Somewhere behind a long wire fence at the southern edge of the Little Sandy Desert, a bilby is digging. Its kind vanished from this Country generations ago, hunted out of the open desert by feral cats and foxes that arrived with European settlement. That a bilby digs here again is not an accident of nature but the result of years of patient work by the Martu people and the scientists they invited onto their land. Matuwa is the place that work has restored, and its name is a homecoming as much as a label on a map.
For much of the twentieth century this was Lorna Glen, a pastoral lease where cattle grazed the fragile arid soils. When the running of stock ended, the land returned to those who had always held it under law older than any lease. The Martu traditional owners, through the Tarlka Matuwa Piarku Aboriginal Corporation, took on its care, restoring the name Matuwa. In May 2023 the Western Australian government formally dedicated Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara National Park, 609,300 hectares of desert managed jointly by the corporation and the state. Together with the adjoining Lake Carnegie nature reserve, the new conservation land covers an area larger than the island of Bali.
Australia has lost more mammal species than any other country, most of them small desert creatures with no defence against cats and foxes. Matuwa is one of the front lines in reversing that loss. Early attempts to release mala and burrowing bettongs straight onto open country failed, eaten almost as fast as they arrived. So conservationists built a fenced, predator-free enclosure, a haven where threatened animals could establish before facing the wider desert. Bilbies, golden bandicoots, brushtail possums, mala and boodies have all been returned. Some now roam beyond the fence; others are still building their numbers inside it. It is slow, unglamorous, deeply hopeful work.
The park was deliberately split from the reserve beside it, and the reason matters. The national park is open to visitors, but the Lake Carnegie nature reserve is not, because it holds sites sacred to the Martu that are not for outside eyes. This is conservation on Aboriginal terms, where protecting biodiversity and protecting culture are the same act. Among the more than 480 plant species recorded here, and across the spinifex and sandplain, the land is also thought to shelter the night parrot, a bird so elusive it was presumed extinct for most of the past century. To know what lives here, you have to be let in.
Matuwa has become something larger than a single park. As an Indigenous Protected Area and the heart of one of Australia's biggest animal translocation programs, it shows what becomes possible when traditional knowledge and modern science work the same ground. Martu rangers read the desert in ways no instrument can, tracking animals and reading fire and water across Country their families have known for thousands of generations. The fence keeps the cats out. The people keep the knowledge alive. Between the two, a stretch of desert that was quietly emptying of life is filling up again.
Matuwa Kurrara Kurrara National Park is centred near 25.84°S, 121.68°E in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia, about 160 km east of Wiluna and south of the Little Sandy Desert. From the air it reads as vast red sandplain and spinifex, with the broad ephemeral expanse of Lake Carnegie forming a pale salt-crusted feature to the east in the adjoining nature reserve. The predator-proof enclosure fence is generally too fine to see from cruising altitude. Nearest aerodrome is Wiluna Airport (YWLU) to the west; Leinster and Meekatharra (YMEK) lie further southwest, and Newman Airport (YNWN) is well to the northwest. This is exceptionally remote country with no services below; visibility is usually superb, though summer heat and occasional dust reduce clarity. Recommended viewing altitude 8,000-11,000 ft AGL to take in the scale of the desert and Lake Carnegie together.