The story begins in 1946, when Australia and the United Kingdom formed the Anglo-Australian Joint Project and went looking for somewhere vast, flat and empty enough to fire rockets across. They found it here. The area was declared prohibited in 1947, and the first military trial took place that December. The purpose-built town of Woomera grew up to house the people who made it run. What followed was decades of rockets and missiles streaking northwest across the desert, where the curvature of the continent gave engineers a clear, instrumented corridor hundreds of kilometres long, the kind of room no crowded country in Europe could spare.

The maps called it empty. It was not. The Woomera Prohibited Area encompasses the traditional lands of six Aboriginal groups, among them the Kokatha, the Arabana, the Gawler Ranges people, and the Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara, with Maralinga Tjarutja and Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara country in the west. To clear the range, Traditional Owners were moved off the land their families had lived on for thousands of generations, displaced so that weapons could be tested over their country. Within the area lie sites of deep significance to these peoples, places now protected by law against damage or removal. It is one of the harder truths of this place: the same remoteness that made it useful to the military was never wilderness at all, but home.

For all the secrecy, Woomera became one of the great launch sites of the space age. From 1957 it was a global focus for space activity, chosen as the base for the European Launcher Development Organisation. At the height of its activity, Woomera recorded the second-highest number of rocket launches anywhere on Earth, behind only NASA's Cape Canaveral. The desert that hosted the bombs also flung satellites skyward. There is even a postscript written from space: in June 2010, the Japanese probe Hayabusa came home after seven years and a rendezvous with an asteroid, and the capsule carrying its precious grains of the asteroid Itokawa fell to Earth inside the Woomera range, the dust of another world settling onto this scarred and guarded ground.

To this day the prohibition holds. The Stuart Highway can be closed at a few hours' notice by roadblock to allow range activity. Those few tracks that cross the area, such as the rough Anne Beadell Highway running from Coober Pedy toward Emu, require permits to traverse. Mapping or sketching the place without permission is forbidden, a relic of its founding secrecy, even as satellites now photograph every inch of it. And scattered across the gibber, half-buried in the stones, lie the leavings of seventy years of testing: spent rocket motors, fragments of projectiles, the occasional piece of unexploded ordnance. It is a landscape that remembers, in metal and in radiation, everything that has been done to it.