lookaout

Postcard view of Barron Falls near Cairns 1932

from State Library of Queensland

• Vesna Verencevic said:

  Barron Falls is situated within the Barron Gorge National Park west of Cairns and approximately 6 km east of Kuranda. Barron Falls is a Wet Tropics World Heritage site and occurs in the north east tableland section of Australia’s Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area (WTWHA), which extends from Cooktown southwards to Paluma, encompassing an area of 894,420 hectares. Indigenous culture has a long history in the Barron Gorge region. The Djabugay, Bulway, and Nyagali are representative of the rainforest people in the Barron Gorge area (DNRM, 2001). For these tribal groups, Barron Falls is a well-known story place and sacred site (Bottoms, 1992). It is a widely held Dreamtime story that the carpet snake (Budadji), which was ambushed, killed and chopped into pieces , and thrown into the bush by greedy birdmen, is the creator of all rivers and creeks of the Barron Gorge (Bottoms, 1999). In the early 1890s, gold was discovered up at Tinaroo creek, and as a consequence, Barron Gorge received the attention of hopeful prospectors (EPA, 1998, cited in DNRM, 2001). As a result of this, the population swelled and placed pressure on a number of indigenous communities due to limited access to water and strip mining (Bain & Draper, 1997; cited in DNRM, 2001). Source: rainforest-crc.jcu.edu.au/publications/site_report_barron...