Qualla: Pilungah Reserve

Pilungah Reserve: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Long before this was a desert, it was a sea. Locked in the rock of Pilungah Reserve are the fossils of fish that swam here in the Devonian period, hundreds of millions of years ago, when oceans covered the heart of Australia. Today the water is mostly a memory, surfacing only in ephemeral claypans and waterholes after rain, and the country is dune and gibber and rocky range at the northern edge of the Simpson Desert. This is Wangkamadla land, near the Queensland-Northern Territory border, and its very name reaches back to the people whose home it has always been: Pilungah is the name of a spring near the reserve's old homestead.

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Pilungah Reserve: A Spring, a Name, a Homecoming

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of its recent recorded history this place was called Cravens Peak, a beef cattle station worked across rocky range and dunefield until Bush Heritage Australia acquired it in 2005, funded by a bequest from a supporter named Gay Bell. The deeper purpose was to help protect...

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Pilungah Reserve: The Pituri Road

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This remote corner was never isolated in the way a map suggests. It lay at the heart of one of Aboriginal Australia's great trade routes, a network running from the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north all the way down to South Australia. Along it travelled pituri, a native plant pri...

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Pilungah Reserve: Ranges, Dunes, and Claypans

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pilungah is a landscape of contrasts. Its western section rises into the Toomba Range, the highest and most rugged ground in the reserve, all rock and ridge and broken hill. Eastward the country relaxes into the parallel sand dunes and swales of the Simpson, with stony gibber pla...

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Pilungah Reserve: A Stronghold for the Rare

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pilungah is a refuge for creatures clinging on elsewhere. It is a haven for reptiles, including the woma, a rare desert python now absent from large portions of its former range due to regional extinctions, particularly in southwest Australia, alongside the ridge-tailed monitor a...

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