Wara was born at Aṟan, in the south-west of the Northern Territory. He and his family were Pitjantjatjara. They lived a traditional nomadic way of life in the bush until Wara was a young man. The first "whitefella" he ever saw was Harold Lasseter, a gold prospector whose story later became an Australian legend. Wara was about 12 years old at the time, and thought Lasseter was a ghost. A portrait of him giving figs to Lasseter features in Winifred Hilliard's book "The People In Between" (1968).