Qualla: Currawinya National Park

Currawinya National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Inas at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. Drive the dusty road north from Hungerford through red sandplains and mulga scrub, and nothing prepares you for what lies hidden in this corner of outback Queensland: two great lakes, side by side, one fresh and one salt, alive with waterbirds in numbers that can stagger the eye. Currawinya National Park is one of the largest parks in Queensland and one of the most important inland waterbird refuges in Australia, its lakes protected under the international Ramsar treaty. This is Budjiti Country, a cultural landscape used by Aboriginal people for countless generations, and today it shelters something rare - a fenced sanctuary where the bilby, that long-eared, burrowing marsupial pushed to the edge of extinction, has been given a chance to come home.

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Inas at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Currawinya National Park: Two Lakes, Two Worlds

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Weldon.r.thompson, CC BY-SA 4.0. The heart of Currawinya is a pair of lakes that could hardly be more different. Lake Numalla is fresh; the slightly larger Lake Wyara is salt. They lie close together, fed by the Paroo - one of the last wild, unregulated rivers in the Murray-Darling system - yet they support diff...

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Image: Weldon.r.thompson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Currawinya National Park: Saving the Bilby

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aviceda, CC BY-SA 3.0. The greater bilby once ranged across most of the continent. Foxes, feral cats and habitat loss drove it back until it clung on across only a fraction of its former country. At Currawinya, conservationists drew a line - literally. In 2001, with money raised by the Save the Bilby F...

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Image: Aviceda | CC BY-SA 3.0

Currawinya National Park: Country Older Than Memory

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before it was a national park, this was - and remains - a place of deep significance to the Budjiti people, its traditional owners. The lakes, the river, and the wider landscape hold a long history of Aboriginal use, rich in archaeological, traditional and continuing cultura...

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Image: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

Currawinya National Park: The Outback's Hard Terms

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aviceda, CC BY-SA 3.0. Currawinya does not make things easy, and that is part of its character. The roads are unsealed; a four-wheel drive is needed to reach Lake Wyara and the granite outcrops known as the Granites. There is no fuel in the park, no food, no reliable drinking water, and no mobile phone...

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Image: Aviceda | CC BY-SA 3.0