40 Fun Facts About Great Dividing Range

Norwegian miners at Kiandra, on the Great Dividing Range, brought which sport to Australia in 1861?

Skiing took off at Kiandra after the miners carved more than forty pairs of skis, and the town's Snow Shoe Club is reportedly the longest continuously running club of its kind in the world.

The Blue Mountains are thought to owe their blue haze to oily vapour from which abundant trees?

Eucalypts cover the sandstone plateau so thickly that the oily vapour they release is thought to scatter blue light across the valleys.

Which sandstone rock formation in the Blue Mountains towers above the Jamison Valley?

The Three Sisters are said to have been turned to stone, though the tale as commonly told may trace back to a 16-year-old schoolgirl rather than to Aboriginal tradition.

Which Snowy Mountains peak is the highest point on the Great Dividing Range and mainland Australia?

Mount Kosciuszko stands just 2,228 metres high, and like nearly every peak on the range it can be climbed without mountaineering equipment.

The Great Dividing Range lies in one country; which chain, the world's longest on land, spans seven?

The Andes pass through seven South American countries, while the Great Dividing Range is the longest mountain chain lying inside a single country.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme, tunnelled through the Great Dividing Range from 1949 to 1974, generates which kind of power?

Hydroelectricity comes from nine power stations fed through 225 kilometres of tunnels and pipes, and the diverted water then irrigates farms inland.

Which river, Australia's longest, rises in the Australian Alps on the Great Dividing Range?

The Murray drains the western side of Australia's highest mountains, then wanders 2,508 kilometres across the inland plains to South Australia.

Which planned Australian capital, founded in 1913, stands on the uplands of the Great Dividing Range?

Canberra is Australia's largest inland city, set about 150 kilometres from the east coast beside the Brindabella Ranges.

Which bush poet set the horseback ballad 'The Man from Snowy River' in Australia's high country?

Banjo Paterson had helped round up wild horses as a child, and his ballad first appeared in The Bulletin magazine in 1890.

Which bird of the Great Dividing Range's tropical rainforests is outweighed only by the ostrich?

Southern cassowary females are the larger sex and can stand two metres tall, with a horn-like casque rising from the top of the head.

Which songbird of the Dandenong Ranges, a branch of the Great Dividing Range, is renowned for mimicking other birds?

Superb lyrebird males build up to 80 percent of their song from imitations of other species, and the bird struts across the back of Australia's 10-cent coin.

What name do Australians give the feral horses whose best-known herds roam the Australian Alps?

Brumbies are treasured by some as colonial heritage and counted by researchers as a threat to alpine ecosystems, so every plan to cull them stirs a fight.

Which river runs from the southern slopes of the Great Dividing Range through the centre of Melbourne?

The Yarra is known to the Wurundjeri people as Birrarung, and Melbourne was founded on its lower reaches in 1835.

What is the dry zone called that forms where air sinks and warms on the sheltered side of the Great Dividing Range?

A rain shadow forms because the range wrings moisture from the air as it climbs, and the dry wind that pours down the far side raises fire danger in the warm months.

Australia's highest peak, on the Great Dividing Range, is the lowest climb on which mountaineers' list?

The Seven Summits are the highest peaks of the seven continents, first completed by Richard Bass in 1985, though a rival list swaps the Australian peak for New Guinea's Puncak Jaya.

Which ancient supercontinent names the World Heritage rainforests of the New South Wales–Queensland border ranges?

Gondwana broke apart long ago, yet these reserves still shelter plants and animals whose lineages date from before Australia split away.

Which Queensland rainforest, running from the coast west to the Great Dividing Range, is far older than the Amazon?

The Daintree's forests are put at around 180 million years old, and they shelter rarities such as Bennett's tree-kangaroo.

The rise of Australia's Eastern Highlands lifted the edge of which groundwater store, the world's largest of its kind?

The Great Artesian Basin is the only source of fresh water across much of inland Australia, and some of its water has been underground for nearly two million years.

Which former volcano near Victoria's Mount Macedon is the setting of a famous novel about vanished schoolgirls?

Hanging Rock formed about six million years ago from stiff magma that congealed over its vent, and Joan Lindsay's novel and Peter Weir's 1975 film made it widely known.

Which 'living fossil' conifer was found in 1994 in a remote national park canyon on the Great Dividing Range?

Wollemi pine survives in the wild as fewer than 100 adult trees, found because a group of explorers was systematically hunting for new canyons.

