The Paakantyi homeland follows the Baaka from around Wilcannia downstream, reaching some twenty to thirty miles inland on either bank, and stretching out to the country around the Paroo River and Broken Hill. In their own language they call themselves wiimpatya. The land is generous along the water and hard away from it; drought is no stranger here. When the country dried, people would withdraw to the few permanent springs in the backcountry and hunt the animals that came to drink. To live well in such a place demands deep knowledge, passed down over countless generations: where the water hides, when the fish run, how to read a sky that so rarely gives rain.

In Paakantyi understanding, the river and its country were shaped by Ngatji, the Rainbow Serpent of the Dreaming. Ngatji is not a story finished long ago but a presence that endures, believed to travel underground from waterhole to waterhole, and not to be disturbed. When a sudden whirly breeze stirs the surface of the Baaka, that is Ngatji, moving. This is the heart of why the river matters so completely. It is not only water and fish and a route through the desert. It is a living being, and the people belong to it as much as it belongs to them. To care for the river is to care for the serpent, and for the law that binds them together.

Colonisation came hard to the Baaka. Cattle and sheep stripped the banks, rabbits arrived in the 1890s, and drought and introduced fish damaged a river system that had sustained people for millennia. Disease cut through the communities; an epidemic around 1850 is remembered by elders as killing a third of the Paakantyi and their neighbours. Many survivors ended up working on the very stations that had taken their land. Even sympathetic settlers like Frederic Bonney, who photographed Paakantyi families at Momba Station and wrote of their honesty, courtesy and kindness, were part of a wave of dispossession. Yet through all of it the people endured. In recent times their descendants are concentrated in Wilcannia, where, by conservative estimate, more than two-thirds of residents are of Paakantyi descent.

By the mid-twentieth century outsiders were calling the Paakantyi a vanishing people, and their language was down to a handful of fluent speakers. But a language is not gone while anyone is willing to fight for it. Community members describe their tongue not as dead but as sleeping, and they are waking it: in 2014 Paakantyi entered the core curriculum of schools across the region, and elders, teachers and young people now carry the words forward. Figures like the elder and teacher Elsie Rose Jones, who recorded Paakantyi stories and alphabet books, and the modern hip-hop artist Barkaa, who raps in language, are links in an unbroken chain.

The fight reached a milestone in court. The Barkindji first lodged their native title claim in 1997, gathering testimony from traditional owners alongside the work of anthropologists, historians and linguists. Eighteen years later, on 16 June 2015, Federal Court judge Jayne Jagot handed down a determination recognising their native title across roughly 128,000 square kilometres, from the South Australian border eastwards to Tilpa, south to Wentworth and north to Wanaaring. It was the largest such recognition in the state's history. For a people whose very name means belonging to the river, it was the law of the newcomers finally acknowledging what the Paakantyi had always known: this is, and has always been, their country.