Before colonisation, the upper Annan was divided into roughly nine to twelve patrilineal clan estates, each tied to a stretch of the river system, together forming one cultural bloc through which people connected to the estates could move and share resources with relative freedom. Authority rested with senior men known as maja maja — individuals of high standing who, through age and their knowledge of the ngujakura, the law and dreaming, were charged with minding their country and its people. As the anthropologist Dr Christopher Anderson recorded, they understood something modern ecology has only lately caught up to: that moral knowledge and subsistence knowledge are inseparable. Breaking the law was believed to carry ecological consequences. Care for the country and care for the conduct of people were, in Kuku Nyungkal understanding, one and the same duty.

This is a country read like a text, where the landscape itself holds meaning. As Kuku Nyungkal people describe it, certain lagoons, swamps, springs and beaches are special story places, each carrying its own law. Some are sickness places, to be avoided. Some are healing places. Some belong to particular birds or are feeding grounds for other animals. Others are where seasonal food is gathered — crab, mussels, bird eggs, certain fish, each in its time. Connected to particular sites was the yirru, a nature-spirit understood to live in the ground, through which the old men could sanction or punish breaches of the moral code. To walk Nyungkal Bubu properly is to know which places give and which places take, and to behave accordingly.

In 1885, tin was discovered at Mount Amos, within Kuku Nyungkal country, and the world the maja maja had ordered began to come apart. What the people themselves called an "invasion" of tin miners turned into decades of sustained mining across their land. Families were pushed from their hunting grounds, herded into camps along the Bloomfield River, and finally confined to a small reserve at Wujal Wujal, where in the 1950s the Lutheran Church established a mission and moved the remaining Kuku Nyungkal onto it. The hurt is almost beyond description, and the people found words for it that still cut: they spoke of being "like a crane standing on one leg," with no room for two feet on the ground, and "like animals in a wild cage." A people of a whole river system had been squeezed onto an island of a few hundred acres.

A century after the miners came, in 1995, Queensland's Aboriginal Land Tribunal examined how deeply colonisation had cut into Kuku Nyungkal life and estimated their number at no fewer than 900. But numbers were never the heart of it. The heart was getting back to Bubu. That work has a face: the late Marilyn Wallace, a native title holder and one of the last fluent speakers of the critically endangered Kuku Nyungkal language, who in 2006 helped found the Bana Yarralji ranger service and social enterprise to bring her people and their law back onto their country. Her rangers care for the Nyungkal stretch of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area; her language and knowledge are being recorded so they are not lost. The crane that once balanced on one leg is, slowly and on its own terms, finding room for two feet again.