The main mass weighs 12.4 tonnes and now rests in the Western Australian Museum. It was not alone: a second giant fragment of more than five tonnes lay close by, the two found about 180 metres apart, together making up the Mundrabilla Mass. In all, more than twenty tonnes of fragments have been recovered, scattered across roughly 60 kilometres, which makes this one of the largest meteorite sites anywhere on Earth. The pieces fell at least a million years ago, long before any human eyes were here to see them streak down. The Nullarbor turns out to be a near-perfect place to find such things: its flat, pale, largely unchanging surface preserves dark iron meteorites and makes them easy to spot, so the plain has become one of the world's richest hunting grounds for fallen stone. For perspective, this single iron visitor outweighs a fully grown elephant several times over, and it arrived from beyond the planet entirely.

Long before the meteorite was found, this was pioneer pastoral country. Mundrabilla Station was the first sheep station in the Nullarbor region, established in 1872 by William Stuart McGill, a Scotsman, together with the Irish brothers Thomas and William Kennedy. Getting there was an ordeal in itself: they drove some 1,500 sheep and eight horses roughly 1,200 kilometres overland from Albany to reach this grazing land. The frontier exacted its price. McGill's first wife, Annie Harkness, died in childbirth in 1879, and Thomas Kennedy died in 1896. Both Annie and Thomas are buried on the station, two graves marking the human cost of settling one of the loneliest corners of the continent.

Mundrabilla has an arid climate, but its position near the Great Australian Bight keeps its summers milder than the deep interior of the Australian desert. Milder is relative. On 3 January 1979, the thermometer at Mundrabilla Station reached 49.8 degrees Celsius, which stands as the equal sixth-hottest temperature ever recorded anywhere in Australia. It is a place of extremes wearing a modest face, cooled by an ocean that lies only about 20 kilometres to the south, yet still capable of heat that would stop most landscapes cold.

Today, like every settlement strung along this stretch of the Eyre Highway, Mundrabilla amounts to little more than a roadhouse, open from early morning until half past nine at night. It was built by Roger and Pat Warren-Langford, who had managed the station before turning to travellers. Like its neighbours along this stretch, it keeps the unofficial local time of UTC+8:45, the Nullarbor's curious 45-minute clock that no government formally recognises. The roadhouse keeps a small wildlife park with emus, camels, and an aviary, a touch of company on a route where the next stop can be an hour or more away. The roadhouse and the historic station sit about 35 kilometres apart, two points of the original holding, while pastoral work carries on across the surrounding plain much as it has for 150 years.