Rainforest that has been here since Gondwana

What the World Heritage listing covers

The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia is a series of national parks and reserves in north-east NSW and south-east Queensland, the parks service says, with 28 reserves in New South Wales and 12 in Queensland, the state environment department's page adds; the Washpool park page describes the group stretching along the Great Escarpment from Barrington Tops to south-east Queensland. The property covers 366,507 hectares, 307,284 of them in New South Wales, the State Heritage Inventory records.

What it holds is the case for the listing: the most extensive areas of subtropical rainforest anywhere, large areas of warm temperate rainforest, and most of the world's Antarctic beech cool temperate rainforest, the parks service says, listed for outstanding examples of the major stages of the Earth's evolutionary history, its ongoing geological and biological processes, and its exceptional biological diversity, on the environment department's account. Rainforest covers only about 0.3 per cent of Australia, the heritage inventory notes, but around half of all Australian plant families grow in it, along with about a third of the country's mammal and bird species. New England National Park's own page calls its stretch the most extensive strip of diverse rainforest anywhere on earth.

The listing, in order

The listing grew in three steps, each dated by the agency that recorded it.

1. 1986Rainforest reserves along the Great Escarpment in eastern New South Wales joined the World Heritage list in recognition of their outstanding natural values, the State Heritage Inventory records.
2. 1994Large extensions, taking in reserves in south-east Queensland, came under a new title, the Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves (Australia), and the environment department's page records the extension of the property first placed on the list in 1986.
3. 2007The property's name was changed to the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, to reflect its values and the 40 component reserves it covers, the environment department says.

The property is also on the NSW State Heritage Register and on the National Heritage List.

The parks on this edge

The regional plan names the parks on this part of the edge: Washpool, Gibraltar Range, Oxley Wild Rivers and New England, all part of the World Heritage-listed Gondwana Rainforests of Australia. Walcha Council adds that parts of Werrikimbe National Park are listed, in a local government area holding some 205,000 hectares of national parks, wilderness and state forest around the Macleay Gorges. Each park's page gives its own claim to the listing. Oxley Wild Rivers holds some of the best examples of dry rainforest communities in Australia. Gibraltar Range is listed for rainforest plants that reach back to when Australia was part of the Gondwana super-continent. Washpool was created in 1983, after a study found plant and animal populations either not found anywhere else in the state or not well protected in reserves. New England National Park marked its 75th anniversary in 2010, its history crediting the vision of Philip A Wright and his son Peter.

A single track joins two of them. The 45 km Gibraltar-Washpool World Heritage walk runs through eucalypt forests, rainforests, wetlands and granite tors on the rugged Northern Tablelands, with 13 adjoining walks and routes that can stretch the outing to 100 km, and its rainforests hold the largest tract of coachwood trees in the world. At Mulligans campground and picnic area, a hut and several weirs remain from a hydro-electric scheme of the 1900s that was abandoned.

The lookout

Point lookout, in New England National Park, is the destination the parks service calls the must-see for visitors: perched on the edge of the Great Escarpment, it looks over World Heritage rainforest to the ocean in the distance. Everyone can reach it by a wheelchair-friendly track, a 200 m walk from the carpark, and the service warns that the weather here can be extreme and unpredictable, so come prepared. At sunrise the mist in the valley turns from orange to pink as the sun rises above the horizon, one of the most photographed sunrises on the NSW North Coast, the page says.

Walks from the lookout range from an easy 200 m stroll to multi-day hikes through remote wilderness, past snow gum forests and the Antarctic beech forests below the escarpment edge, on trails like the Lyrebird walking track. The park's altitudes run from 150 m to 1,563 m, which its page calls superb habitat for a diversity of wildlife. The steep cliffs of the plateau edge here come from at least five basalt lava flows from the Ebor volcano, a rim more than 300 m thick, active until about 18 million years ago and centred around The Crescent, a semi-circular ridge in the Bellinger Valley that is visible from the lookout.

Point lookout is also a sacred place. Known to Aboriginal people as ‘Berarngutta’, which translates roughly as ‘prohibited area’, it is considered a men-only place, and today many Aboriginal women choose to continue that tradition and avoid the area; the park straddles the traditional boundaries of the Dunghutti, Anaiwan and Gumbaynggirr people.

To reach it, leave the Waterfall Way about 7.6 km before the township of Ebor, onto Point Lookout Road, which runs to the park entrance; the road is graded gravel with a sealed section, steep and narrow, suitable for 2WD and 4WD vehicles but not for caravans.