Gold Coast B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record · Gold Coast · QLD
Gorge Falls
Lawful route — caveats lawful, with something that needs saying first
Access verdict · tier 2 of 4 · confidence C (statutory inference, the weakest grade in the chain)
Public land — inside Springbrook National Park. No published track reaches it — the lawful ground to it is a chain of parcels.
Being at this point is lawful on the records below. Getting there is a separate question, answered route by route — and each route carries its own tier and its own caveats.
- 1 · Lawful, nothing to flag Every leg is ground the public may cross, and nothing about the chain needs a warning. Whether a built track runs along it is said separately.
- 2 · Lawful, with caveats A lawful chain with at least one thing about it that has to be said first. This page is here.
- 3 · Unconfirmed No lawful chain could be established from the public record. No route published.
- 4 · No lawful route Enclosed by land the public has no right to cross. No route published.
On-ground signage and temporary closures override this page. Always.
What this place is A definition, then the record
A waterfall — a step in a watercourse steep enough that the water falls clear of the bed rather than running down it. The step is usually a band of harder rock the creek has been unable to cut through as fast as the softer rock below, so the drop moves slowly upstream over time and leaves a gorge behind it.
No watercourse the register names runs within range of Gorge Falls. The layer maps far more creeks than it has ever named, so that is a gap in the record rather than dry ground.
The point falls inside Springbrook National Park, designated National Park. B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record
No register records how far the water falls. What the contours record is this: the terrain rule fired here because the bed loses 15.0 m within 39.3 m along the watercourse — the test the rule applies, not the height of the fall. Its steepest single stretch drops 5.0 m over 2.3 m of ground — 2.2 m down for every metre along the bed. That is a floor and not a total: the contour interval is the smallest drop this layer can show, so the face is at least this steep and may be far more. C — provenance grade C: Statutory inference
On the record — what the registers actually say Dataset versions in the footer
| Claim | What the record says | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Name | "Gorge Falls" is a community record only — absent from the gazetteer and from the state feature layer. | D — provenance grade D: Community record |
| Tenure | Resolved to Protected estate, recorded as "National Park". | B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record |
| Parcel | 5AP19371 | B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record |
| Council area | This place sits inside Gold Coast, tested against the boundary that council area publishes. | B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record |
| Estate | Springbrook National Park , designated National Park. Declared under the Nature Conservation Act 1992; IUCN category II; 6,554 ha as gazetted; current gazettal 26 Mar 2020; first gazetted 3 Nov 1960; no encumbrance recorded. | B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record |
| Watercourse | No named watercourse in the snapshot runs within range of this point. The layer maps many creeks it has never named. | — |
| Feature | Found by the terrain rule falls-rule/1, which fired because the bed loses 15.0 m within 39.3 m — the threshold it tests, not the height of the fall. Steepest stretch measured: 5.0 m over 2.3 m. A rule fired — nobody surveyed it. | C — provenance grade C: Statutory inference |
Officially this place exists only as an unnamed feature on public land. The name is community record at grade D; everything else on this page is computed from grades A to C, and the two are never mixed.
Where it is
Map
Context map for Gorge Falls: parcels, corridors, estate and tracks around the point.
What the colours mean
- Freehold or leasehold — no public access
- National park / protected estate — public land
- Road reserve
- Watercourse
- Track recorded by the managing authority
- Contour, every 10 m of height — nothing is implied about the ground between two of them
- Tenure unresolved — treated as no access
- Where your device says you are, shown only if you press the locate button — read as a rough fix, not a position, and never sent anywhere
- A place with a published approach — the pin is a link to it
- A place with none — every one is listed under the map with its tier in words
- The walk — the line the legs below describe, not a surveyed path
- The parcels it crosses — the evidence the walk is lawful
- Watercourse crossing — no structure, off in high flow
Names on the map come from the same official records as the rest of the page — road and track names from the cadastre and the access layer, watercourses and estates from their own layers. A feature the record does not name is left unlabelled rather than guessed at.
