The scale here is hard to hold in the mind. Simpson sprawls across roughly 50,089 square kilometres, larger than many nations, and yet its 2016 population was zero. It lies about 360 kilometres south-east of Alice Springs and some 1,427 kilometres from Darwin, the territory capital, a distance that makes the centre of Australia feel like a different country from its tropical top. There are no towns here, no fuel stops, no permanent settlement of any kind. What fills the space instead is the desert itself: more than a thousand parallel sand ridges marching to the horizon in near-perfect order, stony gibber plains between them, and the enormous silence of the continent's arid heart. To stand inside such a place is to feel the ordinary scale of human life shrink to nothing against the land.

Simpson the locality borrows its name from Simpson the desert, and the desert's name has a tidy human story. In 1929, after flying an aerial survey over this country, the geologist Cecil Thomas Madigan named it for Alfred Allen Simpson, then president of the South Australian branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia. Simpson was an Adelaide industrialist and philanthropist, the man behind the Simpson washing machine company, and he had helped fund Madigan's survey. So a stretch of some of the emptiest land on Earth came to carry the name of a manufacturer of household appliances, a small irony of how Australian places were christened. The locality's own boundaries were formally gazetted much later, on 4 April 2007.

Empty of residents is not the same as empty of meaning. Much of Simpson is Aboriginal land, including portions held by the Pmer Ulpere Ingwemirne Arletherre Aboriginal Land Trust, and the wider desert is the ancestral country of peoples including the Arrernte and, across the broader Simpson, Strzelecki and Tirari country, the Dieri. For tens of thousands of years before any surveyor flew over it, people lived in and moved through this land, reading its waterholes and seasons with a precision no map could match. They knew where water hid after rain and how to cross country that killed unprepared newcomers. The census may record no population, but the country is not a blank. It is homeland, held in law and in living memory, and the silence a visitor hears is not absence so much as a long, continuing presence.

For all its emptiness, Simpson is fully woven into the machinery of Australian governance. It sits within the federal division of Lingiari, the territory electoral division of Namatjira, and the local government area of the MacDonnell Region. Its land is catalogued in dry official language as NT Portions with numbers like 4208 and 4918. There is something quietly telling in that: a desert with no inhabitants still gets a postcode, an electorate, and a place in the filing cabinet of the state, as if the act of naming and bounding it were a way of holding even the void inside the nation.