This trip, Kalina and I were ready. The roads had been recently graded, we’d made new music playlists for the two-day drive (car karaoke is non-negotiable) and knowing there had been significant summer rain over the months since our last visit, we were quietly, almost desperately, hopeful about what we might find.
We arrived at dusk, set up our swags on the verandah and let the city fall away.
The very first morning, a cacophony of birds announced our return at dawn. Crows, mudlarks, pink and grey galahs and three new arrivals, hawks, perched in the large dead tree beside our house that serves as their viewing platform into our sleeping habits. Then came the rain. Big, heavy drops soaked the ground as we watched from the verandah, grinning.
We dug the pits then the rain came - just like magic.
We spent the first couple of days cleaning the house, the red dust coating everything as it always does, unpacking our tubs and slowly shaking off the city frequency. You can’t rush it. You have to let the desert slow you down before it reveals anything to you.
What we didn’t yet fully appreciate was what had happened while we were away. After five years without meaningful rain, significant rainfall had finally fallen across the Ngaanyatjarra Lands over the summer months. The first meaningful rain in five years and it had fallen into thousands of freshly dug micropits.
When we finally got out to the trial sites, we were not prepared for what we found.
What we went back to find.
When we created over 1,000 micropits across eight hectares of highly degraded land on the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in 2025, we were making an act of faith. Small, angled holes in the hardened crust of the earth, designed to do what the lost burrowing marsupials once did: break the surface, let the water in, give seeds a place to land.
The Ngaanyatjarra Lands had not had meaningful rainfall in five years. We dug the pits and we waited. Then the rains came.
We returned to Kanpa for the first time since those rains. What we found across the four trial sites was more than we had hoped for.
The science team is ready
Earlier this year, Professor Raphael Viscarra Rossel and I appointed our Curtin University soil scientist, Dr Karla Cautivo-Reyes, to lead our formal research partnership with Curtin’s Soil and Landscape Science Faculty. Karla’s role is critical. She will establish the formal baseline measurements that allow us to prove, with academic rigour, what the micropitting is doing to the soil over time.
Our first trip to Kanpa with Karla is planned for late June and will establish the formal scientific baseline program. All of the work through 2025, marking out trial sites, collecting exploratory soil samples and observational data, has helped evolve our project methodology so that the formal program with Curtin University can now begin. With Karla’s visit will come further training for our Aboriginal Field Technicians, a larger soil sampling program and a deep listening to the lands to understand what healthy habitats and landscapes can teach us about the heavily degraded arid environments we are working to heal.
What we found after the rains
Kanpa 1
The spinifex is green and so high that we nearly lost Kalina in it. Blossoming desert wildflowers have established themselves in the micropits and, excitingly, there are additional diggings in one of the blocks. Animals have been there, doing what wildlife does when they find soft, aerated ground. We spent time replacing posts and markers, some disturbed by the heat of summer and the wild desert winds and documented everything we could see. This trial site is very different to the others and it is close to the township.
Kangaroo point
This site has been our most challenging. Some of the ground is so compacted it would require a jackhammer! A number of micropits have filled in and camels appear to have removed almost all of the marker posts, knowing they don’t belong in their favourite resting place. Scat, natural diggings in the surrounding shrub and hawk feathers found across the trial site are an honest reminder that while this heavily degraded site remains our most stubborn, nature follows its own timeline.
The Breakaway
This majestic site always takes our breath away. Positioned between two massive breakaways, the sacredness of this place is visceral. The ground was disturbed by heavy machinery more than fifty years ago during Hunt Oil seismic surveys that scarred land in and around Kanpa and in some places, nothing grew back. Standing here, knowing that history, and seeing grasses returned and succulents quietly settling into the micropits, is a profoundly hopeful thing. A beautiful patch of wildflowers marks the centre of the trial site, anchoring our Western science efforts to the mystery and magic of this place.
Just near The Breakaway is the area where we have previously documented bilby activity on camera. This visit, after setting up four cameras with Matt and Jeremiah, we captured the arrival of a skink, more birds than we had recorded at this site and then, a tiny dunnart. If you have never seen a dunnart on a trail camera, please allow us this moment of pure joy.
Camel Graveyard
This was the moment. When Preston, Matt and Jeremiah got out of the vehicle and looked across the site, their first response was silence and then surprise. Matt said, simply, “this is magic.” And it was. Grasses across the trial site, succulents settled into the micropits, insects and butterflies moving through what had been, not long ago, a dust bowl with no life at all. Several dead camels still decomposing in the sun and around them, life returning. The pits have largely filled from rain and wind, but growth is pushing through them.
Whilst Western science will take time to formally prove what these changes mean for the soil, what we all witnessed with our own eyes was remarkable. At one end of the trial sites here, we came across an active, joyous butterfly garden.
Matt Thomas is the Custodian who has returned to his Country after decades away. “This is magic” is not nothing.
What this means.
Project PanGaia’s micropitting methodology was designed around a specific climate reality. According to the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology (2022), Central Australia faces a future of extreme rainfall events interspersed with longer droughts. Our micropits are designed for this: breaking the hydrophobic soil crust to bank these intense rains before they evaporate. After five years without rain, the first good soaking fell into freshly prepared soil. And the land responded.
The formal science will take time. Dr Karla Cautivo-Reyes and Professor Raphael Viscarra Rossel will establish the baseline measurements on our next trip that will allow us to track and document these changes rigorously over time. But what we saw with our own eyes in April and May 2026 was the land doing exactly what we hoped it would.
The pits held the water. The seeds found the soil. The insects found the flowers. And the Custodians of this Country stood in a field that was silent not long ago and said: this is magic.