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)
At 9.32 am we were inside the actual Wilpena Pound, via one of just two access points which were sufficiently “easy” to enable humans on horseback to bring livestock into it.
My photo’s vantage point is near to what used to be a pastoral property’s homestead.
Sheep and cattle once grazed Wilpena Pound; wheat crops were even (briefly) planted.
For a deal of the 19th and 20th centuries, Wilpena Pound was part of Wilpena Station, or a “forest reserve”, leased for grazing.
Behind its ongoing “rewilding” are various factors: crop failures, recognition of its “tourism potential”, actual conservation effort…and belated governmental “recognition” of the humans whose ancestors were already there, many of thousands of years before any shoed or hard-hoofed feet ever walked upon it.
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