Qualla: Lake Yamma Yamma

Lake Yamma Yamma: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. Stand on the bed of Lake Yamma Yamma in a dry year and there is no lake at all. Cracked grey clay stretches to the horizon, knitted together by grass, and a vehicle could cross the whole basin without getting its wheels wet. Then, perhaps once in a generation, the Cooper runs. Floodwater that fell as monsoon rain hundreds of kilometres to the north arrives weeks later down a maze of channels, and the largest inland ephemeral lake in Queensland fills until it spreads across roughly 720 square kilometres of the Channel Country. The fresh water draws birds in numbers that beggar belief, and for a season the desert becomes one of the busiest wetlands in Australia.

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Image: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Yamma Yamma: The Long Wait Between Floods

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit djambalawa (talk), CC BY 3.0. Yamma Yamma is a lake that keeps time in decades. It fills to capacity only about once every 25 to 30 years, the most recent brimming coming in 2000, and in the long intervals between it lives a second life as country. The cracking clay soils carry extensive grasslands dominated ...

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Image: djambalawa (talk) | CC BY 3.0

Lake Yamma Yamma: Two Names, One Lonely Basin

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit djambalawa (talk), CC BY 3.0. The lake carries a second name, Lake Mackillop, though the doubled Yamma Yamma is the one that sticks, a repetition that rolls off the tongue and lodges in the memory. It lies deep in the South West Queensland outback, on the Cooper Creek floodplain that the Channel Country is na...

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Image: djambalawa (talk) | CC BY 3.0

Lake Yamma Yamma: A Continent's Birds Arrive at Once

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit djambalawa (talk), CC BY 3.0. When the lake is full, the response is extraordinary. BirdLife International recognises Lake Yamma Yamma, together with its claypans and the nearby Barrolka Lakes, as an Important Bird Area of 1,218 square kilometres, because it has carried more than one percent of the entire wor...

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Image: djambalawa (talk) | CC BY 3.0

Lake Yamma Yamma: Reading the Flood From the Sky

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit djambalawa (talk), CC BY 3.0. How birds find a lake that appears once in a quarter-century, somewhere in the emptiness of inland Australia, is one of the quiet wonders of this country. They come from the coasts and from across the continent, some of the migratory waders having flown from breeding grounds in t...

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Image: djambalawa (talk) | CC BY 3.0