John McDouall Stuart, the explorer who opened much of inland Australia to European navigation, passed through this country in the 1860s and found it impenetrable. It took a Mudburra guide — unnamed in the colonial record — to make the first successful European crossing in 1886. Pastoralist and drover Nat Buchanan set out that year to push cattle to the Kimberley in Western Australia, travelling with Gordon Buchanan, "Greenhide" Sam Croker, Willie Glass, Archie Ferguson, and Mick Berry. Where Stuart had failed, Buchanan succeeded — because the Mudburra guide showed the party where water could be found in country that looked, to European eyes, entirely waterless. Without that knowledge, the journey was impossible. The Mudburra people had been living with this country long enough to know where the frogs burrowed and what that meant.

From 1904 onward, the Murranji Track became the main passage for cattle being moved from the Northern Territory's interior toward markets. The 644-kilometre route ran through country belonging to the Mudburra and Djingili peoples, across flat savanna where the distances between reliable water could be fatal for both stock and drovers. The track acquired its grim reputation honestly. Cattle died of thirst. Men died too, from exhaustion, accidents, and the sheer attrition of driving thousands of animals through extreme heat with inadequate water. The tank reservoirs built along the route — low earthworks trapping rainwater — became the emotional core of the track's culture. Drovers scratched their names, insults, poems, and laments into the concrete. Those graffiti survive, faded and incomplete, as a record of an experience that official history rarely captured in full.

The drovers of the Murranji Track came from all walks of frontier life. Nat Buchanan set the template. Sam Croker, who had been on that first 1886 crossing, later became station manager at Auvergne — where he was shot dead in a card game in 1892. In the 1950s, Bill Tapp built a droving business around the route. Ellen Kettle, photographed on the Murranji Track in 1962, was among the women who also worked this country on their own terms. Owen Cummins — known as the "Territory's own man from Snowy River" — left his signature on one of the water tanks, a piece of personal inscription that outlasted the track's working life. Writer Ernestine Hill documented the track for the magazine Walkabout in 1949, before it had fully faded from regular use.

Use of the Murranji declined from 1966 when the Buchanan Highway was completed, offering a sealed alternative that made the waterless stock route unnecessary for most operators. The track still exists as an unsealed road — traversable in the dry season with suitable vehicles — but is now rarely used for droving. Rights to the land were formally established under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and the Native Title Act 1993, recognising what the Mudburra and Djingili peoples had never stopped knowing: that this was their country. The burrowing frog that gave the track its name still lives in the clay, still waits for the wet season, still surfaces when the water comes.