Yarluyandi Country is vast and, to an untrained eye, empty. The anthropologist Norman Tindale estimated their traditional lands at some six thousand nine hundred square miles, reaching from the Mulligan River in the north down toward Alton Downs, west to the country near Atna Hill, and east as far as Birdsville and the Diamantina. This is not generous land. It is semi-arid, swung between long drought and sudden flood, when the Diamantina spreads across the plains in shining sheets. To live here permanently, rather than merely pass through, required a map held in memory and story, a map of where water could be found when the surface gave none.

The key to the desert was the mikiri, the word in the closely related Wangkangurru tongue for the native wells that made the Simpson habitable. These were not springs but soakages, shallow freshwater stores trapped in low ground between the dunes, where rain had filtered down through coarse sand until it met a layer of impermeable clay. The people reached the water through narrow shafts dug by hand, some plunging as deep as seven metres into the sand. For generations the desert form of the language was even known as mikiri-nganha, 'from the native wells'. The wells were the only permanent water for enormous distances, and so they anchored everything: where people camped, which routes they walked, where ceremonies were held. Men hunted from the wells; women gathered seeds from the surrounding dunefields, grinding nardoo and pigweed into bread. When the surveyor David Lindsay pushed into the desert in 1886, it was a Wangkangurru man who guided him from well to well, revealing a network that a European could never have found alone. A whole civilisation turned on knowing the location of water that a stranger would walk straight past.

The desert way of life endured until the catastrophic drought around the turn of the twentieth century, when the wells failed and many families walked out to the fringing country and the new settlements rather than perish. It is tempting to read that departure as an ending. It was not. The Yarluyandi and Wangkangurru carried their language, their songlines, and their knowledge of the mikiri with them, and they passed them on. The connection to Country was never severed; it was held, sometimes quietly, across generations of dispossession and hardship. To tell their story as one of disappearance would be both untrue and unjust to the people who kept it alive.

In 2014, an Australian court formally recognised what the Yarluyandi had always known. On 3 October that year, the native title of the Wangkangurru and Yarluyandi people was determined over a sweep of land approaching eighty thousand square kilometres, taking in much of the Simpson Desert, including the dunes the people call Munga-Thirri, and the township of Birdsville itself. Today they form one community with the Wangkangurru, represented by the Wangkangurru Yarluyandi Aboriginal Corporation, and they care for Country that ranges across two states. The mikiri have mostly fallen quiet, their shafts drifted with sand. But the people who knew them, and the descendants who know their names, remain the traditional owners of one of the harshest and most beautiful places on Earth.