In Unmaking Angas Downs, researcher and writer Shannyn Palmer seeks to understand why a derelict pastoral station in Central Australia, once a hub for First Nations people and a popular tourist destination en route to Watarrka Kings Canyon, was abandoned. Established by white pastoralist Bill Liddle in the late 1920s, Angas Downs is 300 kilometres south-west of Mparntwe Alice Springs at a place known as Walara to Anangu. Curious about the shifting fortunes of Angas Downs, Palmer travels to Walara to uncover the ‘histories that are obscured by the single, fixed idea of the pastoral station’.

Unmaking Angas Downs is a recalibration of Central Australian history spanning the seismic shifts in Indigenous–settler relations during the mid-twentieth century, from the pastoral era through the assimilation period’s ‘ration times’ and welfarism’s ‘sit-down times’, the expansion of tourism, to the emergence of self-determination and the return-to-Country movements. The effect of Anangu stories, recounted to Palmer and included here, is an unravelling of station mythology with its romanticised conceptions of Territorian life during the twentieth century.