The area is known as Aputjilpinya in the native Yankunytjatjara language. It forms part of an important Mala Dreaming track that runs between Uluṟu and Ulkiya. There are a few soakages located within the hills. One of them, Puntitjara, was recorded by several early White explorers travelling through the Kelly Hills.
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The Ngarkat lived on extremely inhospitable terrain eking out life on a waterless karst plateau. Rainfall varied from 8 inches in the north to 18 in the south. Winters were freezing, while temperatures could hit in summer, though averaging . In no part of the land was there a single perennial stream, water was found in soakages, by working mallee roots or culling whatever hollow trees retained, or rock cleavages held.
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Soakages were traditionally important sources of water for Aboriginal Australians in the desert, being the most dependable source in times of drought in Australia. Aboriginal peoples would scoop out the sand or mud using a coolamon or woomera, often to a depth of several metres, until clean water gathered in the base of the hole. Knowing the precise location of each soakage was extremely valuable knowledge. It is also sometimes called a native well.
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The Gurindji and other Aboriginal peoples found their waterholes and soakages fenced off or fouled by cattle, which also ate or trampled fragile desert plant life, such as bush tomato. Dingo hunters ("doggers") regularly shot the people's hunting dogs as well as kangaroos as they competed with cattle for water and grazing land. Gurindji suffered lethal reprisals for any attempt to eat the cattle – anything from a skirmish to a massacre. There was little choice to stay alive but to move onto the cattle stations, receive rations, adopt a more sedentary life and, where possible, take work as stockmen and domestic help.
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The Ngarkat faced a particular problem in making implements, millstones, hammers and axes, since suitable stone or rock materials were quite rare in their area. Onsets of highly arid weather, on draining soakages, yield evidence, aside from skeletons, of tools fashioned from chert, quartzite and jasp-opal. Despite its arid inhospitable terrain, Ngarkat territory was crisscrossed by trade routes, from Lake Hindmarsh to Bordertown, from Nhill to Murrayville and Pinnaroo, from the Wirrurgren Plain north of Lake Albacutya through Pinnaroo country to the Murray Bridge area. The items bartered along these trails were things like yabbyclaw necklaces, pipe clay, red ochre, diorite stone axes, and the like.
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Unsealed road in red sand country near Ali Curung The climate of Ali Curung is arid, and the country around Ali Curung is dry for most of the year, with no surface water in creeks or waterholes. Water was traditionally obtained by digging at soakages. The landscape is characterised by red sand plains and low ridges, with extensive areas of open spinifex grassland. There are areas of scattered bloodwood (Corymbia opaca) and dogwood (Acacia sericophylla) trees, and shrublands and low woodlands of red-bud mallee shrub (Eucalyptus pachyphylla), mulga (Acacia aneura) and witchetty bush (Acacia kempeana), with some desert white gums (Corymbia aparrerinja), smooth-barked coolibah (Eucalyptus victrix) and Hakea chordophylla north of Ali Curung.
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