More than 65 percent of every drop of water that ever reaches Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre passes through this single property first. That is the strange, watery secret of Kalamurina, a 6,700-square-kilometre stretch of dunefield and gibber plain in the arid heart of South Australia, where the Warburton and Macumba rivers and Kallakoopah Creek converge on their long, mostly-dry journey toward Australia's lowest point. For most of the year these are channels of sand. But when the inland rains finally come, Kalamurina becomes the floodgate of the desert.
Kalamurina borders the north shore of Lake Eyre North and contains a vast share of the lake's catchment. Its country is a mosaic of contrasts: red dunefields and stony gibber plains, desert woodlands, freshwater and saline lakes, and the green riparian corridors that follow its three converging waterways. In a landscape defined by drought, those river channels are lifelines, threading living habitat through some of the most unforgiving terrain on the continent. When floodwaters arrive from distant Queensland storms, they spread across the property and trigger an ecological boom, drawing waterbirds and bursting the dormant desert into sudden, fleeting abundance.
Long before it was a sanctuary, Kalamurina was a gamble against the climate. A pastoral lease was established here before 1884, first stocked with merino sheep for wool, with camels brought in to haul supplies across the trackless country. Cattle followed by 1889. But the land punished overreach. A run of poor seasons forced the station's abandonment in 1899, and by 1902 every waterhole had dried completely; the owner of the day was declared insolvent. The pattern repeated in 1908. As late as 1994, with drought again gripping the region, new owners took it on after climatologists assured them rain was coming, and it was, briefly. Boom and bust, again and again, until the cattle were finally sold in the early 2000s.
In December 2007 the Australian Wildlife Conservancy bought Kalamurina and retired it from grazing for good, transforming one of Australia's harshest pastoral runs into one of its largest non-government nature reserves. The acquisition did something bigger than the property itself. Sitting between the Munga-Thirri-Simpson Desert reserves to the north and Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre National Park to the south, Kalamurina closed the gap and stitched the protected lands into one continuous conservation corridor across central Australia covering well over 100,000 square kilometres, larger than the state of Tasmania. Management now centres on undoing the damage of the pastoral era, with sustained programs to control feral camels and rabbits that strip the fragile desert vegetation.
The creatures Kalamurina protects are easy to overlook and almost impossible to replace. The crest-tailed mulgara, a small carnivorous marsupial once thought lost across much of its range, hunts in the dunes. The kultarr races across open ground on long, delicate legs. The Lake Eyre dragon flattens itself against the saltpan crust, and the Eyrean grasswren flits through the cane-grass on the dune crests, a bird so elusive it eluded science for decades. In a property the size of a small country, these are the lives that give the conservation effort its purpose, threatened species finally given room to recover in a place where the only schedule is the rain.
Kalamurina Sanctuary centres on roughly 27.92°S, 137.98°E, on the northern shore of Lake Eyre North in far north-eastern South Australia. From altitude the defining features are the braided, pale channels of the Warburton and Macumba rivers and Kallakoopah Creek converging toward the immense white salt expanse of Lake Eyre to the south, set against red dunefields and dark gibber plains. After major inland flooding the normally dry channels and lake basin can shine with water, a dramatic and rare sight. There are no scheduled airports nearby; William Creek (ICAO YWMC) to the southwest and Birdsville (ICAO YBDV) to the northeast are the closest airstrips, both serving outback aviation and Lake Eyre scenic flights. Fly high for the scale of the catchment; low passes reveal the river-corridor greenery. Visibility is generally excellent, but watch for dust in hot, windy conditions.