The hand-prints were all over the rock face, so clear that the impressions could have been made only yesterday. But these were thousands of years old, made by Aboriginal hunters and gatherers in this, Australia's last great wilderness, the Kimberley.

There was total silence, a sense of timelessness, as if the black tribesmen would return at any minute from hunting, their naked footprints covering ours in the sand, and protest our intrusion.

We were in the Bungle Bungle National Park, a wilderness within a wilderness, its great sandstone massif towering up to 200 metres over the endless, flat, empty bush. Its existence was known only to a handful of people until a few years ago.

The Bungle Bungle range stretches nearly 40 kilometres, and is up to 25 kilometres wide, most of it inaccessible, its deep gorges and bee-hive shaped domes carved by nature an estimated 350 million years ago.

My weather-beaten guide, Grundy, had brought me to this spot after making me solemnly promise that I would not reveal its location to others.

''There are many ancient sites of Aboriginal art here.'' he said. ''Not all visitors would show respect. There would be vandalism, so they must remain secret.'' Grundy knows the bush around here like the back of his hand. A white man, he was raised by Aborigines who taught him how to hunt and find Bush Tucker, berries, wild fruit and roots containing water in this desolate landscape where many without that knowledge have perished.

He has a great respect for the elderly Aborigines who have clung to their culture and will live with them further north in their Arnhem Land reserve during the wet season, hunting the man-eating saltwater crocodile.

''The Aborigines would crush and powder wildflowers, wet the powder in their mouths and blow it around their hands which were pressed on to the rock face,'' he said.

''These impressions are thousands of years old, the most primitive Aboriginal art.'' In the wet season, which breaks around the end of October, the Bungle Bungle area, which covers more than 300,000 hectares, is transformed within hours into a land of raging rivers, cutting it off from the outside world.

Not even a four-wheel-drive vehicle would stand a chance of getting through. Access, is, however, improved for the crocodiles, which move into new waters from their regular habitats in large numbers.

The Bungle Bungles is inaccessible for five to six months of the year. Only the wealthy can get in, by light aircraft or helicopter from the small town of Kununurra, some 300 kilometres north. But then they would have to endure temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius and high humidity.

Yet in spite of its remoteness, the Bungle Bungle sandstone massif, after defying the elements for 350 million years, is under threat.

Only six years after being opened to tourists, it may be closed to visitors permanently in a year or two because the environment is so fragile.

The giant range, looking like multi-layered cakes, was formed by rivers and streams flowing south and east from nearby mountains, washing with them sand and pebbles.

The sediment was compacted to form the sandstone, which was uplifted to its present height over millions of years, and carved into deep gorges and chasms by the ferocious waters of countless rainy seasons.

Scrambling over the rocks into some of these gorges, one can see the tide-marks left on the sandstone by ancient rivers.

The massif has a protective layer of orange-coloured silica and black lichen, in many places less than a centimetre thick. This ''tiger skin'' can be easily broken, and has been in some parts at ground level by cattle and visitors.

When the sandstone is exposed in this way, the rains quickly erode it into piles of dust as fine as talcum powder.

All cattle have been removed and this vast area has been sealed off at great cost by fences beyond the horizon. But visitors, in spite of their small numbers, are now the main threat.

For this reason, the authorities are quite happy not to improve access. For most the message is clear: if you want to see the Bungle Bungle, then be prepared to rough it.

Getting there can be rough indeed.

We set off in a 4WD Landcruiser from Kununurra, the main town in the region - 'main' meaning a population of just over 3,000.

Kununurra is irrigated by the Ord river project, the land around this small town a splash of colour in an endless sea of bush.

The state of Western Australia is the continent's largest, and it is sparsely populated. The whole state has a population of only 1.6 million, and one million of these live in the city of Perth, a three-hour flight from Kununurra.

Place the whole of the United Kingdom in Western Australia and it would be difficult to find. It covers more than 2.5 million square kilometres.

The 300km drive to the Bungle Bungle would take us seven hours, four hours down the Great Northern Highway and then three hours to cover only 50 kilometres of teeth-rattling dirt track into the national park.

Great Northern Highway it may be, but there is no duel carriageway. This is a thin ribbon through the wilderness, and you may only see a dozen or so vehicles in an hour. So it is customary for drivers to raise their hands acknowledging the presence of others.

Tales of breakdowns are legendary and our vehicle carried a short-wave radio, extra fuel tanks and a winch.

Only two tour companies operate into the Bungle Bungle, believed to be a misinterpretation over the years of Bundle Bundle, a grass that grows in the Kimberley, and the numbers of tourists are strictly limited. Only a few thousand have entered the national park, mostly Australians.

Hour after hour of bushland, the monotony broken by an occasional ''upside-down tree'', the boab, a relative of those found in Madagascar and Africa, suddenly gave way to the distant Bungles, their colours changing a rusty red in the setting sun.

The tents are left pitched in the dry season, as is a tented kitchen. All food and drink apart from water has to be brought in on a trailer.

We would be stranded here for four days, but a good Aussie will never be too far from a cold beer. Trays of it were stacked next to Eskis (cooling boxes) crammed with ice.

Water is drawn from a deep well and a bush shower was set up, a leather bag with a nozzle which is filled with water and hauled up by pulley in a corrugated modesty box.

I lay in my swag (bushman's sleeping bag) under the stars with the guides that first night, listening to their tales of croc attacks, snake bites, and killer floods, and wondered if I would ever get back to civilisation.

But lingering fears were dispelled at dawn when I was awoken by all manner of bird calls. There are some 130 bird species in the Bungle Bungle, and most seemed to be feeding from the pool of water outside our shower.

Camping is only allowed about 45 minutes drive from the Bungles massif, and then we would have to set off on foot, negotiating dry river beds and picking our way through spiky spinifex grass.

We were later dwarfed by the sheer walls of the Echidna chasm, its palm trees growing defiantly from narrow ledges high above us, then the majestic Cathedral Gorge, the silence punctuated by the cries of hungry baby peregrine falcons in their nest about 200 metres above.

Nature is always close here. The wildlife has rarely been exposed to the cruelties of man. Flocks of cockatoos settled in the trees, unafraid, giant lizards sunned themselves at our feet, and there were the cries of dingos at night.

But the icing on the cake had to be a chopper ride above this huge, prehistoric massif, its sandstone bee-hive formations stretching out drunkenly below us.

We hovered a couple of metres over this vast plateau where man has never set foot, and then dipped into deep, impenetrable gorges, hovering giddily.

The pilots live out here in tents, leaving just before the wet season arrives.

Rising swiftly above the massif was a cinemascopic experience, making that opening scene from Apocalypse Now seem rather tame by comparison.

Yes, it is well worth enduring hours of jarring pot-holes to see the Bungle Bungle. Make no mistake about it.