This is the southern Great Victoria Desert grading into the northern Nullarbor, and it is not the empty waste outsiders imagine. The country here is a shifting mosaic - long crimson sand ridges running in parallel waves, pale gibber flats, mallee and spinifex, and the blinding white of dry salt pans. Its centrepiece is the Serpentine Lakes, a chain of salt lakes that snakes for nearly 100 kilometres straight along the South Australia-Western Australia border. When they fill, they can cover almost 100 square kilometres; most of the time they lie dry, a thick saline crust over clay and silt, glaring under the desert sun. It is exactly the kind of stark, intact arid landscape that earned the place its biosphere status.

In May 2004, the Premier of South Australia, Mike Rann, handed back the title to 21,000 square kilometres of this country - the conservation park and the Serpentine Lakes among it - to the Maralinga Tjarutja and Pila Nguru peoples. It was the largest return of land under native title in South Australia since the handover of the Maralinga lands two decades earlier, and for Rann it was the keeping of a personal promise: a pledge he had made in 1991, as Aboriginal Affairs Minister, to the Maralinga leader Archie Barton. For the Anangu traditional owners, it was the formal recognition of a connection that no proclamation had ever created and no decades of bureaucratic anonymity had ever erased.

Mamungari is not a place you simply drive into. It is managed jointly by its traditional owners - the Maralinga Tjarutja and Pila Nguru - together with the state's environment department, and it is held as an IUCN Category Ia strict nature reserve, the most protective classification there is. Visitors must hold a minimum-impact code and prove real experience with it; permits take four to six weeks to arrange. Only one road of any note crosses the park at all: Len Beadell's Anne Beadell Highway, an unsealed desert track that is among the most remote drivable routes on the continent. The barriers are deliberate. This is country to be cared for, not consumed.

Behind the harsh surface is one of the least-disturbed desert ecosystems on Earth, which is precisely why UNESCO listed it among Australia's biosphere reserves. The dune fields and spinifex shelter desert reptiles, marsupials and birds adapted to one of the driest, hottest regions of the country - life tuned to scarcity, to the long wait between rains and the brief green flush that follows them. The Anangu have read and lived this country for thousands of years, and that depth of knowledge is now woven into how the park is managed. The blank name on the old maps was always a failure of the outsiders' imagination, never of the land or the people who belong to it.