In the Carnarvon Range, which the Martu more properly call Katjarra, a rock shelter holds one of the longest human records on the continent. Archaeologists know it as Serpent's Glen; its custodians call it Karnatukul. A re-excavation published in 2018 pushed the date of occupation back to before roughly 47,800 years ago, some 20,000 years older than anyone had previously thought. More than 25,000 stone artefacts came out of the deposit, including a finely shaped backed blade dated to over 40,000 years. The findings confirmed that people not only reached the arid interior astonishingly early but stayed through the brutal cold and drought of the last Ice Age. This is not a footnote to Australian history. It is close to its foundation.

Katjarra is a sacred place, woven into the stories of the creator being often called the Rainbow Serpent, and its rock contains a wealth of ancient art. Among the paintings are the bilby and the black-flanked rock-wallaby, and a ceremonial headdress, images that carry meaning far beyond decoration. In 1965 a dingo trapper named Peter Muir gave one site the name Serpent's Glen, struck by the many snake figures and their link to Rainbow Serpent stories. Muir's son, the artist and Indigenous rights activist Kado Muir, would grow up to carry his people's culture forward in a different way. The art on these walls is not a relic of a vanished world; it belongs to living traditions and the descendants who still hold them.

What people did here, day to day, leaves its own quiet record. A study using archaeobotany, the analysis of ancient plant remains, found that wattle had been gathered at Karnatukul throughout the entire span of its occupation, from the Pleistocene into recent times. The wood served as firewood, food, bush medicine, and raw material for tools, a single versatile resource threaded through tens of thousands of years of life in a harsh land. It is an intimate detail. Long before any written history of Australia, generation after generation walked to the same stands of acacia, broke off the same useful wood, and carried it home to the same shelters.

Today the recognised traditional owners include the Martu and the Birriliburu peoples, and they are increasingly the ones who decide how this Country is visited. In 2014 the Birriliburu traditional owners and rangers reopened Katjarra for the month of July, issuing permits for seventy visitors at a hundred dollars a vehicle, with the hope of welcoming the public each July and, just as importantly, of drawing their own young people back to reconnect with culture. Few roads here are signposted, there are almost no facilities, and only the most self-reliant travellers should attempt it. Even Lake Disappointment, named by a thirsty European explorer, now carries its Martu name once more: Kumpupintil. The desert is being read again in the language that named it first.