As mentioned in an earlier post we stopped at Stokes Hill Lookout on our way to Hawker from Blinman the day after finishing the camel trek. The lookout offered a view of Wilpena Pound after the overnight rain. The deep past of the Flinders Ranges was historically defined as terra nullius: a land belonging to no one. Reading a landscape is an activity mediated through the viewer’s cultural lens.
Looking at the Flinders Ranges from this topographical perspective you could see that this was a very old landscape, geologically speaking. What you couldn’t see, and what the bronze tourist diorama at the lookout didn’t mention, was that this old landscape was also a peopled landscape. The Ikara-Flinders Ranges were glacial refugia for the aboriginal people during the Pleistocene, roughly 25-16 thousand years before the present. So we have a long pre-colonial history.
The Long Road to the North 
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