Willi Willi National Park

Plants, animals and landscape

World Heritage Rainforests

Willi Willi and Werrikimbe national parks form an extensive mountain wilderness on a spectacular section of the Great Divide and the Eastern Escarpment, high in the mountains, just 60 km west of the mid north coast of New South Wales. The parks protect some of the best sub-tropical, warm temperate and cool temperate rainforests in Australia and most of Werrikimbe, and the Banda Banda section of Willi Willi, is included as part of the Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves of Australia (CERRA), one of Australia's sixteen World Heritage properties.

Today's rainforests are direct relations of the ancient forests of Gondwana, when parts of what is now Australia lay to the south, within the Antarctic Circle. About 80 million years ago, the ancestral continent broke up and Australia started moving north, which eventually reduced most of the cool-adapted Gondwanan rainforests to a narrow strip along the escarpment of south-eastern Australia. These are places with high conservation and landscape values, an outstanding array of biodiversity and magnificent scenery.

The park protects a diversity of vegetation communities, including sub-alpine woodland, upland heaths and old growth eucalypt forests. This diverse vegetation supports a wide range of fauna, with small ground mammals and bats, the endangered Hastings River mouse, the yellow-bellied glider, as well as Australia's largest marsupial carnivore, the spotted-tailed quoll.

The Great Escarpment

The grandeur of this park comes from its location along part of the Great Eastern Escarpment, which runs the length of eastern Australia, from Victoria to north Queensland. The escarpment is the name given to the steep drop at the eastern edge of the Great Divide (the watershed separating drainage to the Pacific Ocean from that going west). The escarpment began to be formed after Gondwana broke up and ancient seabeds were up-lifted to create the mountainous high country of the Dividing Range.

Erosion by wind, rain, storms and local winter ice over millions of years carved out the undulating plateau, while rivers cut back the edge of the plateau, creating deep gorges that merged to form one continuous escarpment, now seen as a maze of cliffs, gorges, waterfalls, ridges, spurs, hills and valleys. The scarp is slowly moving west and this can be seen in the active erosion of steep cliffs at places like Apsley and Tia Gorges, just off the Oxley Highway east of Walcha.

View a cross-section diagram of the landscape from the Pacific Highway to Werrikimbe Plateau.