The Henbury crater field lies at the crossroads of several Aboriginal language groups, including
Arrernte,
Luritja,
Pitjantjatjarra, and
Yankunytjatjara. It is considered a sacred site to the
Arrernte people and would have formed during human habitation of the area. J.M. Mitchell said that older Aboriginal people would not camp within a couple of miles of the Henbury craters. An elder Aboriginal man who accompanied Mitchell to the site explained that Aboriginal people would not drink rainwater that collected in the craters, fearing the "fire-devil" would fill them with a piece of iron. The man claimed his paternal grandfather had seen the fire-devil and that he came from the Sun. An Aboriginal contact said of the crater field: , which roughly translates in the Luritja language as "A fiery devil ran down from the Sun and made his home in the Earth. He will burn and eat any bad blackfellows." This indicates a living memory of the event. A different story was recorded by Charles Mountford that attributed the largest crater's formation to an anthropomorphic lizard woman (called Mulumura) tossing soil out of the crater, forming its bowl-shape. The soil discarded by Mulumura explained the piles of meteoritic iron around the craters and the presence of
ejecta rays (which are unique to terrestrial impacts but are now gone due to prospecting at the site). This probably relates to
Dreaming stories about ancestral lizard beings from the area of Henbury station near the Finke River, just north of the crater field. The
Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory give the Arrernte name for the crater field as or . In 1980, the conservation reserve was listed on the now-defunct
Register of the National Estate. The craters were listed as one item on the
Northern Territory Heritage Register on 13 August 2003. == See also ==