Kiwirrkurra, the beautiful landscapes of Australia's most remote community

Australia is the sixth largest country in the world, with an area of ​​7.7 square kilometres, but it has only 27 million inhabitants.

The remote island whose inhabitants do not know the country to which they belong
The Inaccessible Island, a remote place in the middle of the Atlantic that lives up to its name

Despite its vast surface area, Australia is a very arid country with an abundance of infertile soils. The Australian Aborigines arrived in this country 65,000 years ago. Today there are less than a million of them. Some of their communities are still nomadic or semi-nomadic, largely dependent on finding water sources in the country's vast desert areas.

British explorer James Cook arrived in Australia in 1770, claiming sovereignty of the vast island for Britain. The first British colony in Australia was established in 1788, but some tribes of Australian Aborigines had no contact with other humans until well into the 20th century.

This was the case of the Pintupi tribe, whose first contact with other human beings took place in the 1950s. Initially this tribe was taken by the government to Papunya, in the Northern Territory, hundreds of kilometres from their place of origin, and in the 1970s they settled in Walungurru, in the far west of that state.

In 1982, a group of the Pintupi tribe settled in Kiwirrkurra, close to their original lands, in the middle of the Gibson Desert in Western Australia. Once in Kiwirrkurra, the Pintupi dug their first waterhole in 1984, which allowed them to turn the place into a permanent settlement.

Interestingly, there was a group of Pintupi who never left their original lands. Known as the "Lost Nomads", the "Lost Tribe" or the "Pintupi Nine" (since there were a total of nine people), they lived moving from one waterhole to another without having any contact with Westerners until October 1984, when they finally reunited with the rest of the Pintupi in Kiwirrkurra.

The Pintupi in Kiwirrkurra are a very small community of less than 200 people, with several dozen houses, a football field and a baseball field, a school, a shop and a women's centre.

In 2001, the community was granted title to 42,900 square kilometres of land and water. To give you an idea of ​​how big this place is, it is an area the size of Denmark, but a tiny piece of land in Australia. Access to this property is not public: it is restricted and requires the permission of its inhabitants, and any unauthorized entry can be punished with a fine, as signs at the boundaries of this Aboriginal community warn.

The people of Kiwirrkurra live far away from towns and other population centres. In fact, Kiwirrkurra is known as Australia's most isolated community, so many connections to the area are made by plane (there is a small dirt airstrip near the town, in Pollock Hills).

To give you an idea of ​​the isolation, the nearest town, Alice Springs (population almost 26,000), is 700 kilometres away in the Northern Territory. Western Australia’s second-largest city, Port Hedland, is 1,200 kilometres from this tiny Pintupi community. The state capital, Perth, is 1,550 kilometres away. This is farther than the distance between Madrid and Rome in a straight line.

The Pintupi of Kiwirrkurra are responsible for preserving this land, which includes annual controlled stubble burns, to prevent large forest fires such as those that periodically ravage the country.

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Photos: Tjamu Tjamu Aboriginal Corporation - Kiwirrkurra.