Ask which is the world's largest rock and most people will name Uluru. They would be wrong. Eight hundred kilometres north of Perth, in the empty heart of the Gascoyne, a sandstone ridge nearly eight kilometres long rises 717 metres off the surrounding plain - more than twice the size of Uluru, and far less visited. The Wajarri people call it Burringurrah. Geologists call it an inselberg. The tourist brochures call it a monolith, and on that point the brochures are simply mistaken.
The word matters to the people who study this rock. Uluru is a true monolith, a single mass of stone. Burringurrah is something different and, in its way, more intricate: an inselberg formed from an asymmetric anticline, a great fold of layered rock arching out of the earth. It is sandstone and conglomerate - the Mount Augustus Sandstone - laid down by ancient rivers and later buckled upward by the slow violence of tectonic movement. The distinction is not pedantry. It is the difference between a rock that was placed and a rock that was bent.
Deep time is the real spectacle here. The sandstone that forms the ridge is reckoned at about 1.6 billion years old - roughly three times the age of the sandstone at Uluru. And it is the younger layer. Beneath its northern end lies granite older still, dated to around 1.64 billion years, the ancient basement on which the whole formation rests. The horizontal sediments you might expect have long since been folded and tilted by forces that worked over spans the human mind cannot truly grasp. Standing at its base, you are looking at one of the oldest visible things on the planet.
For the Wajarri, Burringurrah is not a geological curiosity but the body of a boy. In their tradition, Burringurrah fled his initiation and was speared in the leg by his own people; the rock is his form, lying on its belly with one leg drawn up, the broken spear marked in the land. This is a living story and a sacred site, woven into law and country, and the Wajarri have long returned to the mountain's springs in times of drought. The summit climb - two trails, the harder of them rated for experienced walkers, the round trip taking up to five hours - leads through country that carried meaning here for many thousands of years before it carried a national park.
The European name arrived in a single afternoon in 1858. Francis Thomas Gregory reached the summit on 3 June, becoming the first recorded European to climb it, near the end of a 107-day expedition through the Gascoyne. Weeks later he named the peak for his brother, Sir Augustus Charles Gregory - who was, at that moment, off on a fruitless search across western Queensland for the lost explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. The pastoral lease that took in the mountain was settled in 1887. The national park itself came only in 1989, when land from the Mount Augustus and Cobra stations - some 9,168 hectares - was voluntarily released to protect the rock that had been there, under its older name, all along.
Mount Augustus (Burringurrah) stands in the Gascoyne region of Western Australia at about 24.33 degrees S, 116.84 degrees E, roughly 850 km north of Perth and 490 km by road east of Carnarvon. From the air it is unmistakable: a long, isolated ridge nearly 8 km in length, rising more than 700 metres above flat red mulga plains with no rival landform near it. The country is extremely remote - the nearest sizeable airports are Carnarvon (YCAR) to the west and Meekatharra (YMEK) to the south-east, with a local airstrip at Mount Augustus Station serving the park. Clear, stable air is most likely in the cooler dry season, roughly April to October; summer heat brings haze and thermals.