About 128 kilometres to the southeast lies Maralinga, where between 1956 and 1963 Britain detonated nuclear weapons on Aṉangu land. The fallout was not abstract. Plutonium and uranium settled into the soil, and even after two cleanup attempts - the most thorough authorised in 1995 and completed around 2000, with contaminated earth buried in trenches some fifteen metres deep - concerns about the ground have never fully gone away. The risks of living near land contaminated with plutonium have shadowed this community from the start. When the Maralinga Tjarutja regained their land, returning to the test site itself was never a simple homecoming. They needed clean country, and Oak Valley became it.

In January 1985, in recognition of their native title, freehold title to the lands was granted to the Maralinga Tjarutja - a southern Pitjantjatjara people. By March that year, families had completed the move into the new community at Oak Valley. The compensation funds that flowed from the dispossession helped pay for it. What rose from the red sand was modest but vital: homes, and eventually a school. For years that school was described, brutally, as the worst in Australia. In 2003, Premier Mike Rann and Education Minister Trish White opened a new one. It was a small thing and an enormous one - a sign that this community at the end of the road would be allowed to last.

The homecoming kept growing. In May 2004, after special legislation passed, Premier Rann handed back title to a vast tract - the Unnamed Conservation Park, now Mamungari Conservation Park - to the Maralinga Tjarutja and the Pila Nguru people. The land abuts the Western Australian border and takes in the Serpentine Lakes, a chain of pale salt pans threading through the dunes. It was the largest land return since the 1984 handover of the Maralinga lands themselves. Rann said it fulfilled a promise he had made in 1991, when as Aboriginal Affairs Minister he passed laws returning sacred areas including Ooldea - the old mission site, and the place where Daisy Bates kept her famous desert camp - to their traditional owners.

Distance defines daily life here. Ceduna, the nearest town of any size, is about 516 kilometres away - roughly seven hours of driving. Yalata is 315 kilometres south, Adelaide a remote 1,288 kilometres. The climate is unforgiving in the way of true desert: hot summers, mild winters, and rain that hardly bothers to arrive. The records from the old Maralinga weather station tell the story in numbers. Yet this country is not empty to the people who belong to it. Neighbouring Aṉangu communities ring the horizon - Tjuntjuntjara to the west across the border, the APY lands to the north, Yalata to the south. In 2002, photographs of Oak Valley and the Maralinga lands drew crowds at the Adelaide Festival, a glimpse for the rest of the country of a place most Australians will never see: a community that survived removal and contamination and chose, against every obstacle, to live on its own returned country.