Gariwerd holds the overwhelming majority of Victoria's known rock art - by most counts around four-fifths of it - concentrated in roughly sixty sites across the ranges, together preserving thousands of individual motifs. Most are fragile and unmarked, but a handful are open to visitors. At Gulgurn Manja, the 'Flat Rock' shelter, small hand stencils press against the stone, several of them children's hands. At Ngamadjidj, the 'Cave of Ghosts,' rows of white human figures stand out against the rock. These are not relics of a vanished people. The Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung communities remain custodians of this Country, and at Brambuk, the cultural centre near Halls Gap, descendants of five Aboriginal communities tell the story of Gariwerd in their own voice.

The mountains carried Aboriginal names long before Major Thomas Mitchell, passing through in 1836, renamed them for the Grampian range of his native Scotland. Restoring the older name proved unexpectedly contentious. In 1991 the park was officially titled Grampians (Gariwerd) National Park, only for the decision to be reversed the following year after a change of state government. The dual names endured anyway: under later place-naming law, the Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung names for peaks, shelters and landscape features were progressively reinstated across the ranges. Today Gariwerd and Grampians sit side by side on the maps - a small, hard-won acknowledgement of who named this country first.

The Grampians are uplifted, tilted and weathered sandstone, the same ancient river-laid rock that crops up across western Victoria, here folded into dramatic escarpments. More than 160 kilometres of walking trails thread through them. The signature route climbs through a narrow, boulder-choked canyon to the Pinnacle, a lookout perched on the edge of a sheer drop with Halls Gap laid out far below. Lookouts at Boroka and the Balconies open onto plains that run to the horizon, and waterfalls thread the gullies after rain. The same featured rock that draws walkers makes the range a serious destination for climbers and abseilers - though here, as elsewhere in Gariwerd, access is increasingly weighed against the need to protect the cultural sites woven through the cliffs.

Gariwerd teems with wildlife that arranges itself almost on a timetable. In the late afternoon, kangaroos drift out of the bush to graze the open ground around Halls Gap, sometimes right by the town's shops. Koalas doze in the high branches for anyone patient enough to look up, and emus pick their way across the clearings. The most memorable performance is at dusk, when hundreds of corellas - pink-and-white cockatoos - wheel over Halls Gap in screeching flocks and settle into the trees in a racket that drowns out everything else, the laughing call of a kookaburra cutting through it. The ranges are as famous for their plants as their birds: come spring, the slopes ignite with wildflowers, including native orchids and other species found nowhere else on Earth. Set against the silent sandstone, all that colour and noise is part of what makes the place unforgettable.