The Kennedy Range is older than almost anything you can name. Its layered sandstone was laid down beneath an ancient sea, then slowly bared as the softer ground around it eroded away, leaving the harder caprock standing proud. What survives is a flat-topped tableland — a textbook mesa — whose rim catches the first and last light of the day. Walk into Temple Gorge, the most accessible of the canyons, and you follow a dry creek bed between walls that close overhead until you reach the sheer face the early visitors named 'the Temple.' Honeycomb Gorge earns its name from the wind-pocked rock, eroded into a lattice of hollows. The interior of the range is mostly trackless and waterless, a place where the only sounds are wind and the scuff of your own boots.

Long before any map carried the name 'Kennedy,' this escarpment was a boundary line. The range marked the natural border between two Aboriginal peoples, the Maia and the Malgaru. The springs along its edge drew game to hunt, and outcrops of chert gave the hard stone needed for tools and blades. More than a hundred recorded sites attest that people lived here, deliberately and continuously, for over 20,000 years before Europeans arrived — a span of time that makes the pastoral and tourist chapters look like a single afternoon. To stand at the foot of the cliffs is to stand where countless generations stood, reading the same rock for water, shelter, and stone.

In 1858 the explorer Francis Thomas Gregory led his expedition to the range and gave it a settler's name, honouring Arthur Edward Kennedy, then Governor of Western Australia. On the same journey Gregory named the nearby Lyons River before pushing on toward the great monolith of Mount Augustus. Pastoralists followed within a generation; Charles Brockman took up Boolathana Station in 1877, and for decades the surrounding country prospered on wool. Then the 1930s arrived all at once — overgrazing, drought, and the Great Depression — and most of the runs collapsed. The valleys and plains were left badly degraded, but the high tabletop of the range, hard to reach and harder to graze, came through almost untouched.

The gateway is Gascoyne Junction, a tiny outback town roughly 170 kilometres east of Carnarvon, set where the Lyons and Gascoyne rivers meet. From there an unsealed road runs north about 60 kilometres to the park's main entrance and the campground at Temple Gorge. The reward for the dust is a desert that blooms when the rains come: hakeas, eremophilas, feathery Calytrix, and drifts of papery everlasting daisies. The range even has a creature named for it — Lerista kennedyensis, the Kennedy Range broad-blazed slider, a small burrowing lizard found in this country. Entry is free, but come prepared: there is no drinking water in the park, and the nearest fuel is back at the Junction.