Hiking the Arkaba Walk: Bushwhacking and kangaroo spotting through one of the Great Walks of Australia

“Right,” says guide Darlene. “We’re going to do a little bit of bush-bashing.”

Our group of eight has already spent a day on foot crossing South Australia’s Wilpena Pound with no sight of anything on two legs beyond a rare yellow-footed rock wallaby and several euro kangaroos.

We are several hours on foot to the nearest proper road. So the suggestion that only on the second day of the Arkaba Walk are we really going into the wild is surprising.

But on the Arkaba Walk there’s a lot of smooth with the rough. The trip begins in Adelaide with an early morning flight north by light plane, over an increasingly red and largely empty landscape to the tiny airstrip at Hawker, followed by a drive around the eastern side of Wilpena Pound – a vast lens-shaped enclosure between two mountain ranges that join at one end, like a natural amphitheatre.

Occasional unsurfaced turn-offs offer rumours of residences, but there’s nothing in sight.

The starting point for the walk is where the creek that drains most of the basin has carved a gap through the mountains, providing a relatively easy route into the pound itself.

The walking is on soft, red-sand creek bed, winding through river red gum trees as much as 400 years old, the bark peeling from their smooth, silvery trunks.

These are also known as “widow-makers” for their habit of unexpectedly dropping limbs at times of drought, but are magnificent rather than menacing, and there’s a hint of domesticity in the trunk-mounted boxes for brush-tailed possums, one of several species recently reintroduced to the area.

Another reintroduction is the dainty yellow-footed rock wallaby with its stripy tail, seen delicately sniffing its way up and down the trunk of a young tree, and not much bothered by passing walkers.