Qualla: Yuraygir National Park

Yuraygir National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Angourie, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stand on a headland in Yuraygir and look north, then south, and you will see the same thing both ways: beach giving way to rocky point giving way to beach, on and on, with scarcely a roof or a road in sight. This is the longest stretch of undeveloped coastline in New South Wales - 65 kilometres of cliffs, isolated beaches and quiet lakes - and walking the whole length takes four full days. The name comes from the Aboriginal people who lived here, a word once written down a dozen different ways by settlers who could not agree on the spelling: Jeigir, Yagir, Yegera, Youngai. The land kept its name. It also, against the odds and against the spread of every coastal town to its north and south, kept its wildness.

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Image: Angourie | CC BY-SA 4.0

Yuraygir National Park: A Coast Stitched Back Together

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit janefellis, CC BY-SA 4.0. Yuraygir's wholeness is hard-won. The park was created in 1980 by merging and enlarging two earlier reserves, Angourie and Red Rock National Parks, both declared in 1975. But at first it was a patchwork - blocks of protected land with private holdings punched through it. Over the...

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Image: janefellis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Yuraygir National Park: Walking the Path of the Emu

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Blanche, CC BY-SA 4.0. The four-day Yuraygir Coastal Walk is the park's signature, and it traces the route of the coastal emu - one of the last wild emu populations on this part of the coast, its numbers now perilously low. There are 48 beaches strung along the way, among them the much-admired Shelley ...

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Image: Ben Blanche | CC BY-SA 4.0

Yuraygir National Park: The Country and Its Custodians

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yuragir1, CC BY-SA 4.0. The walk crosses the homelands of two Aboriginal nations: the Gumbaynggirr people in the south and the Yaegl people in the north. They have cared for this coast for thousands of years, and their connection to it continues today - the park is not an empty wilderness but Country, w...

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Image: Yuragir1 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Yuraygir National Park: What Still Lives Here

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. An intact coast shelters animals that vanish where development spreads. Thirty mammal species have been recorded in Yuraygir, including the threatened rufous bettong - a small hopping marsupial - the tiger quoll, the brush-tailed phascogale and the gliding squirrel glider. In the...

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0