Wallaman falls

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Girringun National Park, Australia

Located in Girringun National Park, also known as Lumholtz National Park, Wallaman Falls is often sited as having one of Australia’s largest single drop waterfalls at 879 feet and the entire waterfall comes in at a good 1,109 feet. Though several websites dispute this claim. The waterfall still has an impressive height either way. This is a tiered waterfall made up of several drops but there are only two main drops on the way down to a 32 foot deep and 65 foot wide lagoon.

The Wallaman Falls flow from Stony Creek which is a tributary of the Herbert River. It plunges over and escarpment or transition in elevation that usually involves cliffs called the Seaview Range. 50 million years ago the Herbert River shifted course and through erosion wore down the river bed over time creating a gorge. In the process the Stony Creek was left hanging, literally, above the gorge and the river so it simply spilled over the side of the cliff wall.

Wallaman Falls is part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area created in 1989. It spans 5586 square miles of land. A world heritage site is an area that is considered to have outstanding cultural or natural importance to the heritage of humankind. So Wallaman Falls along with some of the oldest surviving rainforest in the world is pretty special.

There are a variety of unusual creatures in the park. They have the Platypus, one of the few marsupial species on the planet. The Eastern Water Dragon is a lizard with strong forearms and tails that are designed for swimming. However it can live equally well both in and out of the water. The Saw-Shelled Turtle lives in the Herbert River and tributaries including Stony Creek. It has a serrated edge along its shell and is only found in the Eastern portion of Australia.

The rim of Wallaman Falls is inhabited by Casuarinas, Eucalypts and Grass Tree. Casuarinas are also known as She Oaks, Beefwood or Australian Pines and they are found in tropical areas where the soil is nutrient poor. Deeper in the gorge exist the more lush vegetation of the typical rainforest. Eucalypts are also Eucalyptus trees, of which there are nearly 700 species. So any number of these can be found around Wallaman Falls. Grass trees refers to several different species of a unique tree with a ring of leaves typically at the top of a trunk or branches that looks like grass or a grass skirt. There is also a wide range of mosses, lichens and epiphytes in the park.

The falls appear either as a thin stream of water flowing down a light tan cliff face or a rushing torrent depending on the season its viewed in. Typically it reaches its highest volume during the wettest part of the rainy season.

Wallaman existed in the original home of the Warrgamaygan Aboriginal People. They maintain a spiritual connection to the land from which their ancestors once gathered food and resources as well as being where they used to live.