September. October 59About halfway up the side, ice has formed on mossy
patches and is clinging to grasses and vines.
In particularly cold years, icicles can hang like sta-
lactites for months on end. In warmer months, I’m told,
you should listen for the long, creaking growls of the
rare sphagnum frog that lives in cracks in the rock face
or burrows into the moss.
Like Weeping Rock, the steep cliffs of the plateau
edge in New England NP were born from at least five
basalt lava f lows from the Ebor Volcano, forming a rim
more than 300m thick. Active until about 18 million
years ago, this huge volcano was set around a semi-
circular ridge in the Bellinger Valley and you can see it
from Point Lookout. Years of erosion has created the
dramatic escarpment of today.
Protected deep within the valleys below the escarp-
ment are Gondwanan survivors – the beeches, tree ferns,
palms, vines, lichens and more. On the way back from
Weeping Rock I stop to take photo after photo of the
other-worldly scene laid out before me: buttress roots
so large you can stow away in the spaces between them,
branches adorned in old man’s beard, and cycads stand-
ing to attention.
You can lose yourself here, and I do, for hours, mus-
ing over the provenance of these species – how they got
here and have survived ice ages, dinosaurs and, perhaps
most pressingly, humankind.
I find part of the answer the next day, at Wollomombi
Falls, a 40-minute drive further west in Oxley Wild
Rivers NP. It’s an impressive gorge, etched from the
surrounding basalt by the Wollomombi and Chandler
rivers. Yet if you didn’t know it was there, you’d drive
right on by. Surrounded by cleared farmland, which
looks barren and ravaged by overgrazing and drought,
it’s both protector and refuge for Gondwanan species
according to NPWS ranger Alan Hill.
“The sheer cl i f f s mea n it’s la rgely inaccessible to peo-
ple and animals, although feral goats didn’t seem to get
the memo,” Alan says. “Because of this, little commu-
nities of ancient rainforest species are left to their own
devices, to grow, to f lourish and to regenerate.”
Both Wollomombi and Chandler falls sit at the north-
ern end of the gorge, and drop vast volumes of water
hund red s of met res into the rav ine below. It’s so deep that
huge boulders look like pebbles, and aged trees appearOrgan pipe-like rock formations flank Ebor Falls and are
topped by a walking track that takes in views of the surrounding
wilderness. Wedge-tailed eagles soar on thermals here and
brush-tailed rock-wallabies frequent the rocky ramparts.