South West Queensland

The Channel Country in the far south-west is where Cooper Creek and its braided channels spread across an immense clay plain that floods in wet years and bakes to a pale terracotta in dry ones. This is Burke and Wills country, the landscape that defeated the most famous expedition in Australian history, and standing at Innamincka on the Strzelecki Track it's not hard to understand why — the emptiness is complete, the heat is relentless and the distances are Biblical.

But South West Queensland has a gentler entry point that rewards visitors enormously: Carnarvon Gorge, in the sandstone ranges above Roma, is a secret of the kind that makes its discoverers slightly possessive. A creek has cut through 200-metre sandstone walls over millions of years, creating a cool, sheltered gorge with ancient Aboriginal rock art — stencils of hands and tools and animals made perhaps 3,000 years ago — preserved under overhanging rock faces. The Moss Garden and the Art Gallery are accessible by day walk; the campground sits at the gorge entrance.

Mitchell, Charleville and Roma are the towns of the western Downs — honest, practical places with good pubs, reliable fuel and the working-cattle culture of Queensland's interior intact. The night sky out here is one of the darkest in the country — the Charleville Cosmos Centre offers guided telescope nights that recalibrate your sense of scale.