Flinders Ranges

I came to the Flinders Ranges expecting red rocks and got something older. The quartzite walls of Wilpena Pound — a natural amphitheatre roughly 80 kilometres in circumference — rise to 1,170 metres and tilt at the angle they’ve held for 500 million years, folded and thrust by tectonic forces that make the Himalayas look recent. Standing at the Pound’s natural entrance, a narrow gap where Wilpena Creek cuts through the ridge, and looking up at walls that formed before the first fish had eyes, I felt the specific smallness that only geology can deliver. It is not unpleasant.

The Pound is not a crater or a caldera but a synclinal basin — the core of an ancient fold, its surrounding edges preserved as walls. The Adnyamathanha people, who have lived in these ranges for at least 40,000 years, know it as Ikara, a meeting place, and their stories of the landscape run through the rock formations in ways that take time and guidance to read. I spent a morning with an Adnyamathanha guide who pointed out the fossil beds — Ediacaran organisms from 600 million years ago, the oldest complex life forms on Earth, pressed into the limestone at a site about an hour from the main visitor centre. A rippled surface no bigger than a table. Six hundred million years old. I put my hand on it.

The walking in the Flinders is serious and, outside of school holidays, wonderfully quiet. The ABC Range Walk offers a full day’s circuit from Wilpena Pound Resort, climbing to a ridge with views east over the full expanse of the ranges — layer after layer of ridge and valley, each a different shade of ochre, rust, and olive. Yellow-footed rock wallabies appear in the morning on the quartzite faces, their tails improbably ringed, their paws finding holds on vertical rock with a casual confidence that makes you feel heavily evolved for no benefit. The creek beds run white with river red gums whose roots go thirty metres down for permanent water.

I ate camp food for three nights running and broke on the fourth with a very good lamb shank at the Pound resort restaurant, where the wine list ran to Clare Valley Rieslings and Barossa Shiraz and a McLaren Vale red that tasted of blackcurrant and something smoky. The night sky framed through the restaurant window showed the Pound’s dark rim as a perfect oval of stars. The resident astronomer was doing tours outside. I didn’t take the tour. I lay on the grass afterward and did the same thing for free.

In the mornings at dawn, kangaroos fed in the flat ground between the resort and the Pound entrance in numbers I hadn’t anticipated — sixty, seventy animals, moving unhurried through the long shadows, tails raised. The cockatoos came after, white against the red walls, and the silence that had held through the night was replaced slowly by a rising scale of birdsong.

When to go: April through October is comfortable, with July and August the most reliable — cool and clear. The September wildflowers can be exceptional after winter rain, when the normally arid ground goes yellow and purple with native blooms. Avoid January and February: the heat is extreme and the flies are relentless.