Qualla: Mount Field National Park

Mount Field National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Talbotross, CC BY-SA 4.0. You can stand at the base of one of the tallest living things on the planet, then drive twenty minutes uphill into a glacial landscape of tarns and snow gums. That compression is the wonder of Mount Field. A little over an hour northwest of Hobart, in the Derwent Valley, the park climbs from a rainforest floor where Russell Falls drops in three silver tiers, up through forests of giant swamp gums, and onto a high plateau scoured by ancient ice. Established in 1916, Mount Field is, with Freycinet, Tasmania's oldest national park, and a piece of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

Image: Talbotross | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mount Field National Park: The Falls That Started a Park

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TabbyMynx, CC BY-SA 4.0. Russell Falls came first. Long before the national park existed, the colony recognised that this three-tiered cascade was worth protecting, and in 1885 the land around it was set aside as Tasmania's first nature reserve. It remains the park's most beloved sight, a wide, fern-frin...

Image: TabbyMynx | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mount Field National Park: Among the Tallest Trees on Earth

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jörn Brauns, Public domain. The Tall Trees Walk leads into a forest that humbles. Here grow swamp gums, Eucalyptus regnans, known on the mainland as mountain ash and recognised as the tallest flowering plants in the world; the species' record-holders push toward a hundred metres. Walking beneath them, neck ...

Image: Jörn Brauns | Public domain

Mount Field National Park: Carved by Ice

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alisterhaz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Drive the Lake Dobson Road to the top and the world transforms. It is the park's only through road, climbing from the visitor centre to the plateau, and beyond it you travel on foot or not at all. During the Pleistocene, snowfields blanketed the Mount Field plateau and fed glacie...

Image: Alisterhaz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mount Field National Park: A Refuge for the Vanishing

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bubbleteaddict, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mount Field shelters a roll call of Tasmanian wildlife. Wombats and pademelons graze the clearings, platypuses ripple the lakes, and echidnas shuffle through the undergrowth; the Tasmanian devil lives here too, though it is rarely seen. The park carries a more haunting connection...

Image: Bubbleteaddict | CC BY-SA 4.0