Wilpena Pound - Heart Of The Flinders Ranges: In the Outback region of South Australia

Wilpena Pound has a history as impressive and awe-inspiring as its crater like appearance suggests. The Adnyamathanha people of the Flinders Ranges call this cauldron, "Wilpena". The popular translation is "place of bent fingers" making the shape, but it may have originally referred to the people of these parts.Whichever way you look at it, and you should come and see it, Wilpena Pound is a place like no other.

We thought we should dispel a few myths about Wilpena: it's strictly 4 wheel drive country?
No it's not. The bitumen comes all the way from Adelaide and leads you to Wilpena and the Wilpena Pound Resort. 450 kilometres north of Adelaide, the heart of the Flinders Ranges is just a half a day's drive away.
You need to carry all your supplies and gear with you?
Wilpena Pound Resort is renowned for its picturesque camping facilities,and so you have the choice of doing it the old fashioned way or doing it in style in the eco-friendly resort family units.
If you forgot to pack the billy and damper there's a 7 day supermarket to feed the body and you won't need a load of petrol cans in the back to feed the jalopy. Any information you want on The Flinders Ranges National Park is all available at the on site Visitors Centre.

Once you've got your bearings there, just pop down the slope to Wilpena Creek itself.With its springfed pools, it can look sublimely beautiful. And don't feel guilty about liking the Salvation Jane, the farmers here say the sheep are quite fond of it. The first thing you have to do if you haven't been before is go upstream. You'll be up the creek, but you'll love it.

The narrow creek gorge is the only easy way into the vast coliseum. It was farmed for a few years a century back. The Hill family built a cottage before their road in and their dreams... were washed away.

Keith Rasheed's pink jeep is one of the unnatural wonders you could come across. He'll explain this natural enclosure, thus the name "pound", gets a lot more inches of rainfall than the rest of the Flinders.

"Alongside the roads it's about 14. Inside the pound it's over 20. In actual fact the climate in the pound is very similiar to Adelaide... about the same rainfall."

Which explains how the Pound comes to resemble a beautiful park. Its high plain is home to majestic River Red Gums, 300 to 400 hundred years old. So what did the first European eyes make of this geological wonder?

"The theory was that a meteorite had whacked the country. Or was it a volcano? Of course it was neither, it's just a thumping great big rock that's weathered away."

Thumping great buckling and uplifting of these ancient seabed sediments created mountain ranges as high as the Himalayas Ð and the buttresses we see today are but the tough old stumps left behind. Artist Sir Hans Heysen aptly called them "the bones of nature laid bare."

Wilpena today means that geological marvel and getting in close to nature, but now we can get into the old sheep station as well. We can see that 150 years ago Wilpena also meant a station that spread for maybe 2000 square miles in the old money. The home paddock walk is a great new experience in the Flinders.

It's a pretty walk down from the Visitor Centre to the new interpreted trail looping through eight buildings on the flats by the creek. Wilpena staff guide Kym painted the big picture of life on a remote 19th century sheep station while artist Keith Palmer took the task more literally. His hero, Heysen, came here year after year, and so does he. We left him to his sketching and moved on through the river red gums.

"We passed the blacksmith's cottage which was used as a recreation room as well as accommodation. Behind that is the blacksmith's workshop."

"Up here if you wanted a gate , you made it?"

"Exactly. Everything was made on the spot. You couldn't get any supplies from elsewhere so you made it here."

The Wilpena Station buildings, now opened up and signposted by National Park staff, are at the start of a long valley between the great wall of the pound Ð and a smaller run of peaks.

"That's called the ABC range because they thought there were 26 peaks... same amount of letters as the alphabet, but they found there were a lot more than that once they started flying over it."

All the food supplies of the sheep station were kept in the two-storey stone store. Kym explained its ingenious rat proof shelving system.

"You'll see there are no legs so no rodents could climb up to the food. And they had little protective covers that stopped the rodents climbing down the wires and so the food was completely safe."

The nearby book keeper's cottage is a magnificently maintained mid 19th century "pug and pine" construction. It's a good spot to pause to take in the builder's recipe, and a cuppa.

"The homestead here is the original one, but it's been extended a few times. At first it was just an old pug pine hut where the garage is now. It's not there anymore but once the leases became more permanent they started building more permanent houses and started building them out of stone."

Out towards the native pines beneath St. MaryÕs peak, we found a reminder that the station had to become a self-sufficient community, self sufficient in life and death.

"Who's the headstone for?"

"That's one of the managers of the old Wilpena homestead. He died in 1866. Most of the people who died on the stations stayed at the stations and were buried."

The isolation of life on these outback stations called for a special breed. Initially daunted, they came to love this land as we now do. At Wilpena Station, we can now wind back time and walk in the footsteps of those early pioneers.

Old Wilpena Homestead Walk

Wilpena Pound Visitors Centre
Wilpena Pound Resort
via Hawker, South Australia, 5434

Phone: 1800 805 802
Enquire about fees for self guided map tour or group guided tour.

Please email info@postcards-sa.com.au if you have any further questions