During the next two days, Bondfield, like any great guide, takes us where we want to go, then shows us his own secret places there.We first picnic atop King George Falls in the Balanggarra Indigenous Protected Area, a 2.6-million hectare homeland of First Peoples in Australia and whose rock art, dating back to about 50,000 years ago, is drawing global attention.

Bondfield lands us near some caves covered in the ochre images of ancient plants and animals. Their brightness is barely faded despite tens of thousands of years of torrential weather. We crawl into crevices all afternoon, snap photos and return with shots of paintings that are among the oldest made by humans anywhere in the world.

From there, we fly to the Berkeley River Lodge, an 18-cabin eco-resort on the Kimberley Coast. The lodge’s remoteness, design and commitment to local cuisine echo that of Newfoundland’s Fogo Island Inn. Over dinner of grilled barramundi, Bondfield asks if we’ve had a chance to go fishing in Australia yet. With local rivers filled with “freshies” and “salties” (fresh and saltwater crocodiles, the former of which may attack you, while the latter will), no, we have not.

“Well, if you want to get up before sunrise tomorrow, I can fly you to my favourite fishing hole,” he tells us. And so, the next morning at dawn, we land on a ledge of a tributary of the Berkeley River, feeling safe in Bondfield’s charge. And it doesn’t matter that the one barramundi I hook gets away. What matters is the thrill of watching the sunrise over one of the most ancient landscapes on the planet.

Later that day, Bondfield drops us back in Kununurra, the starting point for our journey on the Gibb.

While drivers often carry two spares because tires get shredded, not just flattened, on the Gibb, the rental company we hire our four-wheel drive from assures us we’ll be fine with just one.

Three days later, we limp into Over the Range, the garage at the end of the universe. It looks like a junkyard, filled with hollowed-out tires and skeletons of cars. But owner Neville Hernon — who looks like the Mad Max of tire repair — lives on-site with his wife, Leonie Starnawski. Their leaflet, pinned up at every roadhouse along the Gibb, says: “Drop in to our depot for advice, have a look at our Wet Season photos, or just to say hello.”

As we wait for Hernon to fix our flat, we do have a look at those wet season photos. All the scraggly desert surrounding us was under water. Everywhere. Hernon soon approaches with a grim smile. “It’s USA, I’m afraid.”

We take that to be Australian for “SOL.” The tire has to be replaced. It takes him 15 minutes to do just that, hand me the credit card machine and charge me $385 for a used replacement tire. And so we continue to our next stop in Imintji, happy as clams that we had to drive only 20 kilometres to reach Hernon, and knowing the law of supply and demand is working perfectly in the Outback.

John Bennett appears the perfect Aussie Outback wrangler. Tall, dust-tanned, with tall leather boots that even the fangs of the local, lethal king brown snake couldn’t pierce.

“Howdy,” Bennett greets us. “How are y’all?”

Hmm … Aussie wranglers don’t talk that way. Texas cowboys do. It turns out that Bennett, CEO of the local Imintji Aboriginal Corporation and manager of a campsite and arts centre for tourists in Imintji, came to Australia in 2005 from Waco, Texas, where he had been a mining supervisor. Bennett was drawn to the area by the love of a woman. Of Cherokee descent, he understood first-hand the hardships of Indigenous people, and so in 2011 he started working for a group of Aboriginal tribes in the Kimberley area whose ancestors are believed to have been the first people in Western Australia. A big part of his job today as CEO of the Imintji tribal community is working with the regional and federal governments to make sure local Aboriginal Peoples, specifically the Imintji, Tirrilantji and Yulmbu, get the rights, grants and respect they’re entitled to.