Qualla: Gibraltar Range National Park

Gibraltar Range National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Derrin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stand at the foot of the Needles and the rock seems impossible: great fingers of granite thrust straight up out of the forest, sheer and weathered, with a drop-away view to the ranges beyond. They are the signature of Gibraltar Range, where ancient granite has been carved by tens of millions of years of weather into tors, crags and balancing boulders. The park sits high in the northern tablelands of New South Wales, 79 kilometres northeast of Glen Innes, and it forms part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, a World Heritage Area inscribed in 1986 for forests that trace their lineage back to the supercontinent of Gondwana. This is deep time made visible: rock older than memory, rainforest older than the country itself.

Image: Geoff Derrin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gibraltar Range National Park: Granite Carved by Time

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Derrin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Gibraltar Range is, above all, a landscape of stone. The granite here has been weathering for so long that it has taken on architecture: the Needles standing like a row of stone teeth, the Dandahra Crags rising in tumbled outcrops, granite boulders scattered along Surveyors Creek...

Image: Geoff Derrin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gibraltar Range National Park: A Gondwana Inheritance

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Derrin, CC BY-SA 4.0. The World Heritage listing is not decoration. The Gondwana Rainforests preserve plant communities with direct ancestral links to the forests that covered Gondwana before the southern continents split apart, and they survive in a string of parks running from the Barrington Tops up...

Image: Geoff Derrin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gibraltar Range National Park: Spring and the Wildflowers

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Derrin, CC BY-SA 4.0. For all the gravity of granite and Gondwana, the park has a lighter season. In spring the heathlands and sedge swamps catch fire with colour: Christmas bells, Blandfordia grandiflora, raise their red-and-yellow tubular flowers in the boggy ground near Surveyors Creek, joined by a...

Image: Geoff Derrin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gibraltar Range National Park: The Bird That Almost Isn't

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Derrin, CC BY-SA 4.0. BirdLife International recognises this park as the Gibraltar Range Important Bird Area for a specific and urgent reason. It is a block of highland forest that holds one of only five remaining populations of the rufous scrub-bird, a small, secretive, ground-dwelling bird so reluct...

Image: Geoff Derrin | CC BY-SA 4.0