Across the languages of the Darling River valley, one word keeps surfacing: kali, an old term meaning "people." It anchors the Paakantyi, the "creek people," and it anchors the Wilyakali too. Their other name says it plainly: Bulali, the "hill people," from bula, hill. Their country was the Barrier Ranges and the broken, mineral-streaked land around present-day Silverton, stretching west to Olary and the open saltbush plains beyond. This is hard, beautiful country, where the ranges hold water in their gullies and the horizon goes on forever. The Wilyakali knew its springs, its seasons, and its songlines long before any surveyor drew a line across it.

When Europeans pushed into the Barrier Ranges in the nineteenth century, they brought diseases that moved faster than any wagon. The ethnographer A. W. Howitt later recorded the Wilyakali as part of a wider grouping he called the Itchumundi nation, and colonial authorities declared the people effectively gone in the early 1900s, before any federal acknowledgement around 1913. It was a convenient conclusion. Beneath Wilyakali country lay one of the richest silver, lead, and zinc deposits on Earth, the lode that built Broken Hill and a mining empire. But a people is not a census line. Families endured, moved, married, and held their knowledge close through the decades when governments tore Aboriginal children from their homes and called it policy.

To understand how deep this belonging runs, go to Mutawintji, in the Bynguano Ranges northeast of Broken Hill. Here, in shaded gorges where water lingers after rain, the rock is covered in engravings older than memory can hold: outlines of hands, the tracks of animals, the long-legged shape of a brolga mid-stride. The Wilyakali are joint managers of Mutawintji National Park, the first national park in New South Wales handed back to its traditional owners. Walking those gullies, you are not visiting an exhibit. You are standing inside a record that has been kept, in stone and in story, for far longer than the nation around it has existed.

The Wilyakali language belongs to the Paakantyi group, and like so many Aboriginal languages it was pushed to the edge of silence. Yet edge is not the same as end. Since the 1980s the Wilyakali Aboriginal Corporation has run Poolamacca Station, negotiated with miners on the people's own terms, and pursued the native title claim that finally succeeded in 2023. Words are being recovered, taught, and spoken again. The story that settlers wrote, of a people vanished into the past, turned out to be the wrong story. The Wilyakali are still here, still of these hills, and now, at last, recognised in the law of the country that took so long to listen.