The story of Parnngurr is part of a wider movement that swept Aboriginal Australia in the 1970s and 80s, the return to Country. Across the continent, people who had been moved off their traditional lands during the mission era walked back to reclaim them, and the Martu were among them. They settled some 370 kilometres east of Newman, at the southern end of the rugged Karlamilyi country, the largest and one of the most remote national parks in Western Australia. The place takes its name not from the European word on the survey but from its own water, a rockhole and a yinta, a permanent spring, that had sustained people here for thousands of years. To come back to Parnngurr was to come back to a known source in a country that offers little water and forgives no carelessness.

The pressure that drew the Martu home was uranium. When a deposit was identified in the area in the 1980s, exploration crews moved in, and the Martu found themselves defending sacred ground with the only tool that worked: presence. They set up camp beside the exploration site and refused to leave. It was, by one account, the single successful instance of curbing the mining company's activity anywhere in the Western Desert. The fight did not end in the 1980s. For decades the Martu have continued to oppose a proposed mine at nearby Kintyre, and in time their resistance drew supporters from far beyond the desert, including artists who lent their voices to a campaign most Australians had never heard of. Parnngurr's windmill still turns, a small machine that once stood between a community and a mine.

Parnngurr is not only a settlement; it is a station on one of the great songlines of the Western Desert. In the Jukurrpa, the Dreaming, the Minyipuru, the group of ancestral women known across much of Aboriginal Australia as the Seven Sisters, passed through this country as they fled the unwanted attentions of an old man named Yurla. They paused to rest on Parnngurr Hill, also marked on maps as Mount Cotton, before continuing their long flight east. To live at Parnngurr is to live inside that story, surrounded by named places, by rockholes and soaks and bluffs, each carrying meaning that predates every fence and survey peg by an unimaginable span of time.

Today Parnngurr is a functioning community, and a generous one to the travellers who reach it. Its shop sells fuel, food, cold drinks and even fresh fruit and vegetables hauled in across hundreds of kilometres of dirt, and the community offers medical help, accommodation, camping and a laundry to those passing through. Many of the hardy souls driving the Canning Stock Route or exploring Karlamilyi stop here to refuel and ask the locals about the road ahead, advice worth more than any guidebook in country this unforgiving. Permits are not needed to visit, but Parnngurr is a dry community, with no alcohol or drugs allowed, a rule the residents set for themselves. It is governed through the Parnngurr Aboriginal Corporation, formally incorporated in December 1989, the legal shape of a community that began, a few years earlier, as families choosing to come home.