WMC Resources found the Yeelirrie deposit in mid-1971, and on paper it was enormous. As measured at the end of 2018, the resource stood at 58,100 tonnes of uranium oxide, around 128 million pounds, a quantity that places it among the most significant uranium prospects on the continent. By 1978 WMC had brought in the oil company Esso and the German firm Urangesellschaft to help fund development, with production penciled in for 1984. But the deposit's grade is modest, averaging just 0.15 percent uranium oxide, which means a viable mine must be vast: a pit envisaged at nine kilometres long and 1.5 kilometres wide. A deposit that large, that shallow, and that low-grade has always lived or died on the uranium price, and the price has rarely cooperated.

Politics killed the first attempt. When Bob Hawke's Labor government came to power, its three-mine policy capped the number of operating uranium mines in Australia and shut Yeelirrie down by 1983. The deposit went into care and maintenance, where it would sit for decades. Ownership passed to BHP in 2005 when the mining giant absorbed WMC, and BHP revived the project amid a uranium price boom and a 2008 softening of government policy. Then BHP, too, walked away, selling Yeelirrie in 2012 to the Canadian uranium specialist Cameco for US$430 million. Cameco won state environmental approval in January 2017, granted by the outgoing Barnett government only weeks before it lost office. Yet still no uranium has been mined. As recently as the 2020s, with prices weak, Cameco itself saw little case for building new uranium mines anywhere.

The most unexpected obstacle came from below ground, in the form of animals almost nobody had ever seen. Yeelirrie sits above a rich habitat of stygofauna, minuscule creatures that live their entire lives in the dark of underground water, many of them found nowhere else on Earth. Surveys recorded scores of these species in the local groundwater. In 2016 the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority recommended the mine not proceed, warning that lowering the water table risked driving some of these creatures to extinction. It was a remarkable verdict: a multi-billion-dollar uranium deposit checked, at least in part, by animals smaller than a grain of rice. The desert above held its own rare life too, including a salt-tolerant plant later named Atriplex yeelirrie, found in only two known populations, one of which overlapped the proposed pit.

Through every market cycle and corporate handover, one constant has held: the opposition of the Tjiwarl traditional owners. Senior Tjiwarl native title holders, together with conservation groups, challenged the 2017 approval in the Supreme Court of Western Australia and pursued the fight through appeal after appeal. They lost in the courts, the legal challenge dismissed in 2018 and again on appeal in 2019, but they did not stop. Tjiwarl women became the public face of the campaign, drawing national attention to a struggle that has spanned generations. In April 2022, Environment Minister Reece Whitby declined to extend the project's approval, and the window for construction effectively closed. The uranium remains where it has always been. For the people who call this country home, and who carry the meaning of its name, the silence beneath Yeelirrie is the outcome they have fought fifty years to keep.