Your guide to the greatest new light show in Australia

When I first arrive at Watarrka National Park, it's hard to see what the big deal is. That's because a pre-dawn arrival has me starting the six-kilometre Kings Canyon Rim Walk in the dark, when the cool night air takes the sting out of the strenuous climb leading up to the canyon rim. But the early start pays off when I find myself in prime position atop the rugged plateau as the first rays of the sun flood over the horizon to reveal an otherworldly landscape.

Even on an overcast day, I can't help but marvel at the depth of colour as I slowly make my way across the plateau, through a labyrinth of stupa-like domes streaked with neat orange and black stripes. Between them lie open plazas where slabs of rock creased with ripple marks once lay at the bottom of an inland sea, and when the path follows the edge of Kings Canyon I gaze across the deep ravine to a sheer cliff wall that looks for all the world like it has been scarred by the blade of a giant chisel. In places, the weathered red rock has cleaved off to expose pure white sandstone beneath and at the base of the cliff lie giant boulders the size of a three-storey apartment block.

Like much of central Australia, this landscape is at once awe-inspiring in its scale and profoundly intimate - a place that is eternally conducive to deep reflection. It's a feeling Bruce Munro remembers well from the first time he visited Watarrka 30 years ago, on the same life-altering trip that inspired the Field of Light installation that has been at Uluru since 2016.

An avuncular man who seems slightly bemused by his success, UK-based Munro recalls arriving at the national park on his wife's 29th birthday and celebrating so heartily that he spent the next day nursing a hangover in the pool while she went out walking. "When she came back, she told me that I had missed out on something really special," he says with a sheepish grin. "So we stayed another day and I went up to the plateau where I walked on rocks that were half a billion years old. It was my first experience of geological time, and it made me feel incredibly small but also very much a part of everything."

Back then, the Kings Canyon Resort was "just a hut with a sprinkler and a small patch of green" at the end of a long dirt road, but it's had a major overhaul in recent years. Since acquiring the property in 2021, Discovery Parks has spent $20 million refurbishing the 128 cabins and 250 campsites, as well as adding six spacious glamping tents.

When the red sand begins to glimmer in the fierce midday sun, I escape the heat by hiding out in my spacious Deluxe Room, which makes the most of the location with a small deck and freestanding bathtub that both look out onto the small escarpment of red rock encircling the resort.

But the most eye-catching addition to the property is Munro's latest installation, which opened on April 1. Light-Towers is a collection of 69 illuminated cylinders set in a giant ring of red sand flanked by dry clumps of spinifex and scraggly bloodwoods. Each of the solar-powered towers contains 216 bottles filled with loops of fibre optic cable that slowly change colour, and from a distance they seem to be floating in the ether when I visit in the darkness before daybreak.

The two-metre-tall columns slowly pulse with colour as I walk between them, shifting almost imperceptibly from lilac to hot pink, turquoise to indigo and electric orange to mustard yellow as snatches of song wash over me. Only a few words are audible among the 16 voices, which rise and fall in intensity and pitch to mirror the slowly shifting patterns of light.

Munro conceived Light-Towers as a cycle representing a complete day that plays out from dawn to dusk, but I find myself walking through a twilight zone where everything is suspended in a permanent dream state. It's only when a distant ridgeline slowly appears in the pre-dawn light that I emerge from my reverie and for an instant, both the installation and the surrounding country are in perfect focus. It's this precise moment, "where the light hitting the landscape has the same tonality as the light towers and everything seems to just wobble", that Munro pinpoints as his favourite time to view the installation.

A moment later the spell is broken as the sun emerges and the rainbow of colour around me rapidly transfers to the increasingly solid George Gill Range. As the day progresses, the muted watercolours of morning grow in intensity until the sun's dying rays transform the rock face into a brilliant red ember that seems to glow from within. But where that would have once signalled the end of the light show, now it's the cue for the night shift to take over.

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Getting there: Qantas flies to Alice Springs Airport from Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, and Virgin Australia flies from Adelaide, Brisbane and Darwin. From there, it's a five hour drive on sealed highways or three-and-a-half hours on the unsealed Mereenie Loop.

Staying there: Discovery Kings Canyon resort offers the closest accommodation to Watarrka National Park and has a range of options. Standard rooms begin at $380 a night, while campsites start at $37 a night.

Seeing the Light-Towers: Guided morning tours begin 20 minutes before daybreak and cost $45, while sunset tours - including a guide, canapes and drinks - cost $85, and the unguided evening experience is $30.

Alexis Buxton-Collins was a guest of Discovery Parks