Qualla: Mount Willoughby Indigenous Protected Area

Mount Willoughby Indigenous Protected Area: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the boundary where the red dunes of the Great Victoria Desert give way to the stony plains, about 150 kilometres north-west of Coober Pedy, lies a stretch of land that for much of the twentieth century was run as a pastoral lease - cattle and sheep grazed across ground that had been cared for in an entirely different way for tens of thousands of years before. Today that land is the Mount Willoughby Indigenous Protected Area, and the people making the decisions about its erosion gullies and sacred sites are the ones whose ancestors named every feature on it.

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mount Willoughby Indigenous Protected Area: Country Returned

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The land here sits within the traditional Country of the Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara people, whose territory once reached south to Mount Willoughby, Arckaringa, and the Stuart Range, meeting Kokatha lands near the opal field at Coober Pedy. In 1996 the Indigenous Land Corpor...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mount Willoughby Indigenous Protected Area: Declared by Their Own Hand

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Indigenous Protected Area was not imposed from a government office. It was declared on 22 August 2002 at a meeting of the Tjirilya Aboriginal Corporation, after two years of consultation and planning, and was then ratified by senior traditional owners. That sequence matters. ...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mount Willoughby Indigenous Protected Area: Two Deserts, One Boundary

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The protected area straddles a genuine ecological frontier. It sits on the meeting line of two great bioregions - the dune-fields of the Great Victoria Desert to the west and the gibber-strewn Stony Plains to the east - and shares a border with the state-run Tallaringa Conservati...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mount Willoughby Indigenous Protected Area: Caring for Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The vision written into the IPA was never conservation alone. From the start, the plan paired land management with livelihood - small enterprises such as ecotourism, intended to fund the environmental work and provide employment for community members on their own land. It is an a...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0