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Wilpena Pound, also known by its indigenous Adnyamathanha name of Ikara, meaning “meeting place”, is a natural amphitheatre of mountains located 429 kilometres north of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia in the heart of the Flinders Ranges National Park.
Just to the South of Wilpena Pound, Rawnsley Park Station provides the perfect base for exploring South Australia’s beautiful Flinders Ranges.
Rawnsley Park offers a range of accommodation options, from the eco-villas (with retractable ceilings in the bedrooms offering night-sky viewing while you drift off to sleep) to a caravan park.
You can also stay at the Wilpena Resort
The lovely folk at Rawnsley Park have a range of tours you can experience. We took the two hour Sunset on the Chase tour, a 40-minute drive to the top of the stunning Chace Range. Here we enjoyed sparkling wine and some gourmet canapes, all while watching the sun set over the ranges.
We spent a day driving around inside Wilpena Pound.
There are some spectacular natural rock formations that surround the valley floor. Early European settlers found the area as an ideal enclosure for their animals, which was how the pound was in fact used by early pastoralists. You can still see the remains of some of the structures of the old Wilpena Station (or farm) which operated in the area for 135 years up until 1985.
The indigenous people have lived here for thousands of years. There is a tour of some of the aboriginal rock art sites available from the Wilpena Pound Resort.
You can see Australian native animals at The Healesville Animal Sanctuary – an amazing place a couple of hours drive from Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. Here you will experience up-close encounters with a range of Australian wildlife, including kangaroos, dingoes, koalas, birds, snakes, and the strange platypus.
The Stick Shed in Murtoa is a second World War grain storage area so unique that it has pride of place on the Australian Heritage Register. Who would have thought there would be a forest of mountain ash trees in the Wimmera.
Lake Tyrrell, Victoria’s largest salt lake. The lake is famous for its sky reflections when it is filled with water (it’s called a sky mirror) so the best time to visit is during the July/November period.
Montmartre’s castle in the sky. You can climb the 90 metre tower for a view over Paris.
The Reporters Memorial in Bayeux is an avenue of white remembrance slabs of stone, each seven feet high, and each recording the names of reporters who were killed reporting conflict.
As you walk down through the Trocadero Gardens and fountains, the tower gets higher and higher until it soars above.