For most of its recent recorded history this place was called Cravens Peak, a beef cattle station worked across rocky range and dunefield until Bush Heritage Australia acquired it in 2005, funded by a bequest from a supporter named Gay Bell. The deeper purpose was to help protect the catchment of the Mulligan River, linking the reserve with neighbouring Ethabuka. But the most important change came later. In July 2021 the Wangkamadla people won native title recognition over a vast sweep of their country, stretching from around Bedourie across to the Northern Territory border, and that October the reserve was renamed Pilungah in their language. It was a restoration of name as much as of right, country answering once more to the words of its traditional owners.

This remote corner was never isolated in the way a map suggests. It lay at the heart of one of Aboriginal Australia's great trade routes, a network running from the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north all the way down to South Australia. Along it travelled pituri, a native plant prized for the powerful stimulant in its leaves, exchanged across enormous distances for stone knives, seashells carried from distant coasts, and daggers fashioned from the tusks of dugongs. Goods and stories moved hand to hand across the desert for generations. Rock paintings and significant sites still mark the reserve, the enduring signatures of a people who read, named, and connected this country across thousands of years and thousands of kilometres of seemingly empty land.

Pilungah is a landscape of contrasts. Its western section rises into the Toomba Range, the highest and most rugged ground in the reserve, all rock and ridge and broken hill. Eastward the country relaxes into the parallel sand dunes and swales of the Simpson, with stony gibber plains spreading across the south. Between them lie the ephemeral claypans and waterholes of the Mulligan catchment, which fill briefly after rain and become magnets for waterfowl, making them important for bird conservation. This variety of country, mountain to dune to wetland, is what packs so much life into a place that looks, from a passing aircraft, like nothing but red emptiness.

Pilungah is a refuge for creatures clinging on elsewhere. It is a haven for reptiles, including the woma, a rare desert python now absent from large portions of its former range due to regional extinctions, particularly in southwest Australia, alongside the ridge-tailed monitor and the seldom-seen skink known as Ariadna's ctenotus. Among its mammals are the vulnerable, nocturnal mulgara, a fierce little carnivorous marsupial, and the inland ningaui, one of the tiniest meat-eaters on earth. The skies hold grey falcons, painted finches, Australian bustards, and spinifex pigeons. Managed today through a partnership between Bush Heritage and the Wangkamadla people, a relationship nurtured since 2009 and formalised in a 2014 cultural heritage management agreement before being deepened by native title, Pilungah is that rare thing: a desert protected by the science of conservation and the knowledge of those who have always belonged to it.