Qualla: Guy Fawkes River National Park

Guy Fawkes River National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cgoodwin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The river starts its plunge at Ebor Falls, dropping off the rim of the Northern Tablelands in two great steps, and from there it carves its way down through one of the wildest corners of New South Wales. Guy Fawkes River National Park covers more than 100,000 hectares of gorge and ridge and old-growth forest, draped across the eastern edge of the New England Tablelands where the high country breaks and falls toward the coast. It is a place of deep, shadowed valleys and rugged rivers, and it carries a name borrowed from the man behind England's Gunpowder Plot. But the story most people know about this park is not about geology or a seventeenth-century conspirator. It is about horses.

Image: Cgoodwin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Guy Fawkes River National Park: The Cull and the Outcry

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DebrahNovak, CC BY-SA 4.0. Over three days in late October 2000, professional shooters in helicopters killed 606 wild horses in this park. A long drought and a severe bushfire had stripped the country bare, and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service judged that the surviving horses were destroying wha...

Image: DebrahNovak | CC BY-SA 4.0

Guy Fawkes River National Park: Walers, the Heritage Horses

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Birdnerd77, CC BY-SA 4.0. The outcry forced a question that had never properly been asked: what, exactly, were these horses? The Environment Minister, Bob Debus, commissioned a Heritage Working Party to find out. Its 2002 report concluded that the Guy Fawkes horses carried genuine historical, military and...

Image: Birdnerd77 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Guy Fawkes River National Park: Saving the Bloodline

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MapStaringEnthusiast, CC0. Out of the controversy came an effort to keep the line alive. The Guy Fawkes Heritage Horse Association takes possession of horses passively trapped and removed from the park, offers them for sale, and manages them to preserve the genetics and characteristics that make them disti...

Image: MapStaringEnthusiast | CC0

Guy Fawkes River National Park: Gorges, Old Growth and a Long Trail

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poidabro, CC BY-SA 4.0. Set the horses aside and the park is still extraordinary. The Guy Fawkes River cuts a deeply incised valley along the line of an ancient fault, and the gorges of the Aberfoyle, Sara and Henry rivers slice through the country alongside it. More than forty distinct vegetation commu...

Image: Poidabro | CC BY-SA 4.0