Qualla: Southwest National Park

Southwest National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Shuttles12000, CC BY-SA 4.0. One road. Across more than six thousand square kilometres of mountains, moorland, and drowned river valleys, the Southwest National Park has a single road, and it runs only to a small hydro township at the northern edge before the wilderness swallows everything beyond. The rest, the whole vast southern and western reach of Tasmania's largest national park, you can enter only on foot, by boat, or in a light aircraft bumping down onto a gravel strip in the middle of nowhere. This is one of the great temperate wildernesses left on the planet, a place of buttongrass plains and serrated peaks and rain that falls more often than it does not, and humans have barely touched it.

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Image: Shuttles12000 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southwest National Park: Forty Thousand Years of Quiet

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. People have known this country far longer than the silence suggests. Aboriginal Tasmanians lived in the southwest for roughly 40,000 years, cut off from mainland Australia when the sea rose and flooded the land bridge some 8,000 years ago. In caves now within the neighbouring Fra...

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Image: Public domain

Southwest National Park: The Last Country on the Map

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Europeans were slow to come, and slower to stay. Abel Tasman glimpsed this coast in 1642, but no one even knew Tasmania was an island until Bass and Flinders sailed around it 156 years later. The first overland expeditions, in the early 1830s, were led by George Augustus Robinson...

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Southwest National Park: The Lake That Was Lost

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Duncan Wallace, CC BY-SA 4.0. The park's heart began as something smaller and tragic. In 1955 the government protected the country around Lake Pedder, a glacial lake famous among bushwalkers for a beach of unique pink quartz sand that one writer thought would have stood beside Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef...

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Image: Duncan Wallace | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southwest National Park: Where the Parrots Still Fly

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. For all its harshness, the southwest is a stronghold of rare life. Cyclonic winds, frost in summer, more than two metres of rain a year, and yet the park shelters hundreds of plant species and dozens of animals found only here. Its most famous resident is the orange-bellied parro...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0