Idalia became a national park in 1990, and the occasion came with an unexpectedly grand guest: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, formally opened it. It was a striking gesture for a remote patch of mulga 893 kilometres west of Brisbane, near the wool town of Blackall, the sort of country few visiting royals ever see. The park protects 144,000 hectares, roughly 1,440 square kilometres, of arid woodland and broken range, managed by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service and listed by the IUCN as a Category II national park. The royal ribbon-cutting signalled something the landscape had quietly earned: that this rough, dry corner was worth saving for what lived in it.

Idalia is, above all, a refuge for wallabies. Alongside the yellow-footed rock-wallaby, the park shelters the endangered bridled nailtail wallaby, a delicate animal once thought extinct and clawed back from the very edge, plus black-striped and swamp wallabies, wallaroos, and both red and grey kangaroos. They share the country with a wider community of arid-zone wildlife adapted to heat, distance, and unreliable water. For a place that registers on most maps as blank space, the density of life is remarkable, and much of it is the kind of life found in fewer and fewer places elsewhere on the continent.

People have known this land far longer than any park boundary. Idalia holds several Aboriginal heritage sites, scatters of stone artefacts, deliberate stone arrangements, and old camp sites, the quiet evidence of generations who lived across these ranges and read their water and seasons. Layered over that deeper history are the remains of the pastoral era: the ruins of two homesteads, Idalia and Collabara, slowly weathering back into the mulga that once gave them shade. To walk the park is to move through time as much as terrain, past the marks of those who belonged here first and those who came later to graze a hard and beautiful country.

Idalia does not make itself easy, and that is part of its character. Access is by four-wheel drive only, and when heavy rain sweeps the outback the tracks turn to glue and the park can seal itself off entirely, leaving anyone inside to wait it out. There is no accommodation beyond designated camp sites, no shop, no certainty of water. What it offers instead is rugged tableland and gorge, dense mulga woodland, and long uninterrupted views across the Gowan Range, the reward of country that asks something of you before it gives anything back. Reach it, sit still as the light slants across the ridges at evening, and you may catch the unmistakable bound of a rock-wallaby that, against the odds, is still here.