru of the Simpson sands, the Lower Southern Arrernte near Dalhousie, and others whose boundaries followed water and story rather than survey lines. Australia's First Peoples are broadly grouped as Aboriginal peoples of the mainland and Tasmania, and Torres Strait Islanders, who are Melanesian and hold their own distinct cultures. Many now prefer the term First Nations. The older blanket label "Aborigine" is today considered outdated and offensive and is no longer preferred.

At the heart of these cultures is what English speakers call the Dreaming - the understanding that ancestral beings shaped the world, the land and the law in a creative time that is not merely past but ongoing, present in the country itself. Knowledge of that world was carried in songlines: sung sequences that map a journey across the land, naming every soak, ridge and waterhole in order. A songline is at once a sacred narrative, a legal charter, and a survival map. In waterless country, it could lead a traveller from one hidden well to the next across hundreds of kilometres. Dalhousie Springs, where warm artesian water rises in the desert, sits within an exceptional density of these story and song lines - one reason the place holds such profound significance for the Wangkangurru and Lower Southern Arrernte.

Nowhere is the depth of this knowledge clearer than in the Simpson Desert, which the Wangkangurru Yarluyandi people know as Munga-Thirri - "big sandhill country." Outsiders long assumed no one could live in that sea of dunes. They were wrong. The Wangkangurru lived deep in the desert by means of mikiri: narrow native wells, some sunk seven metres down to reach trapped water, each one able to sustain a family group of dozens. Their location, and the way to find them, was held in song. When drought finally broke the system around 1900, families walked out toward the fringe stations and missions - but the knowledge of the wells was never lost, and descendants have returned to the desert to find them again.

These cultures are not confined to the past tense. Aboriginal art is among the most sought-after in the world, from ancient rock galleries to the luminous dot paintings of the Central Desert, and the Indigenous Art Code now helps ensure artists are properly credited and paid. Intricate kinship systems govern relationships, marriage and obligation. Fire-stick farming - the deliberate, patient burning of country - shaped the continent's ecology for tens of thousands of years and is now being studied and revived. Languages once driven toward silence are being taught again to children. The healthiest way for a visitor to engage is through Indigenous-run cultural tours and art centres, and with the understanding that many sites are sacred, living places, not exhibits.

To celebrate this endurance without naming what it endured would be a lie. Colonisation was catastrophic. Introduced diseases, frontier violence, dispossession and policies of removal devastated communities; whole populations were reduced, and some Tasmanian and mainland groups were brought to the edge of destruction - though, contrary to a long-repeated myth, the Tasmanian Aboriginal community survives and its descendants hold their heritage fiercely. Full citizenship rights came late and unevenly, and the inequalities that flowed from generations of oppression persist today. On 26 January, the date the First Fleet arrived, many First Nations people mark not a celebration but Invasion Day, or Survival Day - a name that says everything. After more than sixty thousand years, and despite everything done to break it, the culture is still here. That survival is the heart of the story.