Sources, licences and dataset versions are listed in the footer of this page.
Every figure the map would draw — parcel references, distances, bearings and the crossing gap — is written out in full on this page, so nothing is only visible on the map. If the map does not load, nothing has been lost.
Is there a track to it No published way within range
No vetted way the managing authority publishes comes within range of this point. That is a fact about the access record, not about the ground: an unmapped pad may well exist, and this site will not invent one on the strength of that.
Approaches — one page each 1 published of 2 computed
2 ways in were computed and 1 is published here. The rest either reach the same ground from a few hundred metres away — the same drive and the same walk — or reach no lawful chain at all, which is only worth saying when nothing else does.
Gorge Falls from Tallebudgera Creek Road
C · tier 2 — provenance grade C: Statutory inference gorge-falls--from-tallebudgera-creek-road- Verdict
- tier 2
- One way
- 1440.1 m
- Caveats
- Watercourse crossing
A lawful chain was established from this entry. Open the route page for the legs, the crossings and what each one rests on.
Before you go Published alerts as at the snapshot date in the footer
park_alert · Springbrook National Park
Toilets closed at Tallanbana trailhead (update 1 Jul): Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS) have determined that visitor amenities situated at the Tallanbana trailhead are not performing to optimum standards.
Published by the managing authority. Follow the link for the current wording; this page carries only what the snapshot held.
park_alert · Springbrook National Park
Unplanned works - Woonoongoora Walkers' Camp (update 9 Jul): The Woonoongoora Walkers’ Camp is closed to new bookings from May to September 2026, due to works in the area. As a result, a temporary closure is in place from May to 30 September 2026, inclusive, weather permitting. Visitors can bypass the camping area and still complete the Gold Coast Hinterland Great Walk.
Published by the managing authority. Follow the link for the current wording; this page carries only what the snapshot held.
On Country
Registered Aboriginal cultural heritage party: Danggan Balun (Five Rivers) People — this point falls inside the registered party boundary. B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record
A cultural heritage party boundary and a native title claim are different legal things. This page never conflates them, and it publishes neither as a permission.
All land and waters in Queensland carry a duty of care under s.23 of the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (Qld) — including here. Cultural heritage site locations are restricted by law (ss.38–46), deliberately, for site protection. This site holds party boundaries only and will never republish site locations. Check the public register and, where in doubt, seek guidance from the Aboriginal party for the area.
Searching a register does not of itself satisfy the duty of care.
Rules here — derived from tenure National Park · statutory inference
This point sits on protected estate. In Queensland that ordinarily means no dogs or pets, no open fires outside provided facilities, no camping outside designated areas, no drones without authority, and nothing taken. These follow from the tenure and the legislation that governs it — they are an inference, at grade C, not a copy of a sign.
Statutes relied on: Nature Conservation Act 1992 (Qld) and its regulations for protected estate; Water Act 2000 (Qld) s.21 for watercourse beds; Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (Qld) ss.23 and 38–46 for the duty of care and for why site locations are never republished here.
If something goes wrong
Emergency reference — read this to 000
- Location
- Gorge Falls (community name — not in any government register), Springbrook National Park
- Lot on plan
- 5AP19371
- Coordinates
- -28.22839, 153.31601 (WGS84 / GDA2020)
- Feature
- waterfall
What this page will never do
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No user pins
Every fact here traces to a government layer or a statute and carries a grade, A to C. Community names are quarantined at grade D and labelled as such. Nothing on this page was dropped on a map by a stranger.
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No invented lawfulness
Where tenure cannot be confirmed from the public record, the page says so instead of endorsing the route or quietly hiding it. Where no lawful corridor exists at all, none is published — the refusal is the answer.
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No safety pretence
A tier is a tenure verdict, not a difficulty or safety rating. Unmanaged terrain, cliffs and flash flooding are not in the cadastre. The engine reads land records, not the weather.