Hawker

The Flinders Ranges are Adnyamathanha country. In Adnyamathanha tradition the walls of Wilpena Pound are the bodies of two akurra, giant serpents, which came to rest around a gathering place; Ikara, now part of the national park's name, means meeting place. People have lived and travelled through these gorges for tens of thousands of years, and painted and engraved sites survive across the district.

European pastoralists took up runs from the 1850s. Kanyaka, south of the present town, was started as a cattle station in 1852 and later ran sheep before it was abandoned. In 1865 the colony's Surveyor-General, George Goyder, drew a line across the map marking the limit of rainfall reliable enough for cropping. A run of unusually wet years tempted wheat farmers north of it anyway, and in 1880 the government surveyed a town on the plain and named it after George Hawker, a pastoralist and member of the colonial parliament. It stood on the railway then being pushed north from Port Augusta towards Marree, the route later travelled by the old Ghan.

For a few seasons the wheat grew. Then the rain failed, the droughts of the 1880s proved Goyder right, and the farms were walked off, leaving the stone shells that still stand in the paddocks. Hawker held on as a railway town and a service centre for sheep stations. When the main line was moved west in 1956, the town turned to the traffic going north instead, and the national park became its living.

This is station country, and the culture is that of a small, scattered community that depends on distance being managed rather than removed. The hotel is the meeting place, the noticeboard and the mail conversation; station families drive in for supplies and stay to talk. Football and netball clubs draw players from properties across the district, and the Royal Flying Doctor Service and distance education for station children are ordinary parts of life rather than curiosities.

Adnyamathanha culture is present and increasingly visible: guides, rangers and tour operators explain Yura Muda, the creation stories tied to particular hills, waterholes and gorges, and the national park is managed with Adnyamathanha involvement. Requests about how sites are treated are taken seriously here, and visitors are expected to follow them.

The ranges also have a place in Australian art. Hans Heysen painted them repeatedly, fixing the image of white-trunked gums against red rock in the national imagination, and the long-distance Heysen Trail is named after him. Photographers and painters still come for the light in the hour after dawn. Road manners matter more than social ones: a raised finger off the wheel to oncoming vehicles, a slow pass on gravel, and gates left exactly as they were found.

A few hundred people live in Hawker, which makes it a small town even by outback standards, though it serves a district of stations and travellers many times that number. The town has a hotel, a general store and fuel, a caravan park, an area school, a health service, a police station and a volunteer fire brigade, and that list is close to complete.

The economy rests on three things: sheep and cattle stations, the tourist traffic heading into the ranges, and the trucking and contracting that keep both supplied. Trade is strongly seasonal, heavy from Easter through to October and thin in the summer heat. Anything not sold in town comes from Port Augusta, about 100 kilometres away, which is also where people go for a supermarket, a hospital and a hardware store.

Distance sets the rhythm. Deliveries arrive on set days, mobile and internet coverage is patchy beyond the streets, and water comes from bores and rainwater tanks. Children on remote properties learn partly by distance education before boarding in Port Augusta or Adelaide, and young adults usually leave for work or study. Keeping the school, the clinic and the store viable in a town this size is a constant local concern, as are drought, feral goats and the cost of fuel.

Eating in Hawker is pub and store food, done well and without ceremony. The hotel serves counter meals of the Australian country kind — steak, schnitzel, fish, a roast and chips — and the general store sells pies, pasties, sandwiches, coffee and the groceries travellers load into an esky before driving into the park. Barbecues and camp cooking do the rest; many visitors eat better in a campground than they expect to.

The regional specialities are outback ones. Saltbush-fed lamb from the plains is prized, and quandong, the small tart native peach that grows in the arid country, turns up in pies, jams and sauces. Wattleseed appears in damper and biscuits. North-west of the park, the hotel at Parachilna built its name on native and introduced game — camel, kangaroo, emu, goat and pig — and it is the one place in the district people drive an hour or more to eat at.

Adnyamathanha foods gathered from this country include quandong, native currants, seeds ground for damper and kangaroo, and bush-food knowledge is part of what Aboriginal-run tours explain. Beer is the drink of the district, and the wine on the lists comes down from the Clare Valley and the Barossa to the south.