The gorge is carved along Powell Creek and Spencer Creek, where cliffs rise as high as forty-five metres above the streambeds in a landscape that otherwise barely lifts above an average elevation of 262 metres. Two waterholes give the place its quiet power: the Hell Hole Waterhole, covering a little over a third of a hectare, and the smaller Spencer's Waterhole. In a region where surface water vanishes for months and the surrounding plains bake hard and pale, these shaded pools are lifelines - for wildlife, for the plants clinging to the rock ledges, and for the Aboriginal people who knew this country, and the value of its water, long before it bore a settler's grim nickname. Powell Creek does not end here; it flows on, eventually feeding the Barcoo River and the great inland drainage of the Lake Eyre Basin. To find permanent water in such terrain is to find the heart of the landscape - and whoever held the water held the country.

The gorge's name is bound to a dark event. In 1872 a young English pastoralist named Richard Welford, who had taken up land on the Barcoo River only a few years earlier, was speared to death along with his stockman, Henry Hall. What followed was retribution against Aboriginal people - rounded up and shot in a punitive expedition, with accounts holding that some of the dead were thrown into the gorge itself. These were people whose country this was, killed in reprisal for a death they were collectively made to answer for. The nearby station was renamed Welford Downs after the man who died there. The gorge kept the harsher name, and with it, a memory the landscape has never fully surrendered.

More than a century after the bloodshed, the gorge gained a measure of protection. In 1994 it was gazetted as a national park under Queensland's Nature Conservation Act 1992, preserving the cliffs, the creeks, and those precious waterholes. Today it remains one of the least-visited parks in the state - not because it lacks drama, but because it is so genuinely hard to reach. There are no sealed roads to its edge, no visitor centre, no easy way in. The protection it enjoys is partly the protection of remoteness itself: a gorge guarded by the sheer distance and difficulty of getting there.

Reaching Hell Hole Gorge is a commitment. Access is by four-wheel-drive only, along rough tracks through the mulga, and the campground offers nothing but primitive sites - no potable water on site, despite the irony of camping beside permanent waterholes. Visitors carry in everything they need and carry out everything they bring. The reward is solitude of a kind that has nearly disappeared from the modern world: a sandstone amphitheatre 912 kilometres west of Brisbane, where the silence is broken only by birds at the water's edge and the wind moving through the gidgee. It is beautiful and it is haunted, and the two are not easily separated.