Qualla: Grampians National Park

Grampians National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rexness from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Drive west from Melbourne across hours of flat farmland and the Grampians simply rear up - a wall of tilted sandstone ridges marking the end of the Great Dividing Range, ramparts catching the last of the Wimmera plain before it gives out. The Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung peoples have known this place for tens of thousands of years and call it Gariwerd. On the orange rock of its overhangs and shelters they left the densest gathering of rock art in south-eastern Australia - hand stencils, animal tracks and human figures painted in ochre, some of them more than twenty thousand years old.

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Image: Rexness from Melbourne, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Grampians National Park: The Oldest Galleries

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 夏目・龍之介, CC BY-SA 3.0. Gariwerd holds the overwhelming majority of Victoria's known rock art - by most counts around four-fifths of it - concentrated in roughly sixty sites across the ranges, together preserving thousands of individual motifs. Most are fragile and unmarked, but a handful are open to vi...

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Image: 夏目・龍之介 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grampians National Park: A Name Returned

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ida Gjerlevsen Nielsen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The mountains carried Aboriginal names long before Major Thomas Mitchell, passing through in 1836, renamed them for the Grampian range of his native Scotland. Restoring the older name proved unexpectedly contentious. In 1991 the park was officially titled Grampians (Gariwerd) Nat...

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Image: Ida Gjerlevsen Nielsen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Grampians National Park: Into the Sandstone

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BriMiDra, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Grampians are uplifted, tilted and weathered sandstone, the same ancient river-laid rock that crops up across western Victoria, here folded into dramatic escarpments. More than 160 kilometres of walking trails thread through them. The signature route climbs through a narrow, ...

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Image: BriMiDra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Grampians National Park: The Living Park

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bingobill, Public domain. Gariwerd teems with wildlife that arranges itself almost on a timetable. In the late afternoon, kangaroos drift out of the bush to graze the open ground around Halls Gap, sometimes right by the town's shops. Koalas doze in the high branches for anyone patient enough to look up, a...

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Image: Bingobill | Public domain