Carnarvon National Park, Nature reserve in Central Queensland, Australia.
Carnarvon National Park covers 298,000 hectares in the Maranoa Region of Central Queensland, 593 km northwest of Brisbane, and is divided into seven sections: Carnarvon Gorge, Salvator Rosa, Ka Ka Mundi, Buckland Tableland, Mount Moffatt, Moolayember and Goodlife. The best known is Carnarvon Gorge, cut by Carnarvon Creek into a soft sandstone plateau into a wide main canyon lined with palms, with narrow side arms where mosses and ferns grow and others bare and dry.
The park was established in 1932 and grew over time to include multiple sections across the region. Its expansion allowed the protection of increasingly larger areas of the landscape.
Rock art sites within the park show the heritage of the Bidjara, Karingbal, and Kara Kara peoples, whose ancestors lived on this land for thousands of years and left their marks on the stone walls. These artworks reveal how deeply connected these communities were to this place.
Multiple entrances to the park can be reached via roads from Rolleston and Injune in the region. The best time to visit depends on weather conditions, with the dry season being more comfortable for walking trails.
Kenniff Cave in the Mount Moffatt section yielded carbon dates of 19,500 years before present, the first Australian site to push human occupation into the Late Pleistocene. Before D.J. Mulvaney's excavation there, occupation of the continent was thought to span fewer than 10,000 years.
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