The lakes are not really lakes at all, most of the time. Their surface is dry clay, silt and sand, sealed under a crust of salt that glitters white against the surrounding ochre. Only after rare desert rains does water gather in the lowest channels, spreading across as much as 9,700 hectares before the sun reclaims it. What makes the Serpentine Lakes extraordinary is what they remember. They form the main channel of a vast palaeo-drainage system, a river network that drained this land in the Palaeozoic era and has been inactive for tens of millions of years. The serpentine shape is the fossil of that long-dead river, its meanders preserved where wind-blown dunes have buried the other channels beyond recognition. Even stranger, geologists have found tektites here, glassy beads forged in the heat of a meteorite impact and scattered far across the desert.

Most of the chain lies within Mamungari Conservation Park, a stark mosaic of Nullarbor limestone, salt-lake palaeo-channels and the dune fields at the heart of the Great Victoria Desert. In 1977 the area was recognised as one of Australia's UNESCO biosphere reserves, listed under the deliberately blank name of the "Unnamed Biosphere Reserve" — the park itself known locally as the Unnamed Conservation Park. But the deeper story is one of return. In May 2004, South Australian Premier Mike Rann handed back title to some 21,000 square kilometres of this country, including the park and the Serpentine Lakes, to the Maralinga Tjarutja and the Pila Nguru, the Spinifex people. It honoured a pledge made years earlier to Maralinga leader Archie Barton. For peoples displaced from the Great Victoria Desert during the atomic-bomb tests at nearby Maralinga in the 1950s, it was a homecoming written into law.

The only road of any significance to cross the lakes is the Anne Beadell Highway, and "highway" is a generous word for it. It is a rough, unsealed track running 1,325 kilometres between Coober Pedy and Laverton, cutting across the northernmost arm of the Serpentine Lakes on its way. It carries one of the loveliest stories in Australian outback history. The surveyor Len Beadell pushed the route through the desert in stages between 1953 and 1962, opening up country for the Woomera rocket range. He named the track for his wife, Anne, who joined him for much of the work. Today it remains one of the continent's most remote drives, where summer temperatures climb toward 50 degrees Celsius and a breakdown can be a genuine emergency. Travellers need permits to cross both the Aboriginal lands and the conservation park, and they carry their own water, fuel and patience.

It is tempting to call this a wasteland, but the Serpentine Lakes are listed as an important wetland, and the desert around them is anything but dead. The Great Victoria Desert holds a surprising richness of reptiles, birds and hardy plants tuned to drought, and the palaeo-channels become corridors of life when the rains finally come. At 264 metres above sea level, the salt crust runs to the horizon under a sky that fills, after dark, with more stars than most people ever see. To stand here is to read a landscape in deep time: a river that died an age ago, an impact that rained glass from the sky, a road built for rockets, and a people whose connection to this country was never broken and is now, again, recognised.