The signature landmark needs no exaggeration. Wilpena Pound - Ikara in the Adnyamathanha language, a word meaning "meeting place" - is a vast natural amphitheatre of rock, a sickle-shaped rampart of cliffs enclosing some 80 square kilometres of valley floor. Its rim holds St Mary Peak, at 1,189 metres the highest point in the range. From the ground the Pound looks like a fortress raised by giants; from the air it reveals itself as a single tilted bowl of upturned quartzite, the Pound Quartzite outcropping in a great curved syncline. To the Adnyamathanha it is not scenery but story, woven into creation accounts that locate meaning in every ridge and waterhole.

Long before any European set eyes on these ranges, people lived here. The Adnyamathanha - the name means "hill people" or "rock people" - are the traditional owners, and the archaeological record of their presence is staggering. At the Warratyi rock shelter, excavations revealed human occupation reaching back roughly 49,000 years, among the oldest evidence of people anywhere in arid Australia. Across the ranges, rock engravings and cave paintings record that long custodianship; some engravings are thought to be among the oldest artwork on Earth, dating back tens of thousands of years. The state government and the Adnyamathanha now work together on protecting this cultural heritage, with elders insisting that the creation stories be carried forward alongside the science.

Colonisation came hard to this country. When the first pastoral leases were marked out in 1851 over land the colony dismissed as "unoccupied waste lands," the people who had lived here for millennia were pushed aside. At Aroona - a name drawn from an Adnyamathanha word for running water - a head station was built beside a permanent waterhole that local Aboriginal people had always relied on, but they were no longer welcome there. In 1852, in the country near Brachina Gorge, that tension turned to bloodshed in what is remembered as the Brachina Gorge massacre. The settler Hayward claimed he had fired in self-defence; two Aboriginal men were arrested and later released for lack of evidence and the want of an interpreter. The land kept his chosen names. Descendants of the Adnyamathanha are telling this history now, on their own terms, as part of caring for country.

The Flinders Ranges did something no other place on Earth has done: they gave a name to a chapter of geological time. In the Ediacara Hills within the range, fossils of the first complex animals were found, creatures that lived some 550 million years ago. In 2004 scientists formally recognised the Ediacaran Period - the first new period added to the geological time scale in roughly 120 years, and the only one defined by a marker in the southern hemisphere, a "golden spike" driven into Enorama Creek in Brachina Gorge. It is fitting that this ancient, eroded country should be where deep time is measured. Seven separate sites across the Flinders, including the new Nilpena Ediacara National Park, anchor a bid for UNESCO World Heritage listing.

Artists have long understood that the magic of the Flinders is light. The painter Hans Heysen made the river red gums of these ranges famous - gnarled, silver-limbed giants standing in dry creek beds, blazing against the blue of distant hills. The long-distance Heysen Trail carries his name; the Mawson Trail, named for the Antarctic geologist Sir Douglas Mawson, threads the ranges too. The climate is semi-arid and theatrical: summer days climbing past 38 degrees, winter frosts in the mornings, and, on rare occasions, snow dusting Wilpena Pound. Around it all live the emus and wedge-tailed eagles, the galahs and goannas, and the worn red ramparts that have been quietly shedding their height for half a billion years.