Karlamilyi National Park. WA's most remote and largest NP.
The red dust of the Pilbara does not merely settle on your skin, it gets under and by the time the tyres of my LandCruiser bit into the gravel of the Talawana Track, the last remnants of mobile phone reception had vanished three hours behind me. Ahead lay Karlamilyi National Park, a place of superlative isolation, raw geographic grandeur, and a cultural lineage stretching back into the deep time of the Australian continent.
At over 1.3 million hectares, Karlamilyi is the largest national park in Western Australia, and arguably the most remote. It sits between the Little Sandy and the Great Sandy Desert, a vast wilderness that demands total self-sufficiency. There are no ranger stations here, no paved visitor centres, no manicured campgrounds, and no safety nets. To enter Karlamilyi in a four-wheel drive is to step off the edge of the modern map and into a landscape governed by geology and the uncompromising laws of the desert.
Leaving the Bitumen Behind
My journey began in Newman, the iron-ore powerhouse of the east Pilbara and after a final, exhaustive check of my gear, food shop, water, and fuel top up, I headed north to find the Balfour Downs turnoff. The transition from the industrial efficiency of the mining zone to the untamed desert is abrupt as soon as your out of the towns limits. Sixty kilometres up the Marble Road I swung a right onto the Balfour Road and immediately dropped my tyre pressures as I knew they needed to be low the next few days.
Cruising along to protect my tyres from sharp gibber stones, the landscape unfolded in a hypnotic rhythm of spinifex plains and low, weathered breakaways, the sky above was a flawless blue against the colours of the Pilbara grasses and low trees. It takes about an hour to get to the turn of the Talawana Track and off the Balfour Road, which is signposted pointing you away from the huge cattle station.
Talawana track itself is a monument to mid-century bush engineering, pushed through the desert by the legendary surveyor Len Beadell in the 1950’s and 60’s. Today, it is a corrugated ribbon of red earth that vibrates through the steering column and tests every weld, bolt, and suspension bush on a vehicle. Not signposted as such, but if your running a good GPS unit, you’ll see a point of interest just off the track that points you to one of Len Beadell’s survey plaques, mounted on an original forty four gallon drum.
This one marked 6th of November 1963. Finding the track that heads up into the park wasn’t signposted as such, all it has is a water sign to a hand bore up the track. By now I was a good three hundred kilometres away from Newman and my last fuel top up, but east along the Talawana Track is the Parnngurr Community where diesel and opal fuel can be bought. Heading down there to top up to me was cheap insurance to have full tanks heading into Karlamilyi, regardless of the inflated price.
The Landscape
Crossing the invisible boundary into the Park, the topography shifts. Karlamilyi is not a monotonous waste of flat sand, it’s a complex, dynamic collision of two distinct desert systems intersecting by a ancient river basin, where glaciers once filled the open landscape.
On my maps the track that headed deep into the park had no name, yet on the northern end of the park there was a sunburnt sign calling it the Rundall River Track. The going is slow, painfully slow with a zillion corrugations at the wrong distance apart to get a good run, and the track narrowed down for miles giving me more bush stripes.
To the north, the red sand dunes of the Great Sandy Desert stand out across the horizon like giant waves, shaped by prevailing winds over millennia. To the south, the older, more degraded landforms of the Little Sandy Desert assert themselves with gravelly plains, mesa top hills and rugged sandstone ranges. The true spine of the park, however, is the Karlamilyi River (formerly known as the Rudall River).
It is an ephemeral lifeline that cuts through the desert, carved into the bedrock over millions of years. While dry for most of the year, its underground aquifers feed pockets of permanent waterholes, creating astonishing corridors of life amidst the arid expanse
A Layered History
This land is the traditional home of the Martu people, who have inhabited, managed, and walked these desert pathways for at least 40,000 years. To the Martu, this is not a wilderness, it’s a highly structured landscape mapped by the journeys of ancestral beings during the Jukurrpa (The Dream time), and nearby communities of Punmu and Parnngurr still have a deep connection to the park.
For millennia, the Martu lived a nomadic lifestyle perfectly adapted to this harsh environment, moving between permanent waterholes like Tarl, Desert Queen Baths, and the rock-holes of the Broadhurst Range. Their deep ecological knowledge allowed them to thrive where European explorers would later perish.
The European chapter of the park’s history began in 1896 with the fateful expedition of Frank Hann, who named the river after his friend, surveyor William Henry John Rudall. Hann was searching for pastoral land and gold, but what he found was an unyielding desert that offered little joy to Western agricultural ambitions. Decades later, the region became a focal point for uranium exploration and missile tracking during the Cold War era, when Len Beadell’s roads opened up the interior. In 1977, the area was gazetted as the Rudall River National Park.
However, this occurred without the consultation or consent of the Martu people, many of whom had been forcibly removed or encouraged to move to coastal missions and pastoral stations during the mid-20th century. The decades that followed saw a profound struggle for land rights. The Martu never relinquished their connection to country. In 2002, they secured a historic native title determination over vast tracts of the desert, including Karlamilyi. Recognising the true custodians of the land, the park was officially renamed Karlamilyi National Park in 2008, honouring the traditional Martu name for the river.
The Martu are the traditional owners of a large part of central Western Australia which extends from the Great Sandy Desert in the north to around Wiluna in the south. Across this country, Martu share a common law, culture and language. The Martu were some of the last of Australia’s Indigenous people to make contact with European Australians with many migrating from their desert lands into neighbouring pastoral stations and missions in the 1950s and 1960s. Sometimes this migration followed the Canning Stock Route north to the Kimberley, or to the south.
The waterholes
One of the highlights in the park is a visit to the waterholes named Tjingkulatjatjarra ( also called Jarra pool ) and Desert Queen Baths, a series of spectacular gorges and hidden freshwater pools tucked deep within the Broadhurst Range. There are no sign posts to the waterholes that are nearly twenty km off the main track yet can take an agonising hour to reach over the rough terrain.
Jarra is the first one heading north and is surrounded by white gums which gives a cool feel on a warm day. Desert Queen is a more technical trail of jagged quartz reefs, dry creek crossings filled with soft river sand, and rocky sections that required good wheel placement. The Broadhurst Range rises out of the desert like a fortress of dark red and purple stone, where eons of water erosion have sliced deep, narrow chasms into the range.
Walking into the gorge, the temperature drops, shielded from the desert wind by towering rock cliffs. Stopping at the entrance to the gorge it’s only a short walk to the first pool where the water is cool, deep, and stained a rich tea-tree black from the fallen leaves of paperbark trees. Sitting beside the pool in the absolute silence of Desert Queen Baths, surrounded by vertical walls of red rock that have stood for hundreds of millions of years, is an experience of profound humility. Here, in the heart of one of the driest places on earth is an abundance of pure, life-giving water.
Further up the gorge there are more pools filled with reeds and giving life to this inhospitable area. To the right of the main pool under a rock overhang, there’s signs of the Martu people where they painted pictures of surrounding wildlife and other interesting figures, which are okay to photogragh according to members I spoke to at Parnngurr.
Leaving Desert Queen there’s a short 4wd track to the other side of the gorge where recent artwork has been re-painted, apparently to keep the good spirits alive. Back out on the main track heading north there’s evidence of past rain where the tracks are severely eroded and in one part, the track runs up an old creek bed, eroded over years of storms.
Despite its aridity, Karlamilyi is teeming with life, though much of it moves in the shadows of twilight and dawn. Along the dry riverbanks, the sand is a highway of tracks, recording nocturnal movements of the desert's inhabitants. Around camp I spotted heavy tracks of feral camels, winding trails of sand goannas and the delicate foot prints of nocturnal mice and small lizards. In the early mornings, the ghost gums came alive with sounds of budgerigars, corellas, and flock pigeons coming down to drink at the waterholes, Zebra finches darted through the spinifex like feathered bullets.
Lessons from the Desert
After a few days of exploring the hidden gorges and navigating the challenging desert tracks, it was time to turn keep heading north. The Rundall River Track doesn’t give up as it passes by dried up shallow salt lakes with the constant hum of hundreds of corrugations. Eventually I hit the mining roads of the nearby Telfer mines & could hear the chatter on the UHF, finally signs pointed me out towards Marble Bar, three hundred kilometres away.
An expedition into Karlamilyi is a exercise in risk management. There is no mechanical recovery service coming to save you, a major breakdown here can quickly escalate into a survival situation. Karlamilyi is not a place to be conquered by a four-wheel drive, it’s a place to be negotiated with, respected, and admired. It stands as a magnificent chunk of primordial Australia, protected by its own geographical hostility and preserved by the enduring spirit of the traditional owners.
WHERE IS KARLAMILYI
Karlamilyi NP ( formally Rundall River NP) is Western Australia’s largest and most remote NP covering over 1.3million hectares in the north western Pilbara region. Located between the great and Little Sandy Desert’s it’s a harsh inhospitable area, with salt pans, sandy regions and dry stony plains surrounded by mesa hills worn down over millions of years. Access can be made from the south via the Talawana Track from Newman or from Marble Bar in the north. This is a very remote and isolated park and you need to be extremely self sufficient, have a good maps as signage in the park is near non-existent and have a fuel range of 650km. Diesel and Opal fuel can be obtained to the south at Parnngurr Community where no permit is needed to visit.
WHAT TO SEE
Visiting Karlamilyi is all about the isolation and remoteness but within this harsh environment there are two waterholes to visit, spotting rock art with a little pastoralist history thrown in. A good 4wd challenge the Talawana Track is unmaintained and yearly weather events dictate the tracks conditions.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
This is a very remote place to visit and its important to be super confident going in, have a reliable 4wd and a emergency contact device. No permits, fees or passes are needed to visit this National Park. The cooler months are the best time visit as temps get up to 50’ in summer.
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