Which insect flies to the Australian Alps each spring to rest in cool caves, once drawing Aboriginal peoples to feast?

Bogong moth swarms lie dormant in the high caves all summer, and the feasts they supplied doubled as gatherings between different Aboriginal groups.

Which marsupial was known only from fossils until a live one turned up in Victoria's high country in 1966?

Mountain pygmy possums are the only Australian mammals restricted to alpine habitat, and they hibernate for long stretches of the year.

Which critically endangered amphibian of the Snowy Mountains is striped in vivid yellow and black?

Corroboree frog adults grow to only about three centimetres long, and zoos now breed them in captivity because the species ranks among Australia's most endangered.

Which tree of the Dandenong Ranges, on the Great Dividing Range, is the tallest of all flowering plants?

Mountain ash can top 100 metres, and loggers felled some of the tallest specimens ever known.

Which explorer climbed and named Australia's highest peak in 1840 on an expedition with James Macarthur?

Paweł Strzelecki thought the peak resembled a memorial mound in Kraków raised to a Polish national hero, so he named the mountain in the same man's honour.

Which explorer of the 1813 Blue Mountains crossing later co-founded Australia's first independent newspaper?

William Wentworth's party got through by keeping to the ridges instead of following the creeks, the mistaken idea that had made the crossing so hard.

Which city, Australia's oldest inland settlement, stood at the end of the convict-built road over the Blue Mountains?

Bathurst was founded in 1815, the year a road of more than 160 kilometres reached it after just six months of work by 30 convict labourers.

The Great Dividing Range begins on Dauan Island, in Australia's far north, in which waterway?

Torres Strait holds the range's northern tip, a granite island peak, and from there the highlands run more than 3,500 kilometres to western Victoria.

Which sandstone ranges, named after Scottish mountains, stand near the Great Dividing Range's far western end?

The Grampians were first labelled the Coast Mountains and then named for the reigning king before surveyor Thomas Mitchell settled on a reminder of his native Scotland.

Which Queensland 'Garden City' sits on the crest of the Great Dividing Range, about 700 metres above sea level?

Toowoomba is high and exposed enough that snow has been reported on its upper streets, a rarity among Queensland cities.

Warragamba Dam, fed by valleys of the Great Dividing Range, holds the main water supply of which city?

Sydney got the dam as an emergency answer to a critical water shortage during World War II, and the project was first called the Warragamba Emergency Scheme.

Queensland rivers west of the Great Dividing Range drain inland to which vast salt pan, Australia's lowest point?

Lake Eyre has filled completely only a handful of times since 1860, and its dry salt crust was firm enough for Donald Campbell's 1964 land speed record.

Thunderbolts Way, a winding road over the Great Dividing Range, honours a 19th-century man of which trade?

Bushranger Frederick Ward, alias Captain Thunderbolt, roamed the Northern Tablelands and stayed at large longer than any other outlaw in Australian history.

Which limestone caves on the Great Dividing Range are the oldest known and dated open cave system in the world?

Jenolan's clay was dated to about 340 million years old by measuring its radioactive potassium against the argon gas the potassium had decayed into.

Which Blue Mountains town has the Scenic Railway, built to haul coal up an incline of 52 degrees?

Katoomba's incline railway hauled coal during the week and passengers at weekends from 1928 to 1945, before turning to tourists alone.

Which Snowy Mountains resort village holds Australia's record low temperature of −23.0 °C?

Charlotte Pass is named after Charlotte Adams, who in 1881 became the first European woman to climb Australia's highest peak.

Which waterfall in Queensland's Wet Tropics has Australia's tallest single drop at 268 metres?

Wallaman Falls pours Stony Creek, a tributary of the Herbert River, over an escarpment of the Seaview Range in one unbroken plunge.

Which peak beside the Atherton Tableland, Queensland's highest, honours a Royal Geographical Society president?

Mount Bartle Frere is so often wrapped in cloud that nearby gauges point to a yearly soaking of about eight metres, which would make it one of the wettest places in the world.

The Great Dividing Range began forming a little over 300 million years ago in which span of geological time?

Carboniferous collisions between Australia and lands now found in New Zealand and beyond raised the range, and the erosion since then explains why its peaks are so low.

Blue Lake in the Snowy Mountains, one of only four lakes of its type on mainland Australia, was carved by what?

Glaciers flowing off the Great Dividing Range met and scooped a hollow out of the granite, and the water there still freezes over for about four months of the year.