Qualla: Mount Augustus (Burringurrah)

Mount Augustus (Burringurrah): Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TerryT2, CC BY-SA 4.0. Long before surveyors gave it an English name, the Wajarri people knew this place as Burringurrah, and they knew what it was: a boy. The story tells of a young man who broke a law of his people and fled, and who was speared in the leg as he ran. He fell, and his prone body became stone. You can read that shape in the rock if you know how to look. The break in the leg, the long line of the back. What rises from the plain here is not just the largest rock on Earth by some measures. It is, in the oldest telling, a person.

Image: TerryT2 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mount Augustus (Burringurrah): The Boy Turned to Stone

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TerryT2, CC BY-SA 4.0. Burringurrah has been a sacred site for thousands of years, and the land around it still holds the proof. On the loop walk that circles the base, three sites - Mundee, Ooramboo and Beedoboondu - carry rock engravings made by Wajarri hands, the surviving record of Dreaming stories...

Image: TerryT2 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mount Augustus (Burringurrah): Bigger Than Uluru, and Older

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0. The numbers strain belief. Burringurrah rises roughly 860 metres above the surrounding plain and reaches 1,106 metres above sea level, with a central ridge nearly eight kilometres long sprawling across some 4,795 hectares. That makes it more than twice the size of Uluru, the rock...

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mount Augustus (Burringurrah): A Mountain That Kills the Careless

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0. The summit trail looks inviting and is anything but. The climb and return can take five hours across exposed rock, and the heat does not forgive. Four hikers - Hans-Juergen Buske, Anne Pollard, and Brian and Thelma Green - have died here, all of hyperthermia, all in conditions th...

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mount Augustus (Burringurrah): Life on the Red Plain

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0. For all its harshness, the country teems. More than 100 species of birds move across the rock and the surrounding scrub, and birds of prey ride the thermals that lift off the warm stone. Red kangaroos and euros - the stocky wallaroos of the ranges - graze in the cool of morning, ...

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 4.0