A national park needs a name, and in 2014 this one was given a far older one than the maps had carried. For the Yandruwandha and Yawarrawarrka people, the channels of Cooper Creek are the track of a Dreaming serpent, and Malkumba is the body of water where that serpent comes to rest. So the freshwater oasis that white authorities had simply called Coongie Lakes became the Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park - a name that finally said, on the signs and in the legislation, whose Country this has always been.
Names carry knowledge here. In Yandruwandha and Yawarrawarrka tradition, the Cooper Creek system is bound up with an ancestral serpent whose movements shaped the waterways, and Malkumba marks where it lies still. To add that word to the park's title in 2014 was more than a gesture. It restored an Aboriginal understanding of the landscape to the official record, asserting that the lakes are not merely scenery to be protected but living, storied Country with meaning that long predates the surveyor's pen. The lakes themselves are a startling sight - sweet freshwater pooling in the middle of one of the harshest deserts on the continent - and the old name insists you see them as more than a geographic accident.
The park is young as parks go, even if the land is ancient. It was proclaimed on 31 March 2005 under South Australia's National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972, created from a parcel of land that had previously been part of the much larger Innamincka Regional Reserve. Sitting roughly a hundred and ten kilometres northwest of the tiny town of Innamincka, it protects the most precious core of the Coongie wetlands. It carries an IUCN Category II classification - the same protected-area standing as the world's great national parks - a recognition that this fragile arid oasis deserves the highest level of care a landscape can be given.
The park is run as a genuine partnership. It is co-managed by the South Australian Department of Environment and Water, the Yandruwandha Yawarrawarrka Parks Advisory Committee, and the regional arid-lands natural resource board. That arrangement matters. It means the people whose ancestors fished these channels and held ceremony on these dunes for thousands of years now sit at the table where decisions are made about fire, access, water and protection. Western conservation science and deep Aboriginal knowledge of this Country are meant to guide the park together, each informing the other - a model of management as alive and adaptive as the floodplain it watches over.
For the few travellers who make the long haul out from Innamincka, the reward is a kind of stillness that is hard to find anywhere else. Permanent and semi-permanent lakes hold their water through the dry, shaded by river red gums whose pale trunks lean over the surface, while the dunes glow orange at dusk behind them. Pelicans drift on water that has no business existing in this latitude, and the night sky, unspoiled by any town light for hundreds of kilometres, is overwhelming. The park asks something of its visitors in return - access is limited, boating restricted, and parts of the wetland closed to protect both breeding wildlife and Aboriginal sites. The remoteness is not an obstacle to the experience. It is the experience.
Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park lies at roughly 27.26 degrees south, 140.16 degrees east, about 110 km northwest of Innamincka on the lower Cooper Creek floodplain in far northeast South Australia. From the air the protected lakes and channels stand out vividly against surrounding red dune fields, a brilliant blue-and-green oasis in arid country. The nearest airstrip is Innamincka (YINN), with Moomba (YOOM) further south. Best viewing is 2,000 to 6,000 feet AGL. The park is remote and access is seasonally limited to protect the wetland and its cultural sites; expect extreme summer heat, sharp dry-season visibility, and occasional dust haze.