Seventeen individuals, both men and women, journeyed across the remote region known as Arnhem Land in northern Australia for nine months. From varying disciplinary perspectives, and under the guidance of expedition leader Charles Mountford, they investigated the Indigenous populations and the environment of Arnhem Land. In addition to an ethnographer, archaeologist, photographer, and filmmaker, the expedition included a botanist, a mammalogist, an ichthyologist, an ornithologist, and a team of medical and nutritional scientists.  
Their first base camp was Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Three months later they moved to Yirrkala on the Gove Peninsula and three months following that to Oenpelli (now Gunbalanya) in west Arnhem Land. The journey involved the collaboration of different sponsors and partners (among them the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and various agencies of the Commonwealth of Australia).  
A Bulletin article in 1956 noted that the scientists collected 13,500 plants, 30,000 fish, 850 birds, 460 animals, thousands of implements, amounting to twenty-five tons, and photographed and filmed in colour and black-and-white and made tracings of cave-paintings from Chasm Island, Groote Eylandt and Oenpelli. The Australian Broadcasting Commission promoted the Expedition in its ABC Weekly magazine by appealing to readers curiosity about "...a fish that looks exactly like a leaf, a multi-coloured praying mantis, intricate string games the aborigines play, a fungus used to cure wounds..." 
In the wake of the expedition came volumes of scientific publications. The legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition is vast, complex, and, at times, contentious. Human remains collected by Setzler and later held by the Smithsonian Institution have since been repatriated to Gunbalanya.