For 55 years he worked with the Eastern and Western Arrernte, Alyawarre, Anmatyerre, Pintupi/Luritja, Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara, and Warlpiri people to organise and share their cultural and scientific knowledge of central Australian plants.

This early sharing of knowledge shaped his career as Australia’s foremost non-Aboriginal authority on desert plants and their medicinal and culinary uses.

In his early adult life Latz worked as a stockman, road train driver, buffalo wrangler, snake handler and stock inspector.

This brought together western scientific and Aboriginal knowledge of central Australian bush foods and medicines in a single comprehensive textbook for the very first time.

For example, detailed experiments were conducted to examine the effects of fire on floristics and dynamic boundaries of plant communities as a result of Peter Latz’ observations and comments.

Latz's second major book presents his assessment of the prehistory and current ecology of central Australia, focussing on Aboriginal use of fire to modify plant communities.

Moses Tjalkabota Uraiakuraia, a proud Western Aranda man, embraced the Christian faith after Lutheran missionaries entered his country in 1877.

Tough, Tantalizing or Tasty is a selective field guide with the species accounts fleshed out with anecdotes from Peter's extensive travels and collecting expeditions across Australia's deserts.

The book serves also as a call for greater academic attention for central Australian plants and ecosystems in general... Latz regularly participates as a field researcher in the annual excavation program at the Alcoota Scientific Reserve.

[4] Here, Latz has been deeply involved in the excavation of fossil remains of one of the largest birds that ever lived, Dromornis stirtoni, the wolf-sized Thylacine, Thylacinus potens, the Alcoota Marsupial Lion, Wakaleo alcootaensis, the wombat-like Miocene diprotodontoids Kolopsis torus and Plaisiodon centralis, and the leaping herbivorous ground-sloth-like Palorchestes painei, and many other browsers that helped to shape desert plant communities.

Latz also volunteers his time for every environmental organisation in the Alice Springs region: as a speaker on the risk of weeds, and a leader of bush walks for the Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club; as a trainer for Alice Springs Landcare, particularly on weed removal in the Todd River; as an adviser to Olive Pink Botanic Garden on native plant behavior and care; as an advisor to Arid Lands Environment Centre on land management practices; and as a teacher of the next generation of Aboriginal botanists who follow him on his bushwalks with cameras and tape recorders.

He identifies weeds that are spreading and less palatable to cattle, and thus may gradually come to dominate native plants on pastoral stations, and then lectures on the risks and steps to mitigate them.

[6] Latz was jointly nominated for the award alongside "the Aboriginal botanists of Central Australia" by the members of the Alice Springs Field Naturalists Club.