Qualla: Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park

Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A national park needs a name, and in 2014 this one was given a far older one than the maps had carried. For the Yandruwandha and Yawarrawarrka people, the channels of Cooper Creek are the track of a Dreaming serpent, and Malkumba is the body of water where that serpent comes to rest. So the freshwater oasis that white authorities had simply called Coongie Lakes became the Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park - a name that finally said, on the signs and in the legislation, whose Country this has always been.

Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park: The Serpent's Resting Place

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Names carry knowledge here. In Yandruwandha and Yawarrawarrka tradition, the Cooper Creek system is bound up with an ancestral serpent whose movements shaped the waterways, and Malkumba marks where it lies still. To add that word to the park's title in 2014 was more than a gestur...

Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park: A Park Carved From a Reserve

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park is young as parks go, even if the land is ancient. It was proclaimed on 31 March 2005 under South Australia's National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972, created from a parcel of land that had previously been part of the much larger Innamincka Regional Reserve. Sitting roughly...

Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park: Two Knowledge Systems, One Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park is run as a genuine partnership. It is co-managed by the South Australian Department of Environment and Water, the Yandruwandha Yawarrawarrka Parks Advisory Committee, and the regional arid-lands natural resource board. That arrangement matters. It means the people whose...

Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park: Camping at the Edge of the Water

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For the few travellers who make the long haul out from Innamincka, the reward is a kind of stillness that is hard to find anywhere else. Permanent and semi-permanent lakes hold their water through the dry, shaded by river red gums whose pale trunks lean over the surface, while th...