Desert surrender follows a journey across millennia

The deserts are crosshatched with animal tracks, histories of journeys, proof of unseen life. At night the dingoes howl and a bull camel wanders past camp bleat-roaring in rut with its dulla lolling from its mouth like a skinned python. On a dry lake nearby a bull camel chews on the massive femur of a dead camel.

Australia's deserts are as biodiverse as jungles. Their plants have the gnarled grandeur of veterans hardened by war, but wear gaudy blossom defiantly, showing they are unbowed by that merciless star. Head-high spinifex and a multiplicity of gobsmacking hakeas, acacias and grevilleas flowering red, yellow, blue and white. Wander a hundred metres and you might be lost in the austere floral labyrinth of an Australian desert.

Almost every escarpment we climbed had caves containing art that, we told ourselves, had never been seen by a white-skinned person. There are numberless unnamed valleys in our deserts, and in many of these valleys are forests. In one treed with desert oak we ignored murmurations of budgerigars to watch a flock of princess parrots tumble like trapeze artists in and out of the hollows of a dead tree.

TV can bring you many things: a grand final, the assassination of a president … but it can't bring you this … or a spring alive with singing honeyeaters and painted finches. In the Tanami Desert a flock of a thousand brolgas rose before us, up and up until barely visible, passing high over us, their cries raining eerily from the sky.

In the desert at night you are roomed in the universe. The planets of our solar system orbit our star on a plane and we watched Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury, even the moon, all in a line cleaving the night sky from horizon to horizon. Mercury didn't stay long, performing its pirouette in the corner of the ballroom before leaving early.

Out here, at night, the spin of our globe is so tangible you almost lean into it, as if riding a bike. In town it exists only as meetings and meals. Camped on a white salt lake named Disappointment we watched a simultaneous sunrise and full-moon set, the purples, reds and oranges passing from the dying horizon to the newly born. Across the lake a treeline hung in mid air perfectly mirrored in salt.

If the deserts are rich in flora they are also combustible. In the north-west the Indigenous are burning tracts of country as large as Tassie. A community of 50 souls must have a carbon footprint as big as Melbourne's. Atomic plumes spike the horizon. Cultural reasons.

The first community we came to had emptied out, leaving only a couple of kids and elders, a posse of balding dogs, two camels that had wandered in from the desert, and a white teacher trying to make a green lawn for sporadic students.

The rest had travelled the 300 kilometres to Jigalong for the week-long funeral of Daisy Kadibil, the youngest and last of the Rabbit Proof Fence girls, who had just died at 95. She had become a great name in the resistance and people were gathering from all over. Her footsteps are still in the sand out there.