Category: photographs

The featured image in the previous chapter and the three photos in this chapter were all taken in Wilpena Pound, within the space of less than three minutes.

Not very far above us, clouds danced.

Another writer’s words:

If a 17-kilometre-long by eight-kilometre-wide elliptical crown of furiously serrated mountains, with a sunken natural amphitheatre in its centre, were plonked just about anywhere except six hours’ drive north-west of Adelaide, it would surely be a national icon by now.

Wilpena Pound covers eight times the area of Uluru, is 300 metres higher and arguably as culturally significant.

(click here for all of travel journalist Steve Madgwick’s Wilpena Pound: Australia’s unknown icon)

This post’s photos were both taken as we neared the most easily-accessed section of Wilpena Pound’s rim.

“The Pound”-proper is a prodigious natural amphitheatre.

Various of its mighty ramparts are visible from many vantage points.

However, its interior – the actual Wilpena Pound – is properly visible only to those who walk up into it, or fly over it; to see just how massive and how spectacular it is, you need to climb one of its rim’s higher peaks, or take a flight.

At 9.03 am we were walking uphill, but easily.

Less than half an hour later, we would be inside Wilpena Pound.

The pictured “grass trees” are neither grasses nor trees.

Xanthorrhoea is an Australian endemic genius of circa 30 species of flowering succulents.