One sun-bright morning in the last weeks of winter, I found myself in the passenger seat of an ancient Toyota Troopie, rattling down a dirt track on the way to a sacred engraving site four times older than agricultural civilisation. Behind the wheel was Cliff Coulthard, a wiry Adnyamathanha guy with a bristly, grey-streaked beard and an Akubra tugged down over sharp eyes. His family owns and operates Iga Warta , an Indigenous cultural tourism centre where I’d come to volunteer.
It had been a couple of months since I’d first ventured into the Flinders Ranges, and in the city I couldn’t get them out of my head. They pulled me back here, further north into the mountainous corridor between the great salt lakes of Torrens and Frome. It was unforgiving but sharply beautiful country — a place where, as you drove west to east, plains sloped into hills and hills built up into peaks, each sculpted over hundreds of millions of years.
This time, I had returned hungry for knowledge beyond anything I could gather on my own. The Flinders Ranges are the traditional Country of the Adnyamathanha (Ad-nya-mat-na) people, stretching from Arkaroola in the rugged north down the spine of South Australia to Mount Remarkable. It’s a huge swathe of land that encompasses several different clan groups – the Wailpi, Kuyani, Yadliaura, Biladappa and Vanggarla – but, since European invasion, they are collectively known as Adnyamathanha: the people of the hills or rocks.
I wanted to learn